Introduction
The role of the accountant has evolved. It is no longer simply about managing the numbers, but rather guiding the client both strategically and commercially.
At the core of this relationship sits the financial system on which the client’s business is based. In recent times software solutions like Sage, Xero and Quickbooks have gained popularity, particularly for SMEs, but while these systems have their place, the real innovation is emerging elsewhere.
This whitepaper will reveal the quiet revolution taking place within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. And more importantly, what it means for accountants and their clients. We will explore its functionality, advantages over alternatives, the seamless collaboration capabilities, its support for industry-specific accounting standards, and the unparalleled integration and connectivity offered across Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain Management teams.
This comprehensive guide aims to equip accountants with a deep understanding of Business Central, when to advocate for its use, and the type of client that will benefit most greatly.
Business Central – Overview
There may be some who are unfamiliar with Business Central, so we’ll begin with the basics.
Business Central is a Microsoft product, part of the Dynamics 365 suite, that serves as a comprehensive ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. At its core it is a financial management system but one that extends into sales, marketing and operations, giving businesses a comprehensive view into the real-time health of their organisation, via a range of analytics tools and dashboards. This holistic design sets it apart from narrower platforms like Xero or QuickBooks, and explains why Forbes have now ranked it as the best ERP system on the market.
8 Reasons Your Clients Should Upgrade To Business Central
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Advanced Financial Management & Heightened Functionality While the likes of Xero offer a solid solution for core accounting requirements, some businesses have specific needs that demand more advanced financial management. Business Central goes beyond accounting and into a range of related functions, such as budgeting, financial reporting (with Power BI integration) and multi-currency management.
Business Central also offers a range of features for supply chain management, service management, manufacturing, and warehousing. This comprehensive approach empowers businesses to oversee production orders, automatically create BOM’s, manage assemblies, set replenishment levels to automatically create purchase orders, and track inventory, providing a holistic view of their operations. We’ll cover more on this later.
Integration is another big consideration for modern-day organisations. Being part of the broader Microsoft 365 suite, Business Central aligns seamlessly with all the other Microsoft products, such as Excel, Teams and Sharepoint. While Xero offers similar integrations, feedback suggests that some clients find the process slow and disjointed.
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Collaboration, Access Control And Sharing One of the most important considerations for accountants is how a financial system facilitates collaboration with clients. They need to each have live access to the appropriate tools and modules, but there also needs to be a degree of control. Access settings need to be easily adjustable to ensure a simple user experience and protection of sensitive data.
Microsoft’s Business Central offers a range of features designed to facilitate smooth interaction and communication, ensuring both parties have real-time access to critical data, whilst maintaining convenience, security and clarity.
One of the core elements enhancing collaboration is the Role Centre feature, which optimises the user experience by customising visibility and access controls. By allowing clients to provide their accountants with tailored access permissions, the system ensures sensitive financial information remains secure, while enabling accountants
to view the necessary data, such as financial statements, transaction history, and reports. This means that auditing and reconciliations can be done seamlessly, and clients can monitor their financial health without the need for manual data exchange. Furthermore, this feature allows clients to grant their accountants authority to execute necessary changes within the system.
This access control also applies internally within their organisation. Senior management can rest assured their workforce only has access to necessary systems, and they remain within the boundaries of their roles.
Business Central simplifies document sharing by enabling the direct attachment
of essential documents, such as invoices, receipts, and statements, to relevant transactions or records. This integration streamlines workflow and fosters transparency, making it effortless for both accountants and clients to access crucial documents. Its robust notification system ensures that all stakeholders are promptly informed about any updates or changes within the system, keeping everyone onthe same page and reducing the risk of miscommunication. Additionally, the multi- device accessibility feature allows users to access the platform from various devices, enhancing flexibility and response times to urgent matters, irrespective of location.
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Welcome To The (Microsoft) Team One of Microsoft’s greatest strengths is in the sheer scale of its community. With an ecosystem of specialist partners, each developing bespoke applications that tackle industry-specific challenges, the capability of Business Central is expanding at a rapid rate.
There are presently over 3,500 available extensions, so whatever industry your clients operate in, there’s a strong chance Business Central will fit effortlessly around their needs. And if additional customisation is required, that’s where a trusted partner like Creative Computing can step in, flexing the system around their unique idiosyncracies. For accountants, this customisation is not to be underestimated, as it can transform the value they deliver to clients, both strategically and operationally.
