Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is an

enterprise resource planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of Business management tools, business management ...

(ERP) system from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, part of the

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) intelligent business applications announced by Microsoft in July 2016 and released on November 1, 2016. Feature applicat ...

product family. The product is designed to assist with

finance Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a r ...

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a ra ...

, supply chains,

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

and

electronic commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

operations of small to medium businesses (SMB).

Online & On-Premises Deployment

The Dynamics 365 Business Central system comes in both an online hosted (

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

) version and an on-premises version for manual deployment and administration. Some features, such as integration with other online Microsoft services, aren't available in the on-premises version and are only available in the online edition.

Localization

As an international ERP system, Business Central is available with 24 official localizations to work with the local features and requirements of various countries. There are an additional 47 localizations provided by local partners. The system is compliant with various internal financial standards to meet local requirements, such as

GDPR The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in partic ...

, IAS/IFRS and

SOX Sox most often refers to: * Boston Red Sox, an MLB team * Chicago White Sox, an MLB team * An alternate spelling of socks Sox may also refer to: Places * SOX, Sogamoso Airport's IATA airport code, an airport in Colombia Computing and technolo ...

Editions & Licensing

There are two editions of Business Central, Essentials and Premium. Essentials covers

Finance Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

Sales Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale. The seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in r ...

Marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

, Purchasing, Inventory,

Warehousing A warehouse is a building for storing goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parks on the outskirts of cities, tow ...

, and Project Management. Premium includes all of Essentials functionality plus

Service Management Service management in the manufacturing context, is integrated into supply chain management as the intersection between the actual sales and the customer point of view. The aim of high-performance service management is to optimize the service- ...

and

Manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a r ...

features. With the arrival of NAV 2013, Microsoft introduced a new licensing model that operated on a

concurrent user In computer science, the number of concurrent users (sometimes abbreviated CCU) for a resource in a location, with the location being a computing network or a single computer, refers to the total number of people simultaneously accessing or using t ...

basis. With this model, user licenses were of two types: Full User or a Limited User. The full user has access to the entire system, where as the limited user only has read access to the system and limited write access. From the launch of the Business Central rebrand, the licensing model changed to a

per-seat license A per-seat license (or "named user license") is a software license model based on the number of individual users who have access to a digital service or product. For example, 50-user per-seat license would mean that up to 50 individual named user ...

model with a 3x concurrent to seat multiplier added to any existing perpetual licences from previous Dynamics NAV versions. Customers with a Dynamics NAV Extended Pack license were moved to the Premium edition.

History

Business Central was first published as Dynamics NAV and Navision, which Microsoft acquired in 2002.

Navision

Navision originated at PC&C A/S (Personal Computing and Consulting), a company founded in

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in 1984. PC&C released its first accounting package, PCPlus, in 1985—a single-user application with basic accounting functionality. There followed in 1987 the first version of Navision, a client/server-based accounting application that allowed multiple users to access the system simultaneously. The success of the product prompted the company to rename itself to Navision Software A/S in 1995. The Navision product sold primarily in Denmark until 1990. From Navision version 3 the product was distributed in other European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom. In 1995 the first version of Navision based on

Microsoft Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

was released. In 2000, Navision Software A/S merged with fellow Danish firm Damgaard A/S (founded 1983) to form NavisionDamgard A/S. In 2001 the company changed its name to "Navision A/S". On July 11, 2002 Microsoft bought Navision A/S to go with its previous acquisition of

Great Plains Software Great Plains Software was an accounting software company located in Fargo, North Dakota, whose products focused on small to medium-sized businesses. It was founded in 1981, went public in 1997, and was purchased by Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 bill ...

. Navision became a new division at Microsoft, named Microsoft Business Solutions, which also handled Microsoft CRM. In 2003 Microsoft announced plans to develop an entirely new ERP system (Project Green). But it later decided to continue development of all ERP systems (Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL). Microsoft launched all four ERP systems with the same new role-based user-interface, SQL-based reporting and analysis,

SharePoint SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage v ...

