A lot of the friction that people attribute to Business Central isn't actually caused by the software—it stems from a configuration decision made at go-live that was never revisited as the business grew. The good news is that most of these issues can be fixed quickly once you know what to look for.
Dimensions are the ways you break down reporting by department, project, location, or cost center—without them, you end up creating separate general ledger accounts to simulate the same result, which bloats your chart of accounts and makes reporting harder, not easier. On the other hand, applying too many dimensions to every transaction slows down data entry without providing any analytical benefit. The solution is usually a quick review: keep the two or three dimensions your business actually reports on, and eliminate the rest.
Short, tightly-bounded number series (such as invoice numbers capped at four digits) are a common oversight at go-live that causes real problems once volume increases. If you're approaching a number series limit, it's worth extending it before it becomes an urgent fix in the middle of the quarter.
General posting groups and VAT posting groups are usually set up early on and rarely changed afterward—but if your product lines, tax obligations, or supplier relationships have changed since go-live, outdated posting groups can quietly route transactions to the wrong accounts. An annual review is well worth the hour it takes.
It is common to assign a standard permission set to new users because it is faster than creating a customized one. Over time, this leads to either too much access (a data-entry clerk who can post journal entries) or too little (a controller who cannot approve what they are supposed to). A periodic access review avoids both the security risk and the daily hassle of users with overly restrictive access submitting support tickets to have their restrictions lifted.
Once a few people start saving their own custom views and layouts, an inconsistent naming convention makes it difficult for anyone else to find or reuse them. A simple shared convention (e.g., "[Department] – [Purpose]") turns personal shortcuts into time-savers for the entire team.
Most of these fixes take less than an hour once identified—the hard part is knowing where to look. If it’s been a while since your Business Central setup was reviewed end-to-end, [LINK: we’d be happy to go over it with you].
