Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2025 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, projects, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that's relevant to their specific industry or region of operation by selecting apps from industry-leading ISVs and customizing the app to fit their business needs. Business Central is fast to implement and easy to configure. Simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.

In this release, you get AI innovation with intelligent agents. These AI-driven agents integrate with Business Central and bring efficiency and automation to your business operations. The new AI agents understand and perform complex tasks in the Business Central environment. Whether it's generating insightful reports, automating routine processes, or providing real-time assistance, these agents enhance productivity at every level.

One of the standout features of the AI agents is their ability to optimize order creation processes. By leveraging natural language processing, agents can create sales orders directly from email interactions, making the process faster and more intuitive. Agents also play a crucial role in data management. For example, they can assist in creating detailed product information, such as variants and units of measure, to help ensure that your data is accurate and comprehensive. With these advanced capabilities, the agents revolutionize how businesses manage their operations, bringing a new era of efficiency and intelligence to Business Central. The core AI-powered business capabilities continue to improve for this release.

The application focus is on the manufacturing area. The release continues to enhance sustainability management and e-document capabilities. Integrations to Shopify and Dynamics 365 Field Service reach the next level.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 release wave 1

Investment areas

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.

E-commerce
In each release of Business Central, we enhance its integration with Shopify based on customer feedback. With this integration, you can efficiently manage planning, procurement, and product costs. You also gain control over inventory levels across locations and item variants.

When you integrate the apps, you simplify the process of defining prices and discounts. You also simplify managing and reporting taxes to comply with government regulations. Whether you're using Shopify or Shopify Plus, which includes business-to-business capabilities, this integration helps streamline your operations and boost your business efficiency.

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.

Electronic Documents
Electronic Documents in Business Central streamlines the process of sending and receiving electronic documents by reducing the need for manual data entry and minimizing errors. This smoother process helps users become more efficient and productive because they can focus on more strategic tasks. Additionally, Electronic Documents enhances data accuracy and security, ensuring that sensitive information stays protected. By implementing Electronic Documents in Business Central, businesses save time and costs while improving overall operational efficiency.

Financial Management
To determine the Financial Management capabilities for each release, we prioritize customer requests and respond to market trends. For example, we focus on helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes. This focus includes leveraging AI to streamline data entry, automate routine tasks, and provide intelligent insights that enhance decision-making.

Currently, we focus on enabling agents to help with tasks related to financial management. For example, agents help with bookkeeping tasks based on previous patterns or business practices. We're committed to ensuring that our financial management tools are robust and adaptable to the diverse needs of our global user base. This commitment involves enhancing the management of taxes to comply with various international regulations and continuously updating Business Central to address the evolving financial landscape.

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.

Reporting and data analysis
In today's world, data is an invaluable resource. It forms the foundation of decision-making and progress across all sectors. Recent advances in AI technology and data analytics tools bring radically new ways for businesses to turn complex information into actionable intelligence. These advances reveal hidden patterns and trends, and they find correlations that earlier methods missed. The critical insights that data analysis provides empower organizations to optimize their strategies, enhance customer experiences, and identify potential risks. With these insights, organizations gain unprecedented understanding of their operations and environments. They can innovate in ways that once seemed impossible.

As data continues to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements, harnessing its potential is essential for staying competitive. For small and medium-sized businesses, data helps shape a more efficient and sustainable future.

Our reporting strategy focuses on building universal BI and analytics within the Business Central experience. We aim to seamlessly integrate in-context, rich, and immersive BI and analytics content from first and third parties into Business Central. With flexible self-service capabilities, you can easily access and use your data for maximum value.

Service and platform
With the new service and platform improvements, users see fewer interruptions. Business Central generally feels faster, and web services and certain scenarios are noticeably quicker. We continue to invest in the fundamentals of our service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance. This focus lets Business Central grow in scale along with our customers' needs.

The new full-text search on lists, drill-downs, and look-ups gives you faster, more accurate access to key data. It focuses only on relevant columns for quicker, targeted results. This improvement boosts productivity and enhances user satisfaction by reducing search time and delivering precise, actionable information. You still have the flexibility to enable the previous search method when needed.

The improved job queue flow keeps the job order (FIFO) and adds a priority system in job queue categories. This system makes sure that high-priority tasks go first. Reduced locking during concurrent warehouse postings lowers bottlenecks. This reduction lets operations run more smoothly in high-traffic environments. Automated performance testing in AL-Go for GitHub helps developers find and fix performance issues earlier. This testing step makes reliability and overall system performance better.

Supply chain management
Supply chain management in Business Central offers a range of features, from procurement and production to distribution and logistics. These features help businesses streamline their operations and improve efficiency.

Business Central provides tools for managing the entire supply chain, including inventory management, order processing, and demand forecasting. Businesses can create and manage purchase orders, track inventory levels, and ensure timely delivery of products to customers. Business Central supports various supply chain methodologies, so businesses can choose the approach that best suits their operations.

A key benefit of using Business Central for supply chain management is its integration with other Microsoft products, such as Power BI and Microsoft Teams. These integrations give businesses deeper insights into their supply chain data, help their people collaborate more effectively, and support good decisions based on real-time information.

The investments for the supply chain management area focus on quality management and subcontracting.

Sustainability Management
To align with customer feedback and evolving regulatory demands, we continuously expand key parts of the Sustainability Management capabilities in Business Central.

Collect sustainability data

• Capture environmental data with sustainability journals and purchase documents, either manually or through formulas.
• Monitor emissions, water usage, and waste intensity across companies, countries, regions, or facilities. You can also purchase carbon credits directly within Business Central.
• Import emission factors from external sources through open APIs to ensure accurate and reliable calculations.
• Use Copilot to help estimate your carbon footprint, even when the system doesn't yet have emission factors.

Track your progress

• Use the modern Sustainability Role Center to access all sustainability data and key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place.
• Set baselines and targets, and track your progress with scorecards and goal management tools.

Gain insights and simplify reporting

• Access built-in reports, Excel-based reporting, embedded Power BI dashboards, and analysis views tailored to your sustainability data.
• Use financial reports to compare sustainability entries with statistical or general ledger data.
• Report on various greenhouse gases in CO₂ equivalents, as well as water and waste metrics.
• Customize reports to focus on the sustainability indicators that matter most to your business.
• Meet regulatory requirements by reporting in line with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other standards through integration with External ESG Reporting.
• Calculate and report data required for Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) compliance.

Enhance brand reputation

• Use the integrated sustainability features in Business Central to enable full value chain tracking of Scope 3 emissions across all operations.
• Add carbon footprint data on product invoices to promote transparency and accountability.

These capabilities provide a comprehensive approach to sustainability management. They help you measure, analyze, and report your environmental impact with confidence and efficiency.

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