Table of Contents

The 2026 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2026 to September 2026. This article covers the product overview and what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Overview

Business Central is a comprehensive business management application for small and mid-sized organizations that helps automate, integrate, and optimize core business processes. Designed to scale as companies grow, Business Central provides a broad set of capabilities for managing finance, supply chain, manufacturing, projects, service operations, and more.

Organizations can extend the application with industry-specific solutions from a rich ecosystem of ISVs and tailor it to regional and regulatory needs through configuration and customization. Business Central is quick to implement, easy to configure, and continuously improved with simplicity, usability, and reliability at the core of its design.

Microsoft is moving Business Central toward AI-driven ERP by embedding AI and automation into everyday business processes. Microsoft is helping organizations move from manual tasks to autonomous, insight-driven operations. Business Central increasingly acts as an active partner in daily work, helping organizations analyze data, take action, and make decisions with greater confidence and efficiency.

A key focus is the expansion of AI-powered agents. Building on earlier investments, Microsoft is adding more capabilities to enable agents to handle more complex, end-to-end business processes.

These agents operate directly within the Business Central environment, using contextual understanding and generative AI to automate repetitive work and help organizations complete tasks faster and with less effort. By reducing manual intervention, AI agents help organizations improve productivity and focus on higher-value activities.

In the financial area, Business Central continues to strengthen its intelligent capabilities. AI agents support core processes such as payables and expenses by assisting with document interpretation, categorization, and approval workflows.

These enhancements help streamline financial operations, improve accuracy, and reduce the time spent on routine processing, while maintaining control and compliance.

Microsoft is also investing in operational capabilities, with particular attention to manufacturing and supply chain scenarios. Enhancements in areas such as subcontracting and quality management help organizations manage more complex production and delivery models. Microsoft’s integration with Shopify is further refined to improve data flow and operational visibility across systems.

In addition, this release delivers ongoing improvements to governance, administration, and reporting. Enhancements to compliance, localization, and regulatory readiness support organizations that operate across regions, while improved reporting and analytics capabilities help decision-makers gain clearer insights into business performance from day one.

Overall, 2026 release wave 1 advances the Business Central vision of an intelligent, scalable, and easy-to-use ERP solution. By combining strong core business functionality with AI-driven automation and continued investments across finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and integrations, this release helps organizations run their business more efficiently and adapt more quickly to change.

New and Updated Features (Investment Areas)

1. Copilot and Agents

Business Central is a comprehensive, AI-powered application for small and medium-sized organizations that want to scale their business with AI automation, eliminate tedious tasks, and simplify work with powerful generative AI. Microsoft is investing in its customers’ AI transformation and empowering its diverse partner community to bring industry expertise to accelerate this mission.

In the AI era, customers can trust that their data is safe. World-class security, privacy, and compliance controls protect customer data. The application follows Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles, which put people at the center of the experience.

Microsoft Copilot is the AI-powered assistant that improves efficiency, boosts creativity, and eliminates tedious tasks. With a Business Central license, users get Copilot at no extra cost. Copilot in Business Central has an ever-growing set of skills to guide, find, compare, analyze, suggest, and summarize. Assistive features such as Chat and task-specific features such as bank account reconciliation assistance are ready to use with no complex setup or training. The features are seamlessly integrated to reduce or eliminate the need to switch between applications.

Autonomous agents intelligently automate key business processes. For example, the Payables Agent automates accounts payable end to end by reading invoices, matching vendors and accounts, and preparing invoices for approval with human oversight.

For makers and pro developers, Business Central provides the flexibility to add custom AI solutions and connect to the broader Microsoft cloud of AI-powered apps and services.

Copilot and agents are available only to Business Central online customers.

2. Country and Regional

To ensure Business Central remains compliant with evolving global regulations, every release includes foundational updates that align with the latest legal, fiscal, and data governance requirements. These updates are driven by continuous monitoring of regulatory changes across key markets and industries. Whether it is tax schema adjustments or electronic invoicing mandates, Microsoft embeds the necessary capabilities to help customers meet their compliance responsibilities without disruption.

Microsoft not only addresses immediate legislative changes, but also builds extensible frameworks that support future mandates with minimal friction. These efforts include enhancements to configuration models, localization layers, and reporting structures that allow customers to tailor compliance settings to their specific jurisdictions. By abstracting complexity and offering guided setup experiences, Microsoft reduces the operational burden on IT and finance teams while ensuring audit readiness.

3. Development

These releases bring powerful new extensibility features that empower developers to create adaptable, resource-efficient solutions. With these features, developers get greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs.

By defining profile extension objects, developers can change and customize user profiles without duplicating code. This approach boosts productivity and keeps code integrity intact. Developers can now add resources to extensions and access them from AL, which simplifies data initialization and setup. Improvements to the Explore in Visual Studio Code feature provide seamless access to GitHub repositories. With this feature, developers can easily pull, inspect, or hotfix code versions, even when IP protection is in place. By using full-text search metadata on table fields, developers enable data search capabilities that deliver faster, more accurate results. This enhancement increases user satisfaction and efficiency.

Resellers and publishers 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 to handle this automation. Also, a rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues, so teams spend less time troubleshooting.

4. E-commerce

In each release of Business Central, Microsoft enhances its integration with Shopify based on customer feedback. With this integration, organizations can efficiently manage planning, procurement, and product costs. They also gain control over inventory levels across locations and item variants.

