Ring på 20 24 55 48
Ring på 20 24 55 48
Business Central is a genuinely deep system, and it's easy to feel like you need to learn all of it before you're "good" at your job. You don't. Most people become genuinely productive within their first month by focusing on a narrow, practical set of skills — not by trying to absorb the entire system at once.
Spend the first week getting comfortable with the "Tell Me" search bar, the role centre relevant to your job, and how to open and read the specific list pages you'll use daily. Don't try to memorise menu structures — the search bar makes that unnecessary.
Pick the one task you'll do most often — posting sales orders, entering purchase invoices, running a specific report — and learn it thoroughly, including what "normal" looks like when something's wrong. Depth on one workflow builds more real confidence than shallow exposure to ten.
Once the core task feels familiar, spend some time personalizing the pages you use most — hiding fields you never touch, surfacing ones you check constantly. This is a small time investment that pays back daily for as long as you use the system.
Know in advance who your internal Business Central admin or support contact is, and where your organisation's documentation (if any) lives. Finding this out during a crisis is far more stressful than finding it out in week four when nothing's urgent.
From there, expertise builds naturally through use — there's no need to rush it. If your team would benefit from structured onboarding rather than a self-guided path, [LINK: our Academy] runs training built around exactly this kind of real-world ramp-up.
Power BI can do an enormous amount — which is exactly why it overwhelms so many beginners. The temptation is to try to learn DAX formulas, data modelling, and advanced visuals all at once. Don't. Most of the value for a beginner comes from a much smaller set of skills, learned in the right order.
Before anything else, get comfortable connecting Power BI to a real source — Business Central, Excel, or a database — and understand the difference between importing data and connecting live. This foundational step determines how well everything you build afterward will actually work.
Bar charts, line charts, and simple tables cover the large majority of real business questions. Learn to build these cleanly and filter them correctly before touching more elaborate visual types — a clear bar chart beats an impressive-looking visual nobody can read at a glance.
Understanding how a slicer on one visual affects (or doesn't affect) others on the same page is one of those unglamorous basics that, once understood, prevents most of the "why is my number wrong" confusion beginners run into.
DAX (Power BI's formula language) is powerful, but it's also where most beginners get stuck and lose momentum. Save it until you've built a few dashboards using Power BI's built-in aggregations — you'll understand DAX far faster once you already know what problem you're trying to solve with it.
A dashboard that's 80% right and in front of real users teaches you more than a dashboard that's 100% polished and never shipped. Get feedback early, refine after.
This same beginner-first, skip-the-noise approach is exactly how we structure our own Power BI training. [LINK: See upcoming course dates] if you'd like a guided version of this path.
It's a familiar pattern: the same two or three questions come up every month — how to run a specific report, how to fix a reconciliation error, how to set up a new vendor correctly — and each time, someone raises a support ticket and waits. Individually, none of these feel like a big deal. Added up over a year, they represent a meaningful amount of lost time and a support cost that structured training would have prevented entirely.
A support ticket fixes the immediate issue, but it doesn't build capability — the same question often comes back a few weeks later, sometimes from a different person on the same team. Training addresses the underlying gap once, for everyone, rather than the symptom repeatedly.
Even a same-day support response means a task is blocked for hours, sometimes longer. Multiplied across a finance team over a year, that waiting time is often the more expensive part of the equation, not the support fee itself.
Experienced staff eventually build up Business Central knowledge through trial and error and accumulated tickets. New hires don't have that history — which is exactly why onboarding gaps show up as a spike in support tickets in someone's first few months. Structured training compresses that learning curve dramatically.
The most useful sessions aren't generic system tours — they're built around your team's actual recurring pain points: the specific reports you run, the specific errors that come up, the specific workflow your business follows. Generic training gets forgotten; targeted training gets used the next day.
If your team keeps raising the same handful of tickets, that's usually a strong signal for where a training session would pay for itself fastest. [LINK: Get in touch] to talk through what a session tailored to your team could look like.
Business Central captures an enormous amount of operational data by default — sales trends, inventory turnover, aged receivables, vendor performance. The problem for most teams isn't a lack of data; it's that it stays locked inside lists and static reports nobody has time to dig through. Power BI is how you turn that raw data into something people actually look at.
The most common mistake with a first Power BI project is trying to build "the dashboard" that answers everything at once. Start narrower: pick one recurring question your team asks — "which customers are slipping into late payment?" or "which products are we overstocking?" — and build a dashboard that answers just that. It's faster to build, easier to trust, and gives you a template for the next one.
