Looking to get more value from your ERP? Watch our 30-minute on-demand webinar hosted by TVision’s Ian Robinson, where we explore the latest Business Central updates designed to improve performance, cut costs, and boost efficiency.
In this session, we break down the key enhancements from Microsoft’s April 2025 Release, including updates in:
- Financial management and reporting
- Governance and administration
- AI-powered services
- Sustainability tracking
- Platform and usability improvements
Whether you’re focused on streamlining operations, gaining deeper insights, or driving smarter decision-making, these new features are packed with potential to help your business work more efficiently.
Watch now and find out how Business Central’s latest improvements can support cost-effective growth.
Transcript
0:04
Okay, it’s midday.
0:07
Thank you, everybody, for joining us today for this What’s New in Business Central Wave 1 webinar, talking about all things new from Microsoft.
0:15
As always, we have the conversation in the office, and we think, and we have a conversation, and we highlight what’s relevant to you, our clients. As always, I’m the facilitator here today.
0:26
My name is Danusia Joliffe. I’m the Customer Success Director, and I’ll be monitoring the question box.
0:31
If you do have any questions at any point, please do ask, and I’ll ask Ian to pause, and we’ll address them.
0:37
Alternatively, we can take the question and the answer offline if it’s a deeper discussion.
0:42
Ian, over to you for a quick introduction.
0:46
Hi, everyone.
0:46
I’ll be doing your demo today.
0:49
I’m going to try and keep it interesting for everyone.
0:54
Next slide, please.
0:58
Great, so these are the highlights Ian will be covering today in the areas of admin, ops, user experience, and finance.
1:05
As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s an awful lot of content that Microsoft creates and share, and I’ll share some links later on, but these are the particular areas that Ian will be going over.
1:15
Some will be demoed, and some he’ll talk through just to give you a flavour of what’s coming up new.
1:21
Just to let you know, my second screen with the questions on it is over here, so if I’m not looking directly, it’s because I’m monitoring the chat.
1:27
Please do ask questions as we go through, and I’ll either answer directly or, as I said, I’ll ask Ian to pause and we can answer that way.
1:35
Ian, over to you.
1:38
Okay. Let me get it up.
1:40
Hopefully, you can see my screen.
1:44
As always, I’m using a virtual machine, so your performance will be better than mine.
1:51
Quite a lot to get through.
1:53
As always with Microsoft, there’s a whole mixture of stuff to talk about.
1:57
The first thing I wanted to talk about was Microsoft are cleaning up in this wave.
2:05
So, in previous waves, they’ve maybe removed some functionality or change some functionality.
2:13
The fancy words that Microsoft uses say they’ve deprecated this and deprecated that.
2:18
All those things that they’ve deprecated, so the old account schedules and things like that.
2:25
They didn’t actually delete them, they left them hidden in the background.
2:29
We couldn’t see them necessarily, but they were still there.
2:32
This time, all of that stuff that’s been deprecated in the past, Microsoft are going to delete those files in the background.
2:40
You might have a customisation that’s still using one of those old files.
2:45
So, it’s really important for this wave that you double-check that all of your key processes are working.
2:52
On our side, we have had a look.
2:55
We’ve checked, we don’t think you should have any problems.
2:59
But there’s a slim chance that we might have missed something so it’s really important that you double check and make sure that it does work.
3:06
You should have heard already from either Thisum or Brad within the support desk on our side – please have a look at those communications, see what they’re asking you. It is important.
3:18
Right now, new features I wanted to talk to you about inventory posting so I was on my way up to the search button and as I was getting there, oh look, Copilot.
3:30
And there’s this new sales order agent over here.
3:34
Copilot is big in this wave release.
3:39
Our MD, Pippa, she’s overseas, she’s attending some seminars on what’s coming up in Business Central.
3:45
And she’s telling us that there’s a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence, it’s all over the place.
3:51
She’ll be feeding that back to us over the next couple of weeks and then we’ll have a lot more to give you.
3:58
If artificial intelligence is something that excites you, interests you, I think at the end, Danusia has got some links for you.