When the apps are integrated, the process of defining prices and discounts becomes simpler. Managing and reporting taxes to comply with government regulations also becomes easier. Whether organizations are using Shopify or Shopify Plus, which includes business-to-business capabilities, this integration helps streamline operations and boost business efficiency.

5. Electronic Documents

E-documents in Business Central streamline the end-to-end exchange of e-invoices and other electronic business documents by removing manual data entry and reducing the risk of errors. By automating document exchange, organizations can shift their focus from administrative tasks to higher-value strategic work, improving both productivity and operational agility.

Beyond efficiency, e-documents enhance data accuracy, consistency, and security to ensure sensitive information is handled reliably throughout the process. The result is stronger compliance, lower operational costs, and faster document processing across the business.

While the core capability supports e-invoice exchange, the e-documents framework is designed for much broader scenarios. It now supports more document types, such as shipments, transfer shipments, and other operational documents, opening the door for partners and organizations to extend electronic exchange to a wider range of business processes.

E-documents in Business Central provide a scalable, future-ready foundation for digital document exchange, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently, securely, and in full alignment with regulatory requirements.

6. Financial Management

To determine the Financial Management capabilities for each release, Microsoft prioritizes customer requests and responds to market trends. For example, Microsoft focuses on helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes. This focus includes leveraging AI to streamline data entry, automate routine tasks, and provide intelligent insights that enhance decision-making.

Microsoft currently focuses on enabling agents to help with tasks related to financial management. For example, agents help with bookkeeping tasks based on previous patterns or business practices. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that its financial management tools are robust and adaptable to the diverse needs of its global user base. This commitment involves enhancing the management of taxes to comply with various international regulations and continuously updating Business Central to address the evolving financial landscape.

7. Governance and Administration

Business Central gives administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. With these tools, administrators can solve customer needs and handle a variety of administrative scenarios.

New features in Business Central improve security, flexibility, and partner management for customers with multiple environments. Administrators can assign partner access to specific environments, which simplifies control and compliance. Customer-managed encryption keys enhance data protection and help businesses meet privacy standards. Extended update windows give administrators more flexibility to schedule upgrades. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions and AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments and saves time. IPv6 supports connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security.

8. Reporting and data analysis

In today’s world, data is an invaluable resource. It forms 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 turn complex information into actionable intelligence. These advances reveal hidden patterns and trends, and they find correlations that earlier methods missed. The critical insights that data analysis provides empower organizations to optimize their strategies, enhance customer experiences, and identify potential risks. With these insights, organizations gain unprecedented understanding of their operations and environments. They can innovate in ways that once seemed impossible.

As data continues to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements, harnessing its potential is essential for staying competitive. For small and medium-sized businesses, data helps shape a more efficient and sustainable future.

Microsoft’s reporting strategy focuses on building universal BI and analytics within the Business Central experience. Microsoft aims to seamlessly integrate in-context, rich, and immersive BI and analytics content from first and third parties into Business Central. With flexible self-service capabilities, users can easily access and use their data for maximum value.

9. Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management in Business Central offers a range of features, from procurement and production to distribution and logistics. These features help businesses streamline their operations and improve efficiency.

Business Central provides tools for managing the entire supply chain, including inventory management, order processing, and demand forecasting. Businesses can create and manage purchase orders, track inventory levels, and ensure timely delivery of products to customers. Business Central supports various supply chain methodologies, so businesses can choose the approach that best suits their operations.

A key benefit of using Business Central for supply chain management is its integration with other Microsoft products, such as Power BI and Microsoft Teams. These integrations give businesses deeper insights into their supply chain data, help their people collaborate more effectively, and support good decisions based on real-time information.

The investments for the supply chain management area focus on quality management and subcontracting.

10. Sustainability Management

To align with customer feedback and evolving regulatory demands, Microsoft continuously expands key parts of the Sustainability Management capabilities in Business Central.

There are more tools to collect sustainability data:

  • Capture environmental data with sustainability journals and purchase documents, either manually or through formulas.
  • Monitor emissions, water usage, and waste intensity across companies, countries, regions, or facilities. Organizations can also purchase carbon credits directly within Business Central.
  • Import emission factors from external sources through open APIs to ensure accurate and reliable calculations.
  • Use Copilot to help estimate carbon footprint, even when the system does not yet have emission factors.

It is also easier to track progress:

  • Use the modern Sustainability Role Center to access all sustainability data and key performance indicators in one place.
  • Set baselines and targets, and track progress with scorecards and goal management tools.

Organizations can gain insights faster and simplify reporting:

  • Access built-in reports, Excel-based reporting, embedded Power BI dashboards, and analysis views tailored to sustainability data.
  • Use financial reports to compare sustainability entries with statistical or general ledger data.
  • Report on various greenhouse gases in CO₂ equivalents, as well as water and waste metrics.
  • Customize reports to focus on the sustainability indicators that matter most to the business.
  • Meet regulatory requirements by reporting in line with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and other standards through integration with External ESG Reporting.
  • Calculate and report data required for Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and extended producer responsibility compliance.

These capabilities can also enhance brand reputation:

  • Use the integrated sustainability features in Business Central to enable full value-chain tracking of Scope 3 emissions across all operations.
  • Add carbon footprint data on product invoices or projects to promote transparency and accountability.

These capabilities provide a comprehensive approach to sustainability management. They help organizations measure, analyze, and report environmental impact with confidence and efficiency.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, readers can check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Check the Release Plan

For Application Administrators

1. User-impacting Features 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, readers should look for all features tagged “Users, automatically” in the release plan.

2. 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 users.