licenses for Business Central come in three types: Team Member, Essential, and Premium

Dynamics 365 Business Central Features

It’s important to note that licenses for Business Central come in three types: Team Member, Essential, and Premium. Which license you choose will dictate which features you have access to; unsurprisingly, the Premium license includes more capabilities than the Essential.

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Essential

The Essential license gets users access to the majority of Business Central’s features. These include everything previously found in Finance and Operations Business Edition, plus a few new tricks that help bring the new app in-line with NAV 2018’s functionality, including extended human resource and project management features. Here’s an overview of what you can expect from Business Central by operational area:

Financial Management

Pegged as a step-up from entry-level business accounting software, Business Central features a range of financial management capabilities at the core of its functionality. This includes all the basic features you’d expect from an ERP, such as managing payables and receivables, overseeing cash flows, preparing VAT reports, and performing year and period closes.

Business Central’s basic general ledger allows users to quickly setup and start posting to chart of accounts, general journals, and recurring journals. Business Central can also help manage inventory costs, and operational and departmental budgets. Users can also easily keep track of fixed assets and related transactions like acquisitions, depreciations, write-downs, appreciations, and disposals.

Business Central makes auditing more intuitive by automatically assigning audit trails and descriptions to every transaction. Users can further strengthen their audit trails by defining transactional reason codes to be added to ledger entries. The app facilitates the amalgamation of financial data from multiple companies, so organizations can get a centralized view of all their arms for financial analysis. Bank statements can also be imported and automatically reconciled in Business Central.

Businesses operating multiple bank accounts can create and manage accounts within Business Central, helping to cater for diverse business needs across a multitude of currencies. The system supports multiple currencies throughout, including in payables and receivables, general ledger reports, and resource and inventory items, and automatically updates currency exchange rates.

The app also aims to help users get better results from their business intelligence by allowing them to set up “dimensions”. Dimensions are essentially tags that can be assigned to entries so that they can be easily categorized and tracked.

Relational Management

Though it’s not a fully-fledged CRM solution, Business Central does contain some core relationship management features to help businesses organize and optimize their sales efforts.

Through Business Central, users can record and manage contact information for all their business relationships. These contacts can be segmented and used to target marketing campaigns.

Leads and opportunities can also be inputted and tracked, so sales teams can see exactly where opportunities are in the pipeline, and where to best focus their efforts.

For businesses that need more-robust CRM features, Business Central integrates with Dynamics 365 for Sales in just a few steps, enabling users to sync information such as inventory levels and sales orders with their customer-facing operations. 

Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Premium

Service Order Management

Manufacturing