Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC) continues to evolve as a unified ERP platform supporting Finance, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Projects, and Services. With Microsoft’s Evergreen release model, organisations benefit from continuous innovation without disruption.
The 2026 release wave 1 introduces agentic AI, stronger financial automation, deeper insight, and tighter governance by advancing Business Central from a system of record to a system that actively supports operations.
See what’s got us excited about this update!
Copilot
- The Payables Agent now automatically tags Outlook emails that include PDF attachments as “Processed by Payables Agent”, helping users identify the previously handled emails while improving visibility and collaboration across shared inboxes.
- A dedicated task pane brings together tasks generated by all agents in one place, replacing scattered notifications with a structured view of AI-driven suggestions, validations, and follow-ups.
- Microsoft-managed Azure OpenAI resources are now available for Copilot extensions, simplifying onboarding, improving security, billing and support of advanced models.
Financial Management
- Employees can now submit Expense Reports linked to categories, dimensions, and payment methods, enabling faster review, approval, and posting, with further evolution expected in later versions.
- Buyers can now create self‑billed Purchase Invoices (Recipient Created Tax Invoices – RCTI) based on agreed pricing and payment terms under a mutual agreement.
- New capabilities support the management of excise taxes and withholding taxes, alongside AI‑assisted reporting, reconciliation, and financial workflows that reduce manual effort and surface anomalies earlier.
Reporting & Data Analysis
- New Power BI reports for Customer Loyalty deliver deeper insight into repeat purchasing behaviour and customer trends to support pricing, promotions, and relationship management.
- Administrators can control which report layouts are active, inactive, or obsolete, helping ensure users work only with approved formats.
- The enhanced Subscription Billing Power BI app provides ready‑to‑use dashboards covering recurring revenue, billing performance, and trends.
- Financial reporting enhancements introduce logos on PDFs, report categories, global defaults, and scheduled email distribution.
- The enhanced Word add‑in makes it easier for functional users to create and maintain document layouts such as invoices and orders directly in Word.
- Payment Times Reporting (PTR) now automates compliance for Australian organisations with turnover above AUD 100 million using live system data.
- New APIs allow approval workflows to be analysed programmatically, improving auditability and compliance oversight.
Supply Chain Management
- Images can now be assigned to individual Item Variants, making it easier to visually distinguish product options across sales and ecommerce scenarios.
- Approval workflows are now extended to Item Journals and Planning Worksheets, locking batches until approval and improving control and auditability.
- Drop shipment processing is simplified by allowing users to create purchase orders directly from drop‑shipment sales orders and standard planning pages.
- Item Variants can now maintain their own Attribute Values, enabling more accurate product information while keeping consistency at the item level.
- The Quality Management extension introduces configurable quality checks across purchasing, production, and assembly, supporting regulatory compliance and product reliability.
- Invoice matching is improved by allowing one invoice line to match multiple purchase order and receipt lines, reducing posting errors and manual intervention.
- simplifies drop shipment processing by allowing users to create purchase orders directly from drop‑shipment sales orders and standard planning pages.
Ecommerce
- Custom Shopify collections can now be assigned to items during export, allowing product collections to be synced and managed more easily, reducing manual categorisation and supporting clearer storefront organisation.
- Items can be exported to Shopify using up to three attributes as product options, creating structured variants and improving the storefront experience.
- Sync images of product variants between Business Central and Shopify introduces support for synchronizing variant‑specific images between the two systems, ensuring each Shopify product variant displays the correct image.
- Sales orders and credit memos can now be created using the customer’s checkout (presentment) currency rather than the Shopify shop currency.
- The Shopify Connector remains aligned with Shopify’s January 2026 supported API, reducing integration risk and improving inventory and product synchronisation
E-Documents
- Inbound electronic documents can now be linked directly to purchase invoices, allowing captured data to be reused and reducing manual entry.
- Vendor Templates can define default e‑document types, ensuring consistent e‑document behaviour from creation.
User Productivity
- The updated Outlook integration allows users to view, edit, and act on records directly from their inbox, including creating and updating quotes, orders, invoices, and contacts.
Governance & Administration
- Administrators can review and audit user and group permissions from a single view, improving transparency, security, and compliance.
- AI agents can securely connect to the Admin Centre via MCP servers, enabling governed, observable automation.
- Database index management tools help optimise system performance and reduce unnecessary overhead.
- Cloud migration capabilities support selective data migration for clean re implementation projects and broader lifecycle scenarios.
- New auditing APIs strengthen visibility and control over permissions and security.
Key Technical & Development Features
- Autonomous AI agents expand automation across expenses, fulfilment, sales, and purchasing.
- A new Agent Designer and improved developer tools support custom AI workflows and safer development.
- Platform upgrades introduce new APIs for auditing, approvals, and improved extensibility.
- Security is strengthened with safer outbound integrations and native SFTP connectivity.
- Item attribute and variant‑level image management are further enhanced.
Looking Ahead
Release Wave 1 reinforces the direction Business Central is heading, towards practical automation, stronger governance, and AI‑assisted operations that scale with the organisation.
If you’d like to dive deeper into Microsoft’s full set of updates for this release, view the official overview here: