Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Business Central is a business management application for small and midsize organizations that automates and streamlines business processes. Highly scalable and adaptable with a rich set of capabilities, Business Central enables companies to manage their finances, supply chain, manufacturing, shipping, projects, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that's relevant to their specific industry or region of operation by choosing apps from the industry-leading ISVs and customizing the app to fit their specific business needs. You can implement Business Central quickly and configure it easily. Simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.

This release enhances our investment in Copilot. With more capabilities, people can optimize their business processes and complete tasks faster with Copilot's assistance. Developers already improve their productivity with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. These world-leading development tools for AL developers bring even more innovation. You can also enrich the application metadata with more details for a better Copilot experience.

By automating regulatory tasks, organizations can focus on their primary business while staying compliant with government regulations. Usability is always a focus. This release boosts efficiency with selection-aware, context-based actions.

Additional updates in 2024 release wave 1 include:

• Adapt faster with Microsoft Power Platform: It's easier to set up workflows in Business Central. With more templates that support more scenarios out of the box, you can automate more processes and be more productive.

• Application: We invested in better project and service management capabilities in this release. For the finance area, we improved the consolidation experience.

• Country and regional: We expanded Business Central's global availability. Business Central is now available in more than 155 countries and regions.

• Development: We continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers who work with GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and AppSource marketplace. We're adding new code refactoring capabilities, an easy path to functional and performance testing, and ISV and custom code with AL GO for GitHub.

• Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of self-service features to help administrators manage granular access to environments and audit critical admin operations by using Microsoft 365 Audit Log. This audit log provides stronger options for reinforcing data privacy with customer-managed encryption keys and Azure Lockbox.

• Legislation: This release offers new capabilities for accessing VAT dates when you preview the results of posting transactions. In this release, you also find the sustainability journal, which helps you with sustainability reporting.

• Reporting and data analysis: We added more capabilities to Analysis mode, and Power BI and Excel Layouts are ready for use.

• Service and platform: We continue to invest in the fundamentals of our service, focusing on high availability, performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Adapt faster with Power Platform
Business Central's seamless integration with Power Platform helps you improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. Use Power Automate templates to automate workflows that optimize your processes for your unique requirements.

We continue to invest in tight integration with Power Platform to make it more powerful and give you more ways to use your business data. For example, you can use the Copilot capabilities for cloud flows in the Power Platform products to create connected business workflows and experiences. You can do so through quick and easy natural language expressions.

Application
To determine what goes into the application in each release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and respond to market trends. For example, we invest in helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes.

For the last couple of releases, we invested in multicompany capabilities because more businesses use Business Central across borders and to manage multiple companies. We commit to enhancing the Business Central experience by integrating Copilot capabilities that boost productivity in financial data entry tasks.

Copilot and agents
Business Central is the comprehensive, AI-powered application for small and medium-sized organizations that want to scale their business with AI automation, eliminate tedious tasks, and simplify work with powerful generative AI. Microsoft invests in its customers' AI transformation and empowers its diverse partner community to bring industry expertise to accelerate this mission.

Even in the AI era, customers can trust that their data is safe. World-class security, privacy, and compliance controls protect their data. The application follows Microsoft's Responsible AI principles, which put people at the center of the experience.

• Microsoft Copilot is the AI-powered assistant that improves efficiency, boosts creativity, and eliminates tedious tasks. With your Business Central license, everyone gets a copilot at no extra cost. Copilot in Business Central has an ever-growing set of skills to guide, find, compare, analyze, suggest, and summarize. Assistive features such as Chat and task-specific features such as bank account reconciliation assistance are ready to use with no complex setup or training. The features are seamlessly integrated to reduce or eliminate the need to switch between applications.

• Autonomous agents intelligently automate key business processes. For example, the Sales Order Agent handles the intake of sales orders from emails and attachments, interprets unstructured data, and generates accurate sales documents. With just a few clicks to configure and activate, you can run these built-in agents. They offer extensive oversight capabilities so you can review and approve activity, ensuring control while reducing manual effort.

• For makers and pro developers, Business Central gives you the flexibility to add custom AI solutions and connect to the broader Microsoft cloud of AI-powered apps and services.

Copilot and agents are available only to Business Central online customers.

Development
These releases bring powerful new extensibility features that empower developers to create adaptable, resource-efficient solutions. With these features, developers get greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs.

By defining profile extension objects, developers can change and customize user profiles without duplicating code. This approach boosts productivity and keeps code integrity intact. Developers can now add resources to extensions and access them from AL, which simplifies data initialization and setup. Improvements to the Explore in Visual Studio Code feature provide seamless access to GitHub repositories. With this feature, developers can easily pull, inspect, or hotfix code versions, even when IP protection is in place. By using full-text search metadata on table fields, developers enable data search capabilities that deliver faster, more accurate results. This enhancement increases user satisfaction and efficiency.

Resellers and publishers save time when they validate their solutions by running multiple AppSource apps through a public NuGet feed that provides downloadable symbols and AL-Go for GitHub handling this automation. Also, a rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues, so you spend less time troubleshooting.

Governance and administration
Business Central gives administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. With these tools, administrators can solve customer needs and handle a variety of administrative scenarios.

New features in Business Central improve security, flexibility, and partner management for customers with multiple environments. Administrators can assign partner access to specific environments, which simplifies control and compliance. Customer-managed encryption keys enhance data protection and help businesses meet privacy standards. Extended update windows give administrators more flexibility to schedule upgrades. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions (PTEs) and AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments and saves time. IPv6 supports connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security.

Legislation
Business Central updates regulatory features to address popular requests and changing requirements from local authorities. To give you peace of mind and help you focus on your core business, we automate many processes and make sure that features comply with regulations set by government agencies. For example, if local regulations require you to create vouchers that prove transactions and provide a detailed audit trail, you can automate the process. Business Central automatically generates and attaches vouchers to general ledger entries. Accountants can rest assured they're compliant without extra steps. With the retention policy features, you specify how long to store vouchers before you clean them up. You get more control over the amount of data you store.

We're working to make regulatory features a standard part of Business Central. With this approach, you get improvements that are ready to use across relevant countries and regions. For example, the E-documents module acts as a foundation that supports processes for sales and purchase invoicing. Partners can easily extend this foundation by building country-specific apps for e-invoicing.

User experiences
Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces that enable you to work with your data from anywhere and on any device. User interfaces include an installable desktop app, a browser-based web app, and mobile apps. Whether you need to enter data at high speed, casually update entries, or analyze relational data, Business Central offers numerous features that are easy to get started with and powerful when you need them.

Each release includes enhancements to usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability. In this release wave, we boost efficiency when you work with actions across selections in lists of records and when you view summarized data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Business Central