Business Central optimisation: where SMEs usually find the quickest wins

Most Dynamics 365 Business Central implementations are judged a success on go-live day and quietly decline from there. Not because the software fails, but because the business keeps moving while the configuration stands still. A year later, finance closes late, operations work around the system, and nobody is sure which report to believe. The good news: the improvements that pay back fastest are usually not projects. They are focused corrections in six areas, most of which can be delivered in short cycles under a support arrangement.

Why systems drift after go-live

During an implementation, decisions are made under time pressure with incomplete knowledge of how the business will actually use the system. After go-live, new products, customers, locations and people arrive; nobody revisits the set-up decisions; and users invent workarounds that become habits. The implementation partner moves on to the next project. Drift is normal. The question is whether anyone is looking for it.

1. Master data and posting set-up

This is where most "the system is wrong" tickets originate. Common findings in SME systems:

• Items created with different costing methods inside the same product group, so inventory valuation behaves inconsistently.
• Posting groups assigned by guesswork, resulting in revenue or cost landing in the wrong general ledger accounts.
• Duplicate customers and vendors, inconsistent payment terms, missing VAT business posting groups.
• Default locations, units of measure and item tracking set up differently per user rather than per item.

Quick win. Run a structured master-data review: export the key tables, check them against a small set of rules, correct the records, and introduce templates and mandatory fields so new records are created correctly. Most of this is configuration and data work, not development.

2. Dimensions and reporting structure

Dimensions are Business Central's answer to "report by department, project, cost centre, region". Set up well, they make management reporting almost free. Set up inconsistently, they make it impossible. Typical issues: dimensions that are optional where they should be mandatory, default dimensions missing on accounts and items, and codes that mean different things in different companies of the same group.

Quick win. Agree a dimension model with finance (usually two global and a few shortcut dimensions are enough), make the right ones mandatory through posting rules, correct the defaults, and align codes across companies. Reporting improves immediately and consolidation becomes a routine rather than a reconciliation exercise.

3. Approval workflows and document flows

Purchase approvals by email, sales quotes maintained in Word, credit memos created without checking the original invoice: each of these is a process that Business Central can run with an audit trail, but was never configured. Standard workflows (purchase document approval, journal approval, customer and vendor approval) are often unused simply because nobody set them up after go-live.

Quick win. Configure standard approval workflows with sensible thresholds and delegation, use Power Automate for notifications in Teams or Outlook, and move document templates into the system's report layouts. The result is fewer manual steps and an approval history auditors actually accept.

4. Customisations that block updates

Older systems, especially those migrated from Dynamics NAV, often carry customisations nobody can explain: a modified posting routine, a bespoke report with hard-coded logic, a field added to several tables for a requirement that no longer exists. Each one adds risk to every update and cost to every change.

Quick win. Inventory every extension and customisation with three questions: is it still used, does standard functionality now cover it, and what would break if it were removed? In our experience a meaningful share can be retired or replaced by standard features or AppSource apps. What remains should be rebuilt as upgrade-safe AL extensions and tested against preview releases before each wave.

5. Reporting that lives outside the system

If the monthly pack is built by exporting trial balances to Excel and adding formulas, reporting is a person, not a process. The same applies to sales reports maintained by one analyst and stock reports that depend on a saved view in someone's client.

Quick win. Identify the five reports the business runs on. For each, decide whether it belongs in Business Central (financial reports, account schedules, standard analyses) or in Power BI (anything combining sources, trends or operational detail), build it once with agreed definitions, and retire the spreadsheet. See our Power BI and reporting service for how a governed model is built.

6. Users, roles and training

Permission sets accumulate. New starters inherit a colleague's rights; leavers keep accounts; everyone ends up with more access than their role needs. Meanwhile, users who were trained at go-live have left, and their replacements learned the system from a colleague's habits, including the workarounds.

Quick win. Define a small set of role-based permission sets, assign users to roles rather than individually, remove dormant accounts, and run short role-based training sessions with documentation that lives in a knowledge base. This also reduces licence cost when users are on the wrong licence type.

How to approach an optimisation review

Resist the temptation to fix everything at once. A workable sequence:

1. Walk the processes with key users. Quote to cash, purchase to pay, inventory and warehouse, finance close. Note every workaround and every "we export this to Excel".
2. Review the set-up, customisations and data against what you learned in the walkthrough.
3. Score each finding on business impact and effort. Most high-impact, low-effort items fall into the six areas above.
4. Deliver in short cycles of two to four weeks, each tested in a sandbox and accepted by the key users, with documentation updated as you go.
5. Put the improvements under support so that the next release wave does not undo them.

Done this way, optimisation is not a project with a budget nobody wants to approve; it is a steady stream of small, visible improvements that make the system worth the licence fee. The Dynamics 365 support and optimisation service describes how we run that stream.