Stop Press! Forbes Advisor have named Business Central best ERP for SME’s for the 3rd year running.
Microsoft has unveiled some exciting new features for Dynamics 365 Business Central in its Wave 1 2025 update, set to roll out between April and September 2025. These updates are designed to enhance operational efficiency, streamline business processes, improve sustainability tracking, and expand integrations with other systems. This is great news for existing Business Central users and displays Microsoft’s commitment to continue its impressive Research and Development investment.
Find the Microsoft Learn full breakdown here.
Here’s a breakdown of the edited highlights in Wave 1 2025 Business Central to look forward to:
AI and Copilot Innovations in Business Central Wave 1 2025
Wave 1 2025 introduces powerful AI-driven automation through new Copilot features that aim to simplify and automate business processes:
Chat with Copilot: Users can now interact with Copilot to ask questions about installed add-ons, making it easier to speed up adoption and improve usability within Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Summarise with Copilot: Copilot can generate summaries of key business insights, helping users make more informed decisions quickly.
Sales Order Agent: This feature automates the process of sales order-taking, reducing manual input and minimizing human errors in the process. There are additional costs for the link to CoPilot Studio messages. Contact Mike Lannon at Qi for more information.
Sustainability Suggestions: Copilot now suggests gas emissions values for sustainability journals, helping businesses track and meet environmental goals more efficiently.
Application Enhancements in Dynamics 365 Business Central Wave 1 2025
Supply chain management
Business Central has rich supply management functionality from sales, purchase, invoice, inventory and warehouse management, project management, service order management, and manufacturing. This release sees a variety of improvements which manufacturing customers will benefit from:
New Supply Chain Features Central Wave 1 2025
- Use enhanced customer document layout for service management
- Cancel production orders that have consumption
- Add more columns to various pages to gain more insight
- Allow multiple people to post inventory at the same time
- Experience improved usability in manufacturing
- Enable overpicking for production orders
- Achieve greater accuracy in manufacturing costing
- Omit warehouse pick for manual flushing methods
- Create demo data for Subscription Billing with demo data tool
- Create subscription contract lines manually
- Add unit cost in subscription lines
- Track and rebill quantity changes in subscriptions
- Align Subscription Billing with standard user experience and terminology
- Handle production output with warehouse put-aways
- Receive project items with receipts or put-aways
- Reschedule production orders within a safety lead time
- Block items or variants from production output
- Avoid document number errors when you post project journals
Microsoft Field Service Integration: A seamless integration with Microsoft’s Field Service will streamline service management workflows, making operations more efficient. If you are not using Microsoft’s Field Service because of cost or potential ‘overkill’, contact Qi regarding our Power App approach for your field staff.
Enhanced Foreign Currency Adjustments: New capabilities allow businesses to post foreign currency adjustments directly to unrealised gain and loss accounts, improving financial accuracy.
Expanded Global Availability & Compliance; Microsoft ensures that Business Central continues to support global operations with updates that improve localisation and regulatory compliance. Business Central is already available in over 100 countries and this Wave brings out a localisation for New Zealand.
For those of you already using a foreign country localisation Administrators will be able to define allowed languages per environment
E-Commerce and Shopify Enhancements in BC Wave 1 2025
Dynamics 365 Business Central Wave 1 2025 strengthens its integration with Shopify, making it easier for businesses to manage e-commerce operations:
Sales Channel Activation in Shopify Connector: The new connector supports multi-channel sales, enabling businesses to expand their reach and streamline operations across various platforms.
E-Document Automation: The automation of e-documents using Power Automate simplifies document management and enhances business efficiency.
Shopify Metafields Support: This update improves the import/export capabilities of data between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Shopify, making it easier to manage product and store information.
Contact Qi Ltd if you are thinking of launching e-commerce for the first time or moving over to Shopify as your platform.
Sustainability and ESG Tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central Wave 1 2025
With growing focus on sustainability, the 2025 update includes several important features for tracking environmental impact and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
Check out the Sustainability section here
CSRD Preparation Reports: New reporting tools help businesses comply with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), ensuring they meet the required sustainability reporting standards.
Scope 3 Carbon Tracking: Businesses can now automatically track emissions from procurement and manufacturing processes, allowing for more accurate carbon footprint measurement.
ESG Reporting Integration: Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors are integrated into Business Central, simplifying regulatory compliance and reporting requirements related to sustainability.
Enhanced User Experience in Business Central Wave 1 2025
Microsoft continues to focus on improving the user interface and overall user experience:
PDF Previews in Web Client: Users can preview PDFs directly in the web client, eliminating the need to download them first, improving workflow efficiency.
Optimised Screen Layouts: Business Central now makes more efficient use of screen space, making it easier for users to navigate and access the tools they need with fewer distractions.
Thought for the Day
The Dynamics 365 Business Central Wave 1 2025 updates bring further powerful innovations to enhance business productivity and simplify operations. Qi loves the improvements to Supply Chain as they will benefit so many of our customers.
This wave is quite AI heavy, the Sales Order Agent will prove useful for many businesses. The supply chain management improvements will be most loved by our customers, we suspect. Good to see Sustainability and Compliance benefiting from investment – as we know regulations and reporting are getting tougher!
AI/CoPilot – Love it or hate it AI/CoPilot is a reality and if it doesn’t work for you and your business – then don’t use it. But before throwing the baby out with the bathwater take some time to review the areas that are useful?