4:05
And if we find anything that we think is really wow, we will share it with you in the coming weeks and months.
4:13
So anyway, I was on my way up here to get to this section.
4:16
So as with all Wave updates, a good place to go and have a look is on a page called Feature Management.
4:23
So, these are all the things that you can turn on and turn off and have a go.
4:28
So, it’s upcoming stuff.
4:30
And the one that I want to talk to you about is this one, multiple users post item ledger entries and value ledger entries at the same time.
4:39
So, if you’ve got a busy warehouse, no doubt you’ve had experienced the problem where two people are trying to post inventory transactions at the same time.
4:49
And one of them gets an error message that says, the table was locked, please try again later.
4:54
Very frustrating.
4:57
If you turn on this feature, it will allow multiple inventory transactions to post at the same time.
5:03
So, you can have two warehouse workers or two inventory workers posting at the same time.
5:09
This feature is also available for your warehouse transactions, not just inventory transactions.
5:15
So, your picks and your putaways, et cetera.
5:17
you can have those happening concurrently as well.
5:20
For a very busy warehouse, this is a big deal.
5:25
Send functionality also being added for resources and it says jobs there, but that’s been renamed to projects, expect that to change over the next few weeks probably.
5:36
One caveat with turning on this feature, if you’re using Bevica, please wait for the Bevica team to double check that this is compatible with all the Bevica functionality.
5:50
And the other thing to be aware of, you’ll notice in this list, they do not include general ledger transactions.
5:56
Only one general ledger transaction can post at a time still.
6:00
So, if you have automatic cost posting for inventory turned on and you allow simultaneous inventory postings, they will try and post to the general ledger, you’ll still get a clash and somebody will still get an error message.
6:16
So, it’s not going to help you if you have that feature turned on.
6:20
And again, if you’re using Bevica, please don’t turn that feature off until our Bevica team have double-checked that it’s going to work for you.
6:30
Claudio’s doing a presentation.
6:31
He’ll probably mention this in a couple of weeks’ time for all the Bevica users.
6:36
Ian?
6:37
Yep.
6:38
Actually, we’ve just had two questions, and one of them was specifically, can you turn this off and should you turn this off?
6:44
But you’ve addressed that.
6:45
And the other question was also about cleaning up all the tables that you mentioned earlier.
6:49
And is that for clients who went live in January 2024 onwards or is it older functionality?
6:57
And the response to that is that there will be some links later on that explain specifically what is going on, what is going off, and we’re sharing them in the presentation, unless you had anything else to add on that question?
7:07
Yeah.
7:08
Pretty much it’s anything that’s been deleted for more than a year, it’s actually going to be physically deleted this time.
7:16
If it’s something that was only deprecated six months ago, that background table will still be there, but this time next year, it will be deleted by Microsoft.
7:26
Thank you.
7:28
Okay. Next thing I wanted to talk to you about, sustainability.
7:33
Now, this one is not going to excite everybody.
7:37
If you operate offices in Europe, then you’re probably aware that you need to start doing sustainability reporting.
7:47
Here in the UK, we don’t have to hassle about this so much right now.
7:51
But the fact that Europe are doing it, probably in the coming months and years, we’re going to start hearing that we’re going to have to do this.
7:58
And this is reporting your emissions, your carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gases, etc.
8:05
There’s a lot of functionality now that Microsoft have added to comply with this.
8:11
A lot of setup.
8:14
I don’t have all the details on this because I’m not a boffin on sustainability, but this was introduced in the last wave.
8:23
It’s now been expanded to all of these functions.
8:27
And I can tell you that from purchase, receiving items, transferring them internally, doing assembly, shipping those items out to customers, those CO2 emissions values, the greenhouse gas values, etc.
8:43
They travel with those items so you can do your proper reporting on your inputs and your outputs.
8:49
The system can do CSRD and ESRS reports. I’m not quite sure what those two are. It can also do…Ian …
8:59
Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Environment, Social and Government’s reporting as well.
9:05
And just to say that according to the UK Gov website, any changes they implement will be from the 1st of January 2026.