If your current "reporting" involves exporting Business Central data to Excel and rebuilding charts by hand each week, that manual step is exactly what Power BI removes. The built-in Business Central connector refreshes data automatically, so the dashboard updates itself instead of depending on someone remembering to re-export.
Business Central ships with a set of out-of-the-box Power BI report templates covering sales, purchasing, and finance. Rather than building from a blank canvas, start by customising one of these — it's a faster route to something useful and teaches you the underlying data model along the way.
Three or four visuals that answer your one question clearly will get used. Fifteen visuals crammed onto one page usually won't. Resist the urge to add "just one more chart" until the first version has been in front of actual users for a week or two.
Once you've got one dashboard people genuinely check, expanding to the next department or question gets much easier — you'll have a working template and a team that already trusts the numbers. [LINK: Get in touch] if you'd like help scoping your first dashboard.
Business Central's built-in reports cover the essentials well. But finance teams often find themselves wanting a view that cuts across periods, combines data BC doesn't naturally group together, or needs to be shared with people outside the finance function who shouldn't have BC access. That's where a handful of well-built Power BI reports consistently pay for themselves.
Combining outstanding receivables, payables, and recurring commitments into a rolling 13-week view is something BC's native reporting doesn't do natively — but it's one of the most requested views by finance leadership.
A single aged receivables report tells you where you stand today. A Power BI version tracking the same metric over the last 12 months tells you whether collections are actually improving — a very different and more useful conversation.
If budget-vs-actual currently means someone rebuilding a spreadsheet every month, a connected Power BI report removes that entire manual step and lets department heads self-serve their own numbers.
A simple view of spend by vendor, ranked and trended, often surfaces renegotiation opportunities or overreliance on a single supplier that's easy to miss in transaction-level BC screens.
Product-level margin is standard. Customer-level margin — factoring in discounts, payment terms, and service cost — often reveals that your "biggest" customers aren't always your most profitable ones.
None of these require new software licences beyond what most Business Central customers already have access to. [LINK: Talk to us] if you'd like help building any of these out for your team.
A lot of businesses run on a quiet, informal system: Business Central holds the transactional truth, but the actual analysis happens in Excel — numbers copied out, formulas rebuilt, formatted by hand. It works, until it doesn't: a broken link, an outdated export, or a formula error that nobody notices until a decision's already been made on it.
It's rarely about preference — it's usually because nobody's had the time to set up a proper connection, and copy-paste is the path of least resistance under deadline pressure. The fix isn't asking people to stop using Excel; it's connecting Excel directly to live data instead of manually recreating it.
Business Central supports live Excel integration — pulling filtered, refreshable data straight from BC into a spreadsheet, without a manual export step. For teams who live in Excel for ad-hoc analysis, this alone removes a large share of the copy-paste risk.
For anything that needs to be viewed regularly by more than one person, Power BI is the better home than a shared Excel file — no version conflicts, no "which copy is current," and it can pull from Business Central, Excel, and other systems into a single connected model.
Before connecting anything, it's worth a short exercise: list the reports your team currently builds by hand, and note where the source data actually lives. Often two or three of these account for most of the manual effort — and are the highest-value ones to connect first.
Untangling data silos doesn't need to be a big-bang project — it's usually a handful of targeted connections that remove the riskiest manual steps first. [LINK: Reach out] if you'd like help mapping yours.
If you've been using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for a while, chances are you've settled into a routine: post journals, run reports, chase down approvals, close the month. It works. But a lot of BC customers only ever touch a fraction of what the system can actually do — and the features sitting unused are often the ones that would save the most time.
Here are five worth revisiting.
Re-entering the same sales order or purchase order details every time a customer reorders is a waste of your afternoon. The Copy Document function lets you pull an existing sales order, purchase order, invoice, or quote into a new document in a couple of clicks — line items, quantities, and all. It's built in, it's fast, and it's one of the most underused time-savers in the system.
Find it under the new document's Actions menu → Functions → Copy Document.
Most users know an admin can configure roles and permissions. Fewer realise that individual users can personalize their own view — moving fields, hiding columns they never use, adding fields they check constantly — without needing IT or a partner involved. It takes minutes and can meaningfully cut down on scrolling and searching during a busy day.
