Strategic insights from Jurgen
1 | Business Central is growing rapidly + Belgium is the best performing country
Not only has the Directions event itself grown significantly to an impressive 3,200 participants, but the entire Business Central ecosystem has also expanded greatly. With over 40,000 customers on Business Central, including 10,000 new customers last year, the footprint is rapidly increasing. We were proud to hear that Belgium is the best performing Business Central country with growth of over 100%.
2 | Business Central is a top priority for Microsoft
Microsoft is clearly investing heavily in Business Central with additional functionality around sustainability, subscription billing, integration with Dynamics Field Service, reporting with standard BI dashboards, and many AI capabilities. Additionally, Microsoft is enhancing security, investing in automation, and continuously optimizing performance.
3 | AI and Copilot become very tangible with AI Agents
An agent is a virtual assistant that can suggest or perform specific actions. The input can be based on various available sources (public websites, documents, SharePoint sites, Business Central data, etc.), and prompting can occur from a location of your choice (Teams, Business Central, etc.). Microsoft presented a sales order agent, which will be incorporated into Business Central in the coming months, that can create sales orders in Business Central based on incoming emails from your customers.
Functional insights from Yannick
4 | What's new in financial management
Microsoft presented new features in financial management: new Excel reports, an update of G/L Account Revaluation, updates in Reminder Terms Setup, Subscription Billing, and new demo data for financial reporting (Power BI, Excel) covering G/L, Fixed Assets, and Projects.
The Subscription Billing module (as part of the Essential Business Central license) is a great addition for smaller companies with a simple subscription sales model. It allows you to generate contracts, perform recurring billing, update contract prices, renew contracts, and more.
Another interesting feature is the new demo set with financial reports in Power BI, leveraging the power of Power BI in combination with data from Business Central.
Last but not least, Business Central offers the new capability to add a separate VAT number to the shipping address. This can help our clients with VAT settlement when shipping to customers with locations in different countries.
5 | Options for sustainability reporting
To meet the increasing demand for an ESG reporting solution, Microsoft has updated its sustainability module. During the Microsoft session, Aleksandar Totovic provided insights into a range of useful new features, including a new role center, sustainability integration with the purchasing process, CO2 credits, scorecards and goals, enhanced reporting and calculation tools, and much more.
In addition to Microsoft's sustainability module, we also saw two of our partners present their solutions for sustainability reporting. BeWo showcased their AI-based CO2 calculation tool, which integrates with Business Central. The AI engine analyzes business data and generates a detailed CO2 report. Our partner Continia presented Continia Sustainability, using their Expense Management app and Document Capture app to gather data and add measurements to translate financial data into environmental codes.
6 | Partner insights
During the expo, we had time to speak with several of our partners, who also explained their latest developments that our clients will soon be able to enjoy. A selection of our partners at Directions includes Resco, Continia, SignUp, ForNAV, Experlogix, Insight Works, and many others.
Technical insights from Koen
7 | Automated testing and better performance
Business Central offers extensive capabilities for setting up automated tests. Although this may require more time during the initial setup, it will save you a lot of time in the future, especially with continuous updates in mind. The foundation for this is a well-organized setup of development pipelines, and we received several useful tips and tricks from various MVPs.
There was a strong focus on improving performance using the BC Performance Toolkit, adding telemetry to automated tests, utilizing the Automation API for On-Prem deployment, and participating in NuGet.
8 | Build your own AI Assistent for your business: Copilot Studio vs OpenAI ChatGPT
It's clear that AI will revolutionize almost every aspect of business operations. Instead of speculating about what "could change" and what "might be possible" in the future, it's important to explore tangible, real applications.
While ChatGPT is accessible to everyone but is not applied to your specific business data, Copilot Studio allows us to help find hard-to-locate (distributed) information within the company. Significantly, Copilot Studio considers security roles within the organization and ensures that client-specific data stays within company walls.
The conclusion is that you can achieve quick wins by building your own 'AI Assistant' (agent) within your company, which you can easily integrate into MS Teams.
9 | Copilot design 101 - the Prompt Dialog
With AI, everything starts with asking the right question, known as prompting. Microsoft has invested a lot of attention in how Copilot can assist in connecting data and apps within the Business Central application.
The use of the Prompt dialog, which is already integrated in various ways in Business Central 25, can help us with this. Microsoft experts showed us the step-by-step process to successfully integrate AI into our clients' solutions. It begins with defining the action that will lead to an AI-supplied data update, then assessing the proposed result, and finally retaining or removing and revising this outcome.
10 | Test Driven Development more efficient with Copilot
Test Driven Development (TDD) is often avoided by AL development teams, as it is perceived as time-consuming. It is often seen as a delay in development work without providing real added value to the result. Copilot makes this process quick, efficient, and even more productive.
Writing automated tests will lead to improvement in the iterative process of writing code and gathering immediate feedback. Tests force us to think about desired behavior rather than actual behavior, which may not be ideal. Using Copilot in combination with well-structured code can simplify testing. Copilot will never write all your code but can help write most of your test code.
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