9:14
And that’s the earliest anything could change, but obviously it’s going to take a while for everyone to get reporting.
9:19
And it’s always based on company size, revenue headcount, that kind of thing.
9:22
So, no immediate action, as you say, Ian, but in Europe, it’s definitely happening already.
9:28
Definitely happening.
9:28
And it’s worth having a look at this now because it is coming for us as well.
9:32
And the last one I was going to mention was that ESG reporting, and I will touch on that a little bit later on when I’m talking about financial reports.
9:43
Next thing, some changes to the user interface.
9:47
You might’ve noticed when I was looking at those feature management where you could turn things on and off, the one at the bottom of the list, it talked about maximising screen real estate, some features that Microsoft have added, which some people were very excited about.
10:04
Some people, maybe not so. Let’s have a look.
10:07
I’m looking at vendors.
10:09
I’ve got my list of vendors here when it shows up, and some of them are hidden underneath this fact box.
10:16
I can always turn the fact box off, but now I’m losing that extra information, so maybe I want it on.
10:24
What Microsoft have added is the ability to resize this fact book. So, now you can shift it to one side and show more information on the screen.
10:33
And the nice thing is it remembers what you were doing.
10:36
So, when I’m on a wide screen view, I can maybe open this up a little bit, maybe make it four boxes wide.
10:45
If I shrink, it remembers last time I shrank, I made it three boxes wide.
10:51
And it will remember that for me.
10:53
And that web interface maximising screen real estate, I think was the wording Microsoft used.
10:59
When you’re using a web browser, as I am, you can have all sorts of different sizes and shapes for your screen.
11:08
And Microsoft are going to try and maximise the amount of screen real estate you have if you turn that feature on.
11:17
The other thing that Microsoft have done, they’ve added more fields that you can manually add to your pages.
11:23
So, on this page, you have all these columns up here.
11:27
If you go to personalise, you will notice if you ever take the option to add a field, more and more fields are becoming available for you to drag and drop and add to your page.
11:41
And even to the point of when you go into one of these customers, first up consultants.
11:51
On this page, let’s give it a second.
11:56
Oh, the joys of doing live demos.
12:00
If I chose to customise this page, which hopefully loads in a second or two, there are also fields that I can drag and drop onto this page, some of them editable, some of them which I can only read.
12:14
And you’ll notice the sustainability stuff is starting to appear here already as well.
12:20
One other thing that I did notice, which I thought was kind of funky, when I create a new customer, I wasn’t sure about anywhere else, I haven’t had chance to explore every corner of the system.
12:36
When I was creating a new customer, and basically, I put in the customer number, put in the customer name, and then when I tab onto the next field, this Copilot, it starts offering to populate the fields on the page for me.
13:01
It’s watched what I’ve done in the past, it’s learned what I do, and it’s going to try and make the correct options for me.
13:07
Again, you can always take those options, you can ignore those options, but there’s some nice functionality that has been added there.
13:15
Right, the next thing I want to talk about, Shopify enhancements.
13:19
Ian, sorry, I just had another question saying, with the new fields that you can add, can you also see the item attributes on the item table?
13:29
I haven’t checked that one. In your Wave environment, you can have a look yourself.
13:37
And if you struggle to find anything, please drop us a line on the help desk and one of us will jump on with you and we’ll help you have a look and we’ll see if you can.
13:45
Absolutely.
13:45
Okay.
13:48
Shopify, so we have quite a few clients now you’ve started using Shopify.
13:52
Shopify is continuously being enhanced by Microsoft.
14:00
And in this release, more data can now be transferred, particularly with B2B, business-to-business Shopify sites.
14:12
There’s more that can be transferred from Business Central to Shopify, from Shopify back to Business Central.
14:18
You have the ability now to start using sales channels within Shopify, and they’ve also added troubleshooting tools.
14:27
So, if something is not being transferred, records are being skipped, you can highlight that record and it tries to tell you why it’s being skipped, what’s the problem that you need to fix instead of just a generic, oh, something’s wrong.
14:42
So, yeah, continuous improvements on that front.
14:46
Well done to Microsoft.
14:48
Ian?