Click the gear icon → Personalize, and drag fields directly on the page.
Most teams set up an approval workflow for purchase orders and stop there. But Business Central's workflow engine can just as easily handle sales credit memos, general journal batches, or customer/vendor changes — anywhere you want a second set of eyes before something posts. If your team has been relying on email chains for approvals outside of purchasing, this is worth setting up properly.
If you find yourself applying the same filters to the same list every single day — this week's overdue invoices, this month's open sales orders — save it as a view instead. Saved views sit right at the top of the page and turn a 30-second filtering routine into a single click.
It sounds basic, but it's genuinely one of the fastest ways to work in Business Central. Instead of navigating menus, type what you're trying to do — "post payment," "vendor ledger," "item availability" — into the search bar at the top of the screen. It surfaces the exact page or report you need, and often faster than clicking through the menu structure.
None of these require a developer, a project, or a support ticket — they're already sitting inside the Business Central you're paying for. If you'd like a walkthrough of what else might be under-used in your setup, or want help building out approval workflows properly, [LINK: get in touch with our team] — this is exactly the kind of thing we help customers with day to day.
Month-end close is one of those processes that quietly grows over time — a manual check added here, an extra spreadsheet reconciliation there — until what should take two days takes five. If your close has crept longer than it used to, the fix is rarely "work faster." It's usually about removing the manual steps Business Central was designed to handle for you.
Waiting until month-end to reconcile bank accounts, VAT, or intercompany balances guarantees a pile-up. Business Central's bank reconciliation and recurring journal templates are built for a weekly rhythm — use them weekly, and month-end becomes a final check rather than a full reconciliation exercise.
Rent, depreciation, accruals, allocations — if an entry repeats every month with the same structure, it belongs in a recurring journal, not re-typed from a spreadsheet. Set it up once with the right allocation keys and formulas, and it posts itself each period with minimal review needed.
If your close checklist currently lives in Excel or a shared document, separate from the system itself, you're adding a manual sync step nobody asked for. Consider building the checklist as a job queue or a simple task list tied to actual BC data — so "has the bank account been reconciled" is a live check, not a box someone ticks from memory.
A quick filter on the General Ledger Entries list for the current period — sorted by amount — surfaces obvious errors (duplicate entries, wrong accounts, missing dimensions) before they're locked into a closed period. Two minutes here saves an adjusting entry later.
It's a small thing, but locking the accounting period immediately after close prevents accidental backdated entries from quietly changing numbers you've already reported on. Set it as the very last step of your checklist, every time.
If your close is still taking longer than it should despite tightening up the basics, it's often a sign the chart of accounts, dimensions, or approval workflow need a second look rather than the checklist itself. [LINK: Talk to us] if you'd like a second pair of eyes on your close process.
A lot of the friction people blame on Business Central isn't actually the software — it's a setup decision made at go-live that never got revisited as the business grew. The good news is most of these are quick to fix once you know what to look for.
Dimensions are how you slice reporting by department, project, location, or cost centre — without them, you end up building separate G/L accounts to fake the same result, which bloats your chart of accounts and makes reporting harder, not easier. On the flip side, too many dimensions applied to every transaction slows down data entry for no analytical benefit. The fix is usually a short review: keep the two or three dimensions your business actually reports on, and retire the rest.
Short, tightly-bounded number series (invoice numbers capped at four digits, for example) are a common go-live oversight that causes real problems once volume grows. If you're approaching a number series limit, it's worth extending it before it becomes an urgent fix mid-quarter.
General posting groups and VAT posting groups are usually configured early and rarely touched again — but if your product lines, tax obligations, or vendor relationships have changed since go-live, outdated posting groups quietly misroute transactions to the wrong accounts. An annual review is worth the hour it takes.
It's common to assign a standard permission set to new users because it's faster than building a tailored one. Over time this leads to either too much access (a data-entry clerk who can post journals) or too little (a controller who can't approve what they should). A periodic access review avoids both the security risk and the daily friction of over-restricted users submitting tickets to unblock themselves.
Once a few people start saving their own custom views and layouts, an inconsistent naming pattern makes it hard for anyone else to find or reuse them. A simple shared convention (e.g. "[Department] – [Purpose]") turns personal shortcuts into team-wide time savers.
Most of these fixes take under an hour once identified — the hard part is knowing to look. If it's been a while since your Business Central setup was reviewed end-to-end, [LINK: we're happy to run through it with you].