Software Connect logo Software Connect logo
Best-in-Class Software Reviews Research

Dynamics 365 Business Central

6 Reviews 5/5

A cloud-based business management solution.

About Dynamics 365 Business Central

Get a complete business and financial management solution for small and medium-sized businesses. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central makes ordering, selling, invoicing, and reporting easier--starting on day one.

Video Overview

Connect Your Business

Consolidate multiple systems into a single, connected application--one that integrates closely with Office 365--to save your employees time.

  • Manage financials, sales, service, and operations in one place.
  • Save time by creating quotes, orders, and invoices in Outlook.
  • Get more done securely with in-app workflows and audit trails.

Make Better Decisions

Get a complete picture of your business--from accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and customer service--with reliable reports.

  • Spot trends and avoid issues with data that's up-to-date.
  • Share reports on performance, sales, inventory, and orders.
  • Add insights from predictive analytics and digital intelligence.

Start and Grow Easily

Get up and running quickly in the cloud, so changing financial management systems doesn't get in the way of running your business.

  • Handle quotes, orders, invoices, purchases, and more on day one.
  • Onboard quickly with the familiar Office interface your employees know.
  • Get the same capabilities on iOS, Android, and Windows devices.

Quoting, Invoicing, + Payment

Create personalized sales quotes and convert them into professional invoices without leaving Outlook. Dynamics 365 Business Central makes it easy to automatically process payments and reconcile bank accounts--easily identifying past-due accounts to expedite collections.

Purchasing + Inventory Management

Simplify and improve your supply chain management with dynamically updated inventory levels, automated ordering, and data-driven forecasting. Built-in predictive intelligence helps forecast sales while monitoring open orders and tracking vendor lead times to reduce out-of-stocks.

Reporting + Analytics

Improve your overall financial management with a complete picture of your financial data across accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and customer accounts. Get better outcomes by empowering your employees with connected processes, predictive analytics, and real-time data.

Finance

General Ledger

Create your own chart of accounts relevant for your company. Map general ledger accounts to categories personalized to the structure of your financial statements.

  • Reporting with the flexibility to meet both real-time and monthly financial needs
  • Set up your G/L, including invoice posting details and actions like additional reporting currency
  • Add categories and subcategories to general ledger accounts for easier reporting

Account Receivables

Apply incoming payments to related customer or vendor ledger entries and close the related sales invoices or purchase credit memos as paid. When all payments are applied, you can reconcile the bank account.

  • Perform online reconciliation of bank transactions with bank feed integration
  • Choose direct bank feed imports or automated feeds using Yodlee
  • Update customer payments automatically based on data from bank information

Account Payables

Generate vendor payments prioritized by payment discounts and overdue penalties. Export payments directly to a bank file when posting.

  • Take advantage of credit terms without missing discounts or incurring penalties
  • Pay using purchasing cards, ACH transactions, or checks--including positive pay

Budgets

Improve your organization's flexibility to develop, modify, and control budgets so you don't get overextended.

  • Focus business performance through better revenue and expense accountability
  • Reach goals quicker with estimating tools that provide income and expense reporting by prospective jobs
  • Track budget versus actuals and stop over-spend before it's an issue

Account Schedules

Use account schedules to define row and column structures, conduct analysis in-page or on screen, and export to Excel to analyze and compare general ledger entries to budget.

  • Easily create your own key performance indicators
  • Use account schedules to generate charts and graphs on your home page
  • Calculate profit margins on departments, product lines, or customer groups

Bank Reconciliation

Import a bank statement file or feed to quickly register payments. Automatically apply credits to open ledger entries.

  • Get real-time bank information from your bank and credit card feeds
  • Access accounts from thousands of financial institutions around the world using simplified Yodlee bank feeds
  • Quickly identify differences with more frequent reconciliation

Inventory

Inventory Control

Perform basic inventory tasks quicker within receiving, selling, and calculating the cost of items.