14:49
Yes.
14:50
We had a couple of questions.
14:53
Yeah, exactly.
14:54
Is it possible, do you know, to show the item dimensions on the item table, or do we need to review that and we can get back to our customer?
15:02
You can show the item dimensions on the list view, but I don’t think off the top of my head that you can actually put it on the page itself.
15:11
But I would have to double check that to be 100% sure.
15:14
Okay, we can have a look at that.
15:15
And also, is it possible to save different columns showing for different filtered reports?
15:24
Yes.
15:27
If I look at, oh, let’s have a look at something like posted sales invoices.
15:43
So, on this one, I can set some filters.
15:49
If I change filters, it doesn’t change the columns that I had when I used that filter.
15:57
I did have a client who asked a very similar question and the workaround that we found was you can use the analysis mode for that.
16:06
So, within analysis mode, you can set up various tabs, and you can have as many tabs as you need, you can give them names.
16:18
On each tab, you can create a different set of columns, arrange them differently, and those filters that you’ve set up on the left-hand side, they’re still available, and you can chop and change between them.
16:31
So, if you want to see this filter with this column set or this filter with that column set, you can do it on this screen.
16:39
Just remember when you’re finished to go back to your normal view.
16:45
Thank you.
16:46
Okay, hope that helped.
16:50
Intrasat was the next thing I wanted to talk about.
16:53
Intrasat, again, this is a European thing.
16:56
If you have European offices, if you’re operating in the Republic of Ireland or anywhere on the continent, you have to report that movement of goods between countries.
17:08
There have been some enhancements to Intrasat.
17:11
At the end of last year, Microsoft changed to a new Intrasat reporting methodology completely, and they’ve added a few new options as well.
17:22
So, on the Intrasat setup page, there is way down at the bottom, you can now include mandatory fields – so you can make the transaction nature code or the specification mandatory. Which would mean if anybody’s trying to post a transaction that removes inventory between countries, if they haven’t specified these fields, they’re going to get an error message to say the transaction nature code cannot be blank you must insert a value before you can post – which makes your reporting at the end of the month or the end of the quarter a lot easier because you know all the information is there. You don’t have to go and manipulate and fix things.
18:04
Very nice. And the last thing I wanted to talk about financial reports.
18:10
So, something for the accountants.
18:14
If you’re old like me, you’ll still remember when we called financial reports account schedules.
18:19
And if you search for account schedules, Microsoft still remember because it takes you to the new financial reports.
18:27
New financial reports, very similar functionality.
18:31
What Microsoft have done, they’ve added some new reports.
18:34
You will notice that environmental sustainability governance, they’ve got a new report there that’s available for this.
18:43
And all of these reports, they work by having column and row definitions.
18:48
So, let’s go and have a look and see how they’ve done some of these.
18:51
So first up, let’s have a quick look some row definitions, financial report row definitions.
19:01
And just for fun, let’s have a look at this ESG one. How do they get this carbon dioxide reporting?
19:08
Let’s edit this definition and have a see. And this is a nice thing about these. You can manipulate these yourself.
19:14
You can copy them and change them to suit yourself, or you can just steal ideas with your eyes and go and build your own from scratch.
19:22
And I’ve obviously chosen the wrong one.
19:27
Let me go back, highlight ESG and edit the row definition.
19:36
So, it looks very much like a financial report, but the big difference is instead of using your chart of accounts, your general ledger accounts, it’s using sustainability accounts.
19:46
You can set up your whole host of sustainability accounts and you can measure your CO2 emissions, et cetera.
19:55
Carbon fee, and I’m not sure what a carbon fee is, but here’s how Microsoft has set this up to work and you can use this yourself to prepare your own reports.
20:08
And along with these new row definitions that Microsoft have offered you, there’s also a new column definition – and this is where it gets a little bit exciting if you enjoy reporting. Very strange to get excited about a report, I suppose.
20:26
There’s a lot more common column definitions that Microsoft have added.
20:30
Some of these were always here, the M balance, net change, etc.
20:35
But some new ones have been added, trial balance with the beginning balance, all the debits, all the credits, and the ending balance.
