Integrating Business Central with Microsoft 365

One of Business Central's enduring strengths is how naturally it lives inside Microsoft 365. The integrations are first-party, mature, and configured rather than coded.

Outlook

The Business Central Outlook add-in opens a side pane from any email. The system recognises the email's sender as a BC customer, vendor, or contact and surfaces their record inline. From the pane the user can: review open documents, create a new quote or invoice for the contact, look up product availability, and even post a payment — all without leaving Outlook. Calendar appointments can sync as activities. The Outlook integration is the single feature SMB sales and AR users adopt most readily.

Teams

A Business Central app for Teams lets users:

• Share a customer, vendor, or item card into a chat or channel as a rich card.
• Click through from the card to the record in BC.
• Run a quick lookup from the Teams compose box.
• Receive approval requests as adaptive cards that approve directly in Teams.

For organisations that operate substantially in Teams, this collapses the friction of "switch to ERP, find the record, take action".

Excel

Almost every list page in BC offers Edit in Excel — opens the list in Excel as a live, two-way connected workbook. Sort, filter, edit, save — changes post back to BC. Used heavily for bulk price updates, mass item edits, dimension changes, and journal preparation. The single feature Finance teams love most.

Power BI

Pre-built Power BI apps for finance, sales, purchasing, and inventory consume BC data via the API. Embed Power BI reports inside BC role centres for inline dashboards.

SharePoint and OneDrive

Document attachments on BC records are stored in OneDrive for Business or a configured SharePoint site, not in the BC database. Keeps the database lean and gives users normal Office collaboration on attached files. Configure a SharePoint storage location for shared documents (versioning, permissions, search).

Microsoft Search

A BC connector for Microsoft Search lets users find BC customers, vendors, and items from the M365 search box in any Office app.

Word

Posted invoice, quote, and statement document layouts can be customised in Word by editing a layout template. Power users with no AL skills design document layouts directly.

To-Do and Planner

Through Power Automate, BC activities can sync to To-Do for personal tasks or Planner for shared work boards.

Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot increasingly has cross-product awareness — drafting an email in Outlook can reference open BC documents, and Word-generated proposals can pull from BC pricing.

Setup

Most integrations are tenant-wide, enabled with a few clicks in BC's Set up your business with Microsoft 365 assisted setup.