Business Central 2025 Wave 1: Everything You Need to Know

One of our favourite things about Business Central is how many amazing new features they add to every update. And when there are two a year, there's always a lot to get excited about. Their October release tends to be their biggest release, and this one is no different. It is packed with some amazing new things you can start using - some now, some in the near future.

There's a big emphasis on Microsoft Copilot from Microsoft, too. They said: "This release will again demonstrate our commitment to Copilot. We continue to look at how Copilot can help optimise business processes so you can complete tasks faster. We'll enable Copilot to help with creating sales orders directly from Chat. Additionally, we will also make it faster to create product information with Business Central using Copilot to create information like Variant, Unit of Measure and other information. We are also investing in piloting Chat extensibility to help users learn from 3rd party content."

Here's a few of our favourite features…

Copilot and AI

Smarter Insights and Automation with Copilot

Microsoft continues to integrate Copilot deeply into Business Central, offering intelligent assistance to streamline daily tasks.

• Summarise with Copilot: Tired of sifting through lengthy records? Copilot now provides concise summaries of key information within the FactBox pane on pages like Customers, Sales Orders, and Items. This AI-powered overview highlights the most critical details, saving you time and helping you quickly grasp the current status and plan your next steps. The summaries are even tailored to your role, ensuring you see the insights that matter most.
• Autofill fields with Copilot: Data entry can be a drain on productivity. Copilot steps in as an intelligent assistant, suggesting values for editable fields as you create or modify records. These suggestions are based on your company's data, including frequently and recently used values, and even AI-generated options. You remain in control, reviewing and choosing whether to apply the suggested value. Excitingly, a future enhancement promises web-based lookups for contact details, product codes, and similar fields.
• Use Sales Order Agent to automate sales order-taking: Imagine an AI agent handling the entire sales order process from initial customer email to final order confirmation. The new Sales Order Agent does just that. This autonomous agent monitors a shared company mailbox, identifies customers, drafts sales quotes, checks item availability, sends quotes for approval, and converts approved quotes to sales orders – all with minimal user intervention. You maintain full transparency and control, reviewing the agent's actions and stepping in when needed. This feature promises significant efficiency gains and allows your team to focus on more strategic tasks.

E-commerce        

More Control Over Your Shopify Sales Channels

• Activate sales channels in Shopify Connector: For businesses utilising Shopify, managing multiple sales channels just got easier. You can now directly activate specific sales channels within the Shopify Sales Channels page in Business Central. This streamlined approach gives you precise control over which products are published to each channel, simplifying your omnichannel strategy.

E-documents

Streamlined Document Handling and Flexible Processing

• Generate multiple incoming e-documents for multiple attachments: Manually processing multiple e-document attachments is a thing of the past. Business Central now allows you to upload several files at once and generate a corresponding incoming e-document for each, significantly saving time when you're not using an external endpoint.
• Process e-documents in two steps: While automation is key, sometimes a review step is crucial. Business Central now offers the flexibility to process incoming e-documents in either a fully automated, one-step process or a two-step process that requires confirmation before a purchase document is created. This provides enhanced control over your accounts payable workflow.

Financials

Empowered Financial Reporting

The enhanced Financial Reporting capabilities provide greater flexibility and control for finance teams.

• Use enhanced Financial Reporting capabilities: The no-code Financial Reporting feature receives significant upgrades for viewers, owners, and administrators. Viewers can now hide empty rows, print in portrait mode, and use accounting formats for negative numbers. Report owners gain the ability to document report usage, add introductory and closing paragraphs, save and run reports with Excel templates, and more. Administrators benefit from documentation on required permissions and access to telemetry for report usage and lifecycle events. These enhancements empower finance users to generate insightful reports efficiently without developer assistance.
• Check total purchase amounts on documents: Ensure accuracy in your purchase invoices and credit memos with the new ability to check total amounts. By activating this feature, the "Doc. Amount Incl. VAT" and "Doc. Amount VAT" fields become mandatory before posting, prompting a check against the total of the purchase lines to minimise errors.

Sustainability Management

Sustainability Tracking Integration

Business Central now offers more robust features for tracking your company's environmental impact.

• Specify default sustainability values for various entities: You can now configure default inbound emissions for items, resources, G/L accounts, work centres, machine centres, and transfer journals. This comprehensive setup ensures more accurate monitoring and reporting of your company's sustainability efforts. Values can be inherited from item categories for streamlined setup.
• Capture sustainability data with general journals: Integrating sustainability data directly into general journals allows for a more holistic view of your company's impact. You can now record greenhouse gas emissions alongside financial data in a single journal line, facilitating better tracking, informed decision-making, and enhanced corporate responsibility.
  
  

These new features in Business Central's latest update demonstrate a continued commitment to innovation, empowering businesses with intelligent automation, enhanced efficiency and deeper insights into their operations and environmental impact.