Business Central

Business Central (full name: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) is Microsoft's SaaS ERP aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. It is the direct successor to Dynamics NAV and ships with financials, inventory, sales, purchasing, basic manufacturing, and project accounting in a single integrated application. It is extended through AL extensions distributed via AppSource and licensed per user in Essentials or Premium tiers. Business Central runs on Microsoft's Azure cloud and integrates natively with Microsoft 365, Power BI, and the wider Power Platform. It is typically implemented by a certified partner.

In practice, most Business Central implementations combine three layers: the standard application (financials, inventory, sales, purchasing, and the rest, used as configured out of the box wherever possible), AppSource extensions (an ISV-built add-on for a specific need — country compliance, an industry vertical, a warehouse-scanning app), and, for anything genuinely unique, custom AL extensions built by a partner. A well-run implementation minimises the third layer, since custom AL — however small — is the layer that carries an ongoing maintenance cost through every future release wave, while standard functionality and AppSource extensions are Microsoft's and the ISV's problem to keep working.

Where confusion shows up most: Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&O) are both "Dynamics 365 ERP" in marketing language but are different products on different application cores, aimed at different company sizes — Business Central does not "scale up into" F&O by upgrading, it requires a genuine re-implementation, which is exactly what the growing-from-Business-Central-to-Finance-and-SCM guide covers.