Don’t know where to begin? Explore!

Business Central is a vast, ever-expanding platform with new features with each update. For those who are new to the platform, it may feel like there’s a paralyzing number of things to learn and it’s hard to know where to begin. Fear not! Business Central has made it incredibly easy to find your way around and has provided an extensive library of resources available to you.

First, familiarize yourself with the Tell-Me function. All you have to do is click the looking glass in the top right corner and start searching whatever you’re looking for. Want to look up an invoice? Search “invoice” and a multitude of related pages, tasks, reports, etc. will appear.

If that didn’t yield what you were looking for, click the “exploring pages and reports” link at the bottom of the options list. An outline of several sections and subsections of the role assigned to you in Business Central will appear. If that still didn’t quite get you to where you were looking, click the “Explore more roles” at the top of page to view all of the sections and subsections within Business Central.

 

 

Let’s say you found what you were looking for, but you’re unsure what to do once you’ve got there. You can always use the Help feature by clicking the “?” in the top right corner. Here you can search using keywords for articles, trainings, or other support provided by Microsoft.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bookmark Your Most Visited Pages

Now that you’ve explored the depths of what Business Central has to offer, we’re sure you found a few different pages of interest! Instead of repeatedly searching for the same page day in and day out, you can save yourself time and click by bookmarking it. This will add the page as a quick link to your main page.

You can find the bookmark ribbon to the right of the page option using the Tell-Me feature.

Or within the page itself

Personalize Your Home Page

You’ve added all these new pages to your home page. Now it’s time to remove the clutter! One of the best ways to start being more comfortable and efficient with Business Central is to remove the items that are unnecessary to your role.

For example, you may want to remove the “Welcome headline” after you’ve used Business Central for a while. To start personalizing, click the gear in the top right corner…

Then click the arrow for the dropdown options

Select “Hide” to remove this headline from your main page

In addition to hiding unnecessary pages and tasks, you can drag and drop where you want certain sections to be. There’s no need to worry about how the changes will affect anyone else’s home page because these changes are specific to your Business Central experience.

If you find that you changed too much, you can always choose “Clear personalization” and reset it to the default settings for your assigned role.

Click “Done” once you’re finished and enjoy the new look Business Central custom suited just for you!

Personalize The Action Bar

The personalization tool isn’t just for the home page! You can use it in way different ways to cut down on the number of clicks needed to perform an oft repeated task.

For example, when you’re in the payment journal you’ll notice that the “Send Remittance Advice” button is nestled within a few layers of options.

If you plan on sending a remittance advice to your vendor every time you pay an invoice, this can be tedious. Instead of dealing with it every day, personalize it!

Click the gear in the top right corner and select “Personalize”

Go to the field that you’d like to move. In this example, we are moving the “Send Remittance Advice” button to the action bar.

Click and drag the “Send Remittance Advice” and drop it onto action bar.

Click “Done” once your finished! Now this will stay on your action bar for the next time you use that page.

Dig for some hidden gems

Sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t there, but sometimes it’s just hiding. Using the Personalization feature again, we are going to dig deeper and find additional information provided by Business Central.

For this example, let’s assume you’re in a Cash Receipt Journal and in your old system there was a column for tax, but you notice it’s not there in Business Central.

As you’ve in the previous two examples: click the gear, then Personalization, but this time you’ll also click the “+ Field” on the left side of the page

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Find the column that you’d like to add and drag and drop it wherever makes the most sense to you.

Reminder: if you are using an Excel spreadsheet to copy and paste information, you will want to create a new template with the new column inserted.

Click “Done” and you’re all set!

This feature is helpful in many places within Business Central such as the Chart of Accounts, customer/vendor cards, reports, etc.

 

 

 

Get to know (and love) the keyboard shortcuts!

The flow of Business Central can feel a too manual without the use of keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft provides an entire list of these shortcuts which you can view here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/keyboard-shortcuts?wt.mc_id=d365bc_inproduct_page

Here are a few of our favorites:

F8

Since you can’t click and drag like you would in Excel, this is next best thing. Hitting F8 copies the cell directly above it. This is particularly helpful for when using Cash Receipt Journals, Payment Journals, etc.

Alt + Q

This shortcut opens the Tell-Me function ready to search.

t

You can enter “t” for today’s date! This is particularly helpful when going through various reports instead of manually typing numbers and slashes.

Update Lists Using “Edit in Excel”

There will be times when you need to update a field on multiple customer/vendor cards to reflect changes within the business such as a different location, new salesperson, etc. Rather than individually go through each and every customer card to change the location, you can use “Edit in Excel”.

For this example, one of our locations moved from the West side of town to the East side, so we need to update “West” to “East” for all of customers belonging to that location.

Go to the customer page

On the right side of the page, click the “Share to” icon and select “Edit in Excel”

Click “Enable” to be able to edit

Update “West” to “East”

Click “Publish” to make your changes in Business Central

It noteworthy that in order to publish, you cannot have anything filtered, hidden, or if the data does not exist within BC. Going back to the example above, if we did have the location “East” set up within Business Central, we would have received when attempting to publish.

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about certain fields such balance being accidentally updated because they are protected and cannot be edited.

We highly recommend sticking to lists when you “Edit in Excel”. For more complicated changes or imports, we recommend going the “Configuration Package” route.

Want to see more than one page? Duplicate!

This is a quick, but powerful little feature. Avoid going back and forth between different pages within Business Central. Instead, right click on your browser’s tab and duplicate the page! You’ll be able to move throughout both pages without an issue.

Save time by saving list filters!

We’ve all been working on an Excel document and discovered the perfect combination of filters to find what we’re looking for. Now in Business Central, you can easily save those list filters for later use saving you time and frustration.

For this example, we are going to go back to our customers out the East warehouse.

From the Customers page, click the Filter icon on the right hand side

A popout section on the left will appear, click the “+ Filter…” within the “Filter list by” section. In this case, click “Location Code” and the select “East”. Click the save icon and choose a name for your saved filter view!

Now you can toggle in between “All” and your newly saved filter. These filters appear in multiple places, so we encourage you to look through all the different ways you can slice up data and enhance your analysis!

Running the same reports every week? Schedule them instead!

Reports are critical to the basic function of your business. Instead of spending time mindlessly running the same report each week, have it scheduled to find your inbox each day/week/month. It will give you time back better focused elsewhere.

Starting from the main page, scroll down to the “Report Inbox”, click the down arrow and select “Show Queue” from the dropdown

You will be brought to the “Job Queue”. Click “+ New” to create a new report.

Here you will need to will start by choosing which report you’d like to run. Under the General fast tab, click on the box with the ellipsis and select the report.

For this example, to start our Monday we want to check in on our Receivables and Payables, so we will choose number 5

And then we’ll turn on the Monday toggle under the Recurrence fast tab.

Once you’ve looked all the setting over, click “Set Status to Ready” in the action bar

Now your report will appear in your Report Inbox every Monday ready for review!

Conclusion

We at TruNorth Dynamics hope you find these ten easy tips and tricks help you and your team be more confident and productive within Business Central by recapturing time, minimizing duplicate work, and overall improving the user’s knowledge and experience. Thank you for reading!