Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2025 release wave 1
Important
The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2025 to September 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Overview
Business Central is a business management application for small and mid-sized 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 picking 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, we're taking AI innovation to the next level with the introduction of intelligent agents. These AI-driven agents are designed to seamlessly integrate with Business Central, bringing unparalleled efficiency and automation to your business operations. Our new AI agents can 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 are equipped to enhance productivity at every level.
One of the standout features of our 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, our agents are set to revolutionize how businesses manage their operations, bringing a new era of efficiency and intelligence to Business Central. We'll continue to improve our core AI-powered business capabilities for this release.
Our application focus will be on the manufacturing area, continuing to enhance our sustainability management and e-document capabilities, and take our integrations to Shopify and Dynamics 365 Field Service to the next level.
Investment areas
Application
To determine what goes into the application in every release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and respond to market trends. For example, our investment in helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes.
For the last couple of releases, we've invested in multicompany capabilities because an increasing number of businesses use Business Central across borders and to manage multiple companies. We're committed to enhancing the Business Central experience by integrating Copilot capabilities that significantly boost productivity in financial data entry tasks.
Copilot and AI
According to our recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. But until recently, AI has been a commodity that few SMBs could truly invest in.
Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 enables professionals to perform their day-to-day work with the assistance of cutting-edge AI by their side. With Copilot in Business Central, our customers empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort, without needing to become data scientists.
This wave expands on our use of Copilot capabilities, enabling customers to orchestrate and automate business processes with help from AI agents. These agents can autonomously perform tasks, respond to events, analyze data, and handle errors using both user input and contextual data from the Business Central environment. Agents operate with minimal user intervention, involving users only when needed, and can act on behalf of a company, department, or team, while maintaining full transparency and bringing humans into the loop when their attention is required. To showcase this capability, we’re introducing the Sales Order Agent, our first out-of-the-box agent that automates the end-to-end process of capturing sales quotes and orders from customer emails.
Country and regional
Business Central continues to become available to businesses in more countries and regions. This expansion happens largely through partner-led localizations. Our partners create and maintain apps for specific countries and regions, and publish their apps on AppSource. In combination with built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more than 170 countries and regions worldwide. Additionally, in the countries where Microsoft is responsible for the localization, we provide updates for all regulatory features.
Development
Our focus with these releases is on bringing powerful new extensibility features that empower developers to create adaptable, resource-efficient solutions while offering greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs.
With the introduction of the ability to define profile extension objects, developers can modify and customize user profiles without duplicating code, enhancing productivity and maintaining code integrity. Developers can also now include resources in extensions and access them from AL, streamlining data initialization and setup. Enhancements to the Explore in Visual Studio Code feature allow seamless access to GitHub repositories, making it easy to pull, inspect, or hotfix code versions, even with IP protection in place. The full-text search metadata on table fields allows developers to provide data search capabilities that deliver faster, more accurate results to boost user satisfaction and efficiency.
Resellers and publishers can 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. Additionally, a rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues, reducing troubleshooting time.
E-commerce
In each release of Business Central, we're enhancing its integration with Shopify based on valuable customer feedback. This integration empowers you to efficiently manage planning, procurement, and product costs, while also gaining control over inventory levels across locations and item variants.
Additionally, it simplifies the process of defining prices and discounts, and 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 can help streamline your operations and boost your business efficiency.
Governance and administration
We're giving Business Central administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. The goal is to help administrators be self-reliant, able to solve their customer needs, and easily handle a variety of administrative scenarios.
New features in Business Central improve security, flexibility, and partner management for multi-environment customers. Administrators can now easily assign partner access to specific environments, simplifying control and compliance. Customer-managed encryption keys enhance data protection, allowing businesses to align with privacy standards. Extended update windows provide flexibility in scheduling upgrades during convenient times. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions (PTEs) alongside AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments, saving time for administrators. IPv6 supports future-proofs connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security, preparing businesses for a growing, interconnected world.
Reporting and data analysis
In the modern world, data is an invaluable resource, forming 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 distill complex information into actionable intelligence, reveal hidden patterns and trends, and find correlations that were previously concealed. The critical insights gained from data analysis empower organizations to optimize their strategies, enhance customer experiences, identify potential risks, gain unprecedented insights into the details of their operations and environments, and innovate in ways that were once inconceivable.
As data continues to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements, harnessing its potential has become essential for staying competitive and shaping a more efficient and sustainable future for SMBs.
Our reporting strategy revolves around 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. Alongside flexible self-service capabilities, you can effortlessly access and leverage your data for maximum value.
Supply chain management
Supply chain management in Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to help businesses streamline their operations and improve overall efficiency. This comprehensive solution offers a range of features that cater to the needs of companies, from procurement and production to distribution and logistics.
Business Central provides tools for managing the entire supply chain process, including inventory management, order processing, and demand forecasting. It allows businesses to create and manage purchase orders, track inventory levels, and ensure that products are delivered to customers on time. The system also supports various supply chain methodologies, giving businesses the flexibility to choose the approach that best suits their operations.
One of the key benefits of using Business Central for supply chain management is its integration with other Microsoft products, such as Power BI and Microsoft Teams. This integration enables businesses to gain deeper insights into their supply chain data, collaborate more effectively, and make informed decisions based on real-time information.
The investments for the supply chain management area are currently focused around the service and manufacturing capabilities.
Sustainability Management
We're continuing to build out the capabilities in Sustainability Management in response to customer feedback and new regulations. With the Sustainability Management capabilities in Business Central you can:
Collect sustainability information
- Use sustainability journals and purchase documents to gather data directly or via formulas. Track emissions per company, country, region, or facility, and purchase carbon credits directly in Business Central.
- Import emission factors from external sources to ensure accurate calculations using exposed APIs.
Track progress
Use the modern sustainability Role Center to monitor all sustainability information and various KPIs. Scorecards and goals help you easily track progress against your baselines and targets.
Get easy insights and reporting
- Leverage standard reports or modern Excel reporting with analysis views for your sustainability entries. Compare your sustainability entries with statistical or GL entries using Financial Reports, and report different greenhouse gases or CO2 equivalents, as well as water and waste management.
- Customize reports to focus on specific sustainability metrics relevant to your business, ensuring tailored insights for your unique sustainability objectives and reporting requirements.
These capabilities provide comprehensive tools for effective sustainability management, enabling you to track, analyze, and report on your environmental impact efficiently.
User experiences
Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces that enable our customers to work with their 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 needed.
Every release includes enhancements to usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability. In this release wave, we're boosting efficiency when you're working with actions across selections in lists of records and viewing 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
Helpful links | Description |
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Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Business Central. |
Product documentation | Find documentation for Business Central. |
User community | Engage with Business Central experts and peers in the community. |
Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
Product trials | Get started with Business Central. |