-based portal, Pocket PC-based mobile clients and integration with

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

Dynamics NAV

In September 2005, Microsoft re-branded the product and re-released it as Microsoft Dynamics NAV. In December 2008, Microsoft released Dynamics NAV 2009, which contains both the original "classic" client, as well as a new

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

-based three-tier

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

called the RoleTailored Client (RTC). In first quarter of 2014 NAV reached 102,000 current customers. In 2016, Microsoft announced the creation of

Dynamics 365 Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) intelligent business applications announced by Microsoft in July 2016 and released on November 1, 2016. Feature applicat ...

— a rebranding of the suite of Dynamics ERP and CRM products as a part of a new online-only offering. As a part of this suite, the successor to NAV was codenamed "Madeira".

Dynamics 365 Business Central

In September 2017 at the Directions conference, Microsoft announced the new codename "

Tenerife Tenerife (; ; formerly spelled ''Teneriffe'') is the largest and most populous island of the Canary Islands. It is home to 43% of the total population of the archipelago. With a land area of and a population of 978,100 inhabitants as of Janu ...

" as the next generation of the Dynamics NAV product. This replaced codename "Madeira". On April 2, 2018, Business Central was released publicly and plans for semi-annual releases were announced. Business Central introduced a new AL language for development and translated the codebase from Dynamics NAV (

C/AL C/AL (Client/server Application Language) was the programming language used within C/SIDE the Client/Server Integrated Development Environment in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Formerly known as Navision Attain) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Cen ...

Dynamics SL, Dynamics GP, Dynamics C5

Several variants of the Dynamics brand have migration paths to Business Central with most having not had a new release since 2018. The later releases of the SL, GP, and C5 products adopted the Dynamics NAV Role-Tailored Client UI which helped pave the transition to the Business Central product.

History of Dynamics C5

Dynamics C5 was developed in Denmark as the successor to the DOS-based Concorde C4. The developing compan
Damgaard Data
merged with Navision in 2001 which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft Microsoft in 2002 rebranding the solution from Navision C5 to Microsoft Dynamics C5. The product handles currently more than 70,000 installations in Denmark.

History of Dynamics SL

Based in Findlay, Ohio, Solomon's roots go back more than 35 years, when co-founders Gary Harpst, Jack Ridge and Vernon Strong started TLB, Inc. in 1980. TLB, Inc. stands for The Lord's Business. TLB was named to remind the founders why the business was started: to conduct the business according to biblical principles. TLB was later renamed Solomon Software, and then Microsoft Dynamics SL.

History of Dynamics GP

The Dynamics GP product was originally developed by

, an independent company located in

Fargo, North Dakota Fargo ( /ˈfɑɹɡoʊ/) is a city in and the county seat of Cass County, North Dakota, United States. According to the 2020 census, its population was 125,990, making it the most populous city in the state and the 219th-most populous city in ...

run by

Doug Burgum Douglas James Burgum (born August 1, 1956) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and politician serving as the 33rd governor of North Dakota since 2016. He is a member of the Republican Party. Burgum was born and raised in the small to ...

. Dynamics Release 1.0 was released in February 1993. It was one of the first accounting packages in the United States that was designed and written to be multi-user and to run under Windows as 32-bit software. In late 2000,

announced the purchase of Great Plains Software. This acquisition was completed in April 2001. Dynamics GP is written in a language called

Dexterity Fine motor skill (or dexterity) is the coordination of small muscles in movement with the eyes, hands and fingers. The complex levels of manual dexterity that humans exhibit can be related to the nervous system. Fine motor skills aid in the growt ...

. Previous versions were compatible with

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ma ...

Pervasive PSQL Actian Zen (named Pervasive PSQL before version 13) is an ACID-compliant database management system (DBMS) developed by Pervasive Software. It is optimized for embedding in applications and used in several different types of packaged software app ...

Btrieve Btrieve is a transactional database ( navigational database) software product. It is based on Indexed Sequential Access Method (ISAM), which is a way of storing data for fast retrieval. There have been several versions of the product for DOS, Li ...

, and earlier versions also used C-tree, although after the buyout all new versions switched entirely to Microsoft SQL Server databases.

References

External links

* Business Central Accounting software ERP software Microsoft acquisitions 2018 software {{Microsoft-software-stub