20:44
Very nice for a traditional company who like to do things the old-fashioned debits/credits way.
20:49
Ian? Yes?
20:52
Another question, is there a way to stop the column and row definitions being added automatically? Being added automatically, I’m not quite sure what that means.
21:05
It’s all right, I’ll ask for further detail. Yeah, we can get, yeah, no problem, we can take it offline.
21:10
Okay. They’ve also added these ones beginning with C over here.
21:15
So, they have column definitions for 12 months net change of the budget or the current month net change versus last month’s net change.
21:26
Oh, that’s interesting. How did they do that?
21:28
Again, you can go and have a look at the column definition. So, we’ll highlight it. We’ll have a look at that definition.
21:37
And how did they get the current month net change, they use a period formula of P and to get last month, minus one P.
21:46
Guess what, month before, minus two P.
21:49
Pretty easy, but now you can see some examples of how this is done.
21:55
And then the next one they have is current month compared to the same month last year.
22:01
Ah, I’ll take a bet that they do this minus 12 P, possibly.
22:06
Let’s have a look and see how Microsoft do it.
22:10
They’ve got a fancy function, minus one financial year, so you can go back one financial year.
22:17
All these are available for you to use when you’re building your reports, which is very nice.
22:22
Then they’ve got some more with even more, and one’s comparing budgets, year-to-date.
22:30
Let’s have a look. How did they do this one?
22:33
All sorts of things going on in here.
22:35
So, they’re using entries, general ledger and budget, the current period.
22:42
For the year to date, this financial year, period one to the current period, all added together.
22:49
And for the entire year, this financial year from period one to period 12, all added together.
22:56
So, all of this functionality, it’s kind of been there bubbling in the background.
23:01
Now, Microsoft are putting out some examples how to use this and you can use these column sets in your own reports.
23:07
You can copy them, tweak them, make them your own or just steal the ideas and do your own from scratch.
23:15
So that’s pretty much what I wanted to speak to you about today and I’m bang on time.
23:20
I’m very happy. Danusia, I will hand that back to you. Thank you.
23:26
We have had a couple more questions, but I think we can take those offline and we can respond afterwards.
23:31
So yeah, so as I mentioned earlier in the session, these are some links that people might find of interest.
23:36
The first two are actual release plan information.
23:41
You can just get by Googling directly or we can share those links on the learn.microsoft.com website.
23:47
That YouTube playlist has approximately 60 plus, maybe 65 or 70 videos on there.
23:54
Microsoft have done a specific video relating to the bigger changes that may be relevant to people using Business Central.
24:02
You can pick and choose the sessions you want to watch, stagger it, watch them as you wish to or as and when you need to. Ian also mentioned Copilot earlier.
24:11
Copilot is on the majority of pages, tables, everywhere within Business Central.
24:17
If anyone wanted that Copilot overview, there’s some information there.
24:21
Then the last piece was around sustainability and what those requirements look like. It says Update 2024.
24:28
There is further information on that link if you want to find out a little bit more. I’m just checking if there’s any further questions.
24:43
One question around Continia – and are there any impacts on Continia output as a result of the wave?
24:51
We’ve not heard anything specific from Continia, but I know that they have run a number of webinars on what’s new in Continia, so I can definitely find those links and share them accordingly.
25:04
Danusia, that’s one of the areas where, if that’s really important to you, that’s something you need to test thoroughly when you get that link to your UAT, just to make sure it is 100%.
25:15
Yeah.
25:16
Okay, I think that was the last one, and we had a bit more clarity on that question that was asked as well, so we can talk about that afterwards and get the response back the client. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today.
25:28
I’ve had a number of questions, so thank you all for participating.
25:32
This webinar will be available on demand on the website in the next couple of days.
25:37
If you do have any further questions, please get in touch with us and we can answer.
25:41
If there’s any further questions, we’ll respond and get back to the individuals. Thank you very much.
25:47
Thank you, Ian, for doing the session and the demo for us. It’s a pleasure. Thank you, guys.
25:52
Thanks. Bye everybody.
25:55
Bye.