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Power BI Power BI has become one of Microsoft’s most successful products in recent years and represents a significant point of difference to non-Microsoft solutions.
Power BI is an advanced data visualisation and business intelligence tool that offers a range of personalised dashboards and reports, providing a greater insight into financial performance than ever before. It’s therefore hugely important that accountants are familiar with the product, as it’s likely to be in use by many of their larger clients.
Power BI allows accountants and their clients to monitor all aspects of business performance, identify areas of concern and make informed decisions across every function of the business. The speed and ease of creating these dashboards ensures all stakeholders remain informed and can participate proactively in the decision making process.
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Enhanced Control And Analysis Another noteworthy feature within Business Central is its dimensional accounting; functionality that gives organisations a high degree of control over their data. Think
of these dimensions as adaptable filters that can be finely tailored to suit a business’s unique needs, allowing for as many dimensions as necessary. With the option to assign dimensions to transactions, such as departments, projects or cost centres, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their financial data, leading to more incisive analysis and decision-making.This dynamic feature, coupled with the advanced reporting and analytics ability offered by Power BI, is particularly valuable for industries that demand more nuanced analysis, such as those reliant on project-based accounting or requiring detailed expense tracking across diverse product lines.
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Auditing And Regulation As clients often turn to their accountants for recommendations of financial systems, accountants need to be familiar with the compliance and regulatory implications of recommending one solution over another. Getting this wrong could have significant ramifications.
Unlike certain alternatives, Business Central offers comprehensive audit trails with detailed records of all activities within the system. This not only promotes transparency and accountability but also instils confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the
data. Meanwhile the bank reconciliation process minimises errors and discrepancies, reinforcing trust between accountants and their clients.One of the core pillars of Business Central is its comprehensive support for configurable charts of accounts. This functionality empowers users to meticulously define and personalise their chart of accounts, aligning it to the precise requirements of their industry. This customisation also provides a layer of security for accountants and their clients, as they tailor the software to the specific standards and regulations of the sector in question.
Business Central offers a suite of compliance and localisation packs tailored to various regions, ensuring adherence to a range of regulatory and reporting mandates. These packs play a pivotal role in enabling businesses to meet requirements, such as tax rules, financial standards and statutory reporting formats. This functionality provides both businesses and their accounting partners with a sense of reassurance, confident that they are consistently meeting their obligations.
Another key feature is the automation of compliance management. This functionality not only frees organisations from significant manual labour, allowing their people to focus on core business activities, but also provides peace of mind to both accountants and their clients that the process is free of human error.
Staying on-top of the evolving landscape of industry-specific accounting regulations can pose a significant challenge for many organisations. In this context, the value of a software solution that not only alleviates this burden but actively supports compliance cannot be overstated. Business Central and their industry focused partners like Creative Computing make auditing and compliance more robust and straightforward than ever before.
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Scalability Another big differential lies in Business Central’s scalability and consolidation feature, allowing the management of multiple companies and locations. This is critical for any rapidly expanding and evolving organisation.
A truly global solution, Business Central allows you to create localisations (legal and fiscal) for every country your client operates in. So if, for instance, your client has a new operation in the US, Business Central could be set up to handle US sales tax in that region. If they are trading in Japan, invoices can be set up to include header information in Japanese. Business Central also holds all your data within a datacentre in the region in question, which is becoming a more common requirement for many businesses, for reasons of latency and security.
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Automation, Co-Pilot And Future Innovation From day one, Business Central has been at the leading edge of ERP innovation. Its automation capabilities reduce manual data entry, minimise errors, and ensure that all stakeholders operate with the latest information. The interconnectedness and streamlining enhances productivity and enables employees to focus on higher value and more strategic tasks.
Where things become really interesting, however, is in Microsoft’s growing proposition around AI. With the introduction of Copilot, a virtual assistant powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), Business Central is set to become more intuitive and user- friendly than ever, reinforcing its position as the market leader.
For companies not undergoing major change and that operate with relatively straightforward business models, there can still be a place for the more basic solutions like Xero, Sage and QuickBooks. But for those clients of yours seeking automation, advanced insights, multi-company support, scalability and customisation, there is only one real option – Microsoft’s Business Central.