  • Search for items by range of fields, including SKUs, manufacturer's part number, categories, or product attributes
  • Manage inventory and sales forecast using Cortana Intelligence, to accurately predict future sales and avoid inventory shortage
  • Set up automated reordering based on pre-determined stock levels

Item Substitutions

Link items with the same or similar features so that if a customer orders an item that is unavailable, you can suggest a substitute item.

  • Offer substitute items quickly and avoid lost sales
  • Provide extra service to customers by offering cost-effective alternatives
  • Create a hierarchy of item categories and assign item attributes to each item category for easy filtering and navigation across related items

Returns and Cancellations

Post sales credit memo and have visibility to manage customer refunds.

  • Reverse and record customer refunds
  • Integrated sales, G/L, inventory, and cash disbursement transactions
  • Eliminate recalculations for local currency conversions

Project Management

Job Management

Create, manage, and track customer projects with sophisticated job costing and reporting capabilities.

  • Track costs against budgets, sales orders or quotes to minimize cost overruns
  • Estimate time frames more accurately for customers and internal use
  • Schedule employees, inventory items, and tasks related to specific jobs

Capacity Management

Plan capacity and sales and manage usage statistics and profitability of resources.

  • Create your plan in a calendar system with the level of detail and time period you need
  • Monitor resource usage and get a complete overview of your capacity for each resource
  • Get insight into availability and planned cost on quotes and orders

Budgets/Estimates

Improve your organization's flexibility to develop, modify, and control budgets to avoid over-expenditure.

  • Focus business performance through better revenue and expense accountability
  • Reach goals quicker with estimating tools that provide income and expense reporting by prospective jobs
  • Track budget versus actuals to avoid over-expenditure

Purchasing

Purchase Order Management

Record costs and track accounts payable. Minimize inventory costs and provide better customer service through dynamically updated inventory levels.

  • Monitor and control your purchasing process with automated workflows
  • Implement approvals for internal controls, preventing unnecessary or fraudulent purchases
  • Easily modify a posted purchase invoice in your financial records and record the corrective credit memo for your audit trail

Vendor Management

Automate tasks for vendors to record your agreements concerning discounts, prices, and payment methods.

  • Record and manage vendor credit terms and pricing
  • Easily access agreements concerning discounts, prices, and payment methods to improve profitability

Vendor Item Catalog

Precisely identify ordered items using vendor numbers linked to your company's internal numbers. Quickly cross-reference information plus access and store universal product codes (UPCs).

  • Reduce data duplication by preserving the items list to only internal numbers
  • Link multiple vendor numbers to your own internal item catalog
  • Designate default vendors to specific items to auto-populate as suggested items

Sales

Sales Invoicing

Post sales right from Outlook, then email your invoices as PDF attachments that include a PayPal link to expedite payments.

  • Minimize data entry by automatically converting quotes to sales invoices when approved
  • Prepare quotes in Dynamics 365 Business Central and easily create a professional-looking document using Word forms
  • Easy correction or cancellations of posted sales invoices to satisfy last-minute customer changes

Sales Order Management

Manage the sales cycle end-to-end, from quote generation to invoicing. Create and manage sales order quotes, sales orders and handle invoices for multiple shipments.

  • Manage partial shipments more effectively
  • Define multiple ship-to and bill-to addresses per customer
  • Ship and invoice separately, including direct shipments and direct invoicing

Pricing and Discounting

Manage special agreements with individual customers and customer groups that include discount structures based on minimum quantities, units of measure, currencies, and time periods.

  • Set up invoice discounts for customers based upon defined criteria
  • Automatically calculate best unit price by sales line when an order meets specified conditions

Contact Management

Create contacts and groups to support your business relationships with prospects, customers, and vendors.

  • Manage your contacts within Outlook or integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for deeper contact management capabilities
  • Automatically synchronize contacts within Outlook for faster customer communication
  • Combine sales and CRM data in one system to target products to specific customers

Opportunity Management

Prioritize leads based upon revenue potential and opportunities to close throughout the entire sales cycle.

  • Drive leads through the sales funnel using your predefined steps
  • Generate sales documents within Outlook and respond to prospects faster
  • Integrate with Dynamics 365 Business Central for advanced sales management capabilities

Interaction Management

Set up templates to record, view, and manage customer interactions to improve sales, order fulfillment, marketing, and service calls.

  • Get a complete overview of interactions and know current customer status, from email to order to invoice
  • Easily set up interaction tracking by entering your credentials into Outlook
  • Track interaction costs and determine the most cost-effective way to convert prospects into sales

Product Overview

Market Focus

Ratio of reviewers by organization size.

Industry Focus

Ratio of reviewers by sector.

13%
13%
Distribution
13%
13%
Consulting
10%
10%
Manufacturing
10%
10%
Service
8%
8%
Non-Profit
Other Industries:
  • Health Care (7%)
  • Educational Services (5%)
  • Retail (4%)

User Reviews of Dynamics 365 Business Central

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 7th, 2023 by an anonymous Dynamics 365 Business Central user.

After trying, and failing, to make Quickbooks Enterprise work for our compnay, we moved to Business Central. We have multiple entities and in being able to consolidate our needs onto one program, we had an 80% cost reduction from when we were using Quickbooks. I was familiar with Great Plains prior to our search but this was not the same program, much more flexible. Throughout implementation they have called me daily. Any issues or questions, they have quickly respond to and resolved.

Affordable and Flexible

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on December 28th, 2022 by Paul Sadovsky from OVO-TECH USA

We’re using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and actually loving it. The support has been amazing too.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on January 10th, 2019 by an anonymous Dynamics 365 Business Central user.

The solution can do a lot more than I need. I had a primary need for inventory and CRM and I’m glad it can be bought in a way to just handle that. I will probably only be covering 25% of the available functionalities, so it’s good to know that I can always expand my use down the road if needed.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on April 25th, 2018 by Trevor Moore from Microsoft - Canada

Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is designed for growing businesses that have outgrown their accounting systems. It’s an all in one business management solution that easily and seamlessly connects people and processes together.

It’s deeply integrated with Office 365 and includes built in intelligence so it’s easy to make better business decisions.

Business Central connects your people and processes with a single unified system. It manages financials, project management and operations, supply chain, sales and service management, and reporting and analytics.

Functions like payroll, CRM systems, are just integrated, so people can share the most current data and respond to customer requests faster with more accurate information.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on March 13th, 2018 by Andrew King from WebSan Solutions

This is replacing Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Business Edition. It’s a great leap forward in capability in cloud offerings for Microsoft with business applications.

Business Edition was very limited in what it had. Microsoft has swung the pendulum the other way and now has a full ERP at a very reasonable price point. The way that Microsoft has split it out is into an Essentials and Premium edition. It’s licensed by modules and you can’t mix or match (it’s either essentials or premium).

The Essentials package takes care of everything fundamental except for manufacturing and service. The general ledger, payables, receivables, ability to cut checks, budgets, consolidations, multi-currency, are all included in Essentials. It’s a mid-market ERP, so you can sell stuff and ship stuff. It’s great if you need project accounting and things like that.

I will say inventory is here, as well as lot management and serialization, but inventory planning is not. That’s a premium module in their manufacturing area. It does require requisition worksheets or planning worksheets in MRP to be turned on. That is the biggest limitation in the Essentials, so keep that in mind if you need that functionality.

Distribution and shipping, warehousing with bins, document management with OCR, some HR, and Office 365 integration is great. The ability to edit lists in Excel or if I’m in my outlook I can instantly see their receivables directly in my outlook. It’s very extensive.

★★★★★
★★★★★
Submitted on February 15th, 2018 by an anonymous Dynamics 365 Business Central user.

It was an easy setup, and the lowest cost ERP that I found (something like $40/user for the financials product). It just made the most sense financially to go with Dynamics 365. I also enjoyed the name brand recognition of a Microsoft product.