Getting Started
“We Have A Broad Range Of Clients. How Do We Identify Which To prioritise?”
By now, you should have a strong sense of why Business Central is fast becoming the go- to solution for ambitious, growing organisations. Its intuitive, customisable and scalable nature makes it an ideal choice for organisations with complex operations, while its market-leading functionality empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions while adhering to industry-specific standards.
So the next question is, how do you identify those clients that will most benefit from this unrivalled solution? By identifying those businesses best placed to upgrade to Business Central, you can enhance your overall client experience and demonstrate a commitment to meeting their evolving requirements.
Most complex organisations will see benefit from Business Central, but if you’re unsure then these are some of the questions you might ask:
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Are they operating more than one company?
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Are they expanding abroad?
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Are they heavily invested in their supply chain?
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Are they growing rapidly?
“Can You Give Examples of Priority Industries?”
These are some of the industries that we’ve seen benefit most from the upgrade to Business Central:
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Manufacturing due their supply chain.
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Franchise models where all franchises sit under the same financial system (as consolidation becomes key).
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TV and film as they often operate with multiple companies.
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Charities as they benefit from the utilisation of the dimensions to handle fund management and departmental budgets.
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Any other complex industry where companies require systems with significant customisation
“An Example – Business Central In Action”
Manufacturing is a great example of an industry where your clients will see huge value in upgrading to Business Central.
Let’s imagine one of your clients is a furniture manufacturer. With its integrated data sharing capabilities, Business Central would facilitate seamless connectivity among each of the teams within this business, centralising all financial and operational data. Each department could be granted real-time access to critical information, including customer orders, supplier invoices, inventory levels, and production schedules. The sales team could instantly access customer orders and communicate precise delivery timelines to clients, while the procurement team could efficiently manage supplier invoices and monitor inventory levels to prevent stock shortages or overstocking.
The system would ensure that all teams operated from the same up-to-date data, coupled with stringent access controls, ensuring increased productivity and preventing unauthorised access. This centralised access would enable management to make informed decisions faster and with greater insight than ever before.
And that’s just the start of it – when a customer placed an order for a new sofa, the system would automatically generate a corresponding purchase order for the item. This seamless automation eliminates bottlenecks and manual intervention, accelerating and optimising the order fulfilment process.
The inventory management functionality would also prevent unnecessary stockpiling. By setting minimum and maximum inventory thresholds, along with reorder points and safety stock levels, Business Central could ensure that purchase or production orders were automatically generated when inventory levels reached specified thresholds.
What’s more, the furniture company would see significant benefit to their future planning, as the system’s functionality would allow them to adapt production schedules in response to shifting customer demand or supply chain disruptions. So let’s imagine they’re forecasting their production for chairs. They may have different stages of production which are each managed by different teams, such as moulding, assembly and finishing. The system’s planning tools would allow management to track production orders, monitor work-in-progress, and view the lead time and costs associated with each stage of production. This would ensure the manufacturing process aligned tightly with customer demand, thereby minimising delays and optimising resource allocation.
For accountants advising their clients on Cloud Accounting software, this example highlights the operational and commercial value of Business Central relative to competitors like Xero, QuickBooks or Sage.
“What’s The First Step? How Do We Find Out More On Behalf Of Our Clients?”
The simplest thing to do is to contact hello@creative-computing.co.uk and share an overview of the client in question. We need to understand their challenges and frustrations with their existing solution, and how they would define success for an upgrade to Business Central. From this we can scope out a plan that addresses the key issues and meets the defined success criteria.
“We Have Multiple Clients In Need Of Business Central. Do You Offer A Partnership Scheme?”
Yes we do, so if you think you have a number of clients that would benefit from the change, email hello@creative-computing.co.uk with their details and we’ll arrange a call to discuss how we can make such a relationship work for all parties.
“So We Can Manage Our Client’s Expectations, Can You Provide A Sense Of Timings And Costs”
We of course need to scope requirements out properly, but as a rule these transitions take 6-9 months.
The costs may be greater than the likes of Xero or Quickbooks due to the significantly enhanced functionality, but the business case is compelling. You can see some of the typical ROI data below:
