Microsoft is doing some housekeeping in Dynamics 365 Business Central–and significant changes are coming with the 2025 release Wave 1 clean-up. We want you to know about these changes and how to prepare your applications.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central Release Wave 1 clean-up means that all tables, table extensions, and table fields remaining in the Obsolete::Removed state for more than one major release will be permanently deleted. This sweeping clean-up affects the Base Application as well as all other first-party apps. Already, the removal of over 150 tables has optimized and cleaned up the application code.

With the Release Wave 1 clean-up, Microsoft will adopt a clean-up cycle every fifth release, ensuring a smooth transition.

Why this matters: Benefits of the clean-up

The April 2025 Release Wave 1 clean-up effort isn’t just about reducing database size, it’s part of a broader vision:

• Improved database performance: Removing unused schema elements will optimize performance and reduce technical debt.

• Unified Base Applications: Multiple countries (such as, Sweden, Denmark, Czechia, India, and Iceland) and partner-localized regions will move towards a unified Base Application. The goal is to have all countries based on the same codebase.
• Improved maintainability: By removing more than 10% of tables and table fields, we’ve simplified development and made it easier for developers and product owners to manage changes.
• Streamlined codebase: Cleaner code results in fewer errors and easier maintenance for developers.

Key updates and concepts

Platform support for the clean-up

2025 release wave 1 (v26) introduces platform-level support for dropping tables, table extensions and table fields that have been in the Obsolete::Removed state for more than one major release. This ensures an automated clean-up process, consistent and in alignment with Microsoft’s ongoing breaking changes process and optimization strategy.

Introducing the Step Release

A new concept, Step Release, plays an important role in cloud migration and the upgrade process:

• Mandatory for cloud migration: Customers migrating from earlier versions must upgrade to a Step Release before proceeding to newer versions.
• Purpose: The Step Release ensures all schema elements in the Obsolete::Removed state for more than the defined period are cleared out before transitioning to the latest version.
• Impact on upgrade code: The updated upgrade process excludes objects marked for removal in this release.

Important: The data from deleted tables, table extensions and table fields will also be permanently removed. Tables, table extensions and table fields in the state Obsolete::Pending are not impacted.

How to identify impacted tables, table extensions and table fields

With the Release Wave 1 clean-up, Microsoft has introduced a new preprocessor symbol, CLEANSCHEMA, to help developers identify and handle obsolete schema elements. Here’s how it works:

• The CLEANSCHEMA symbol operates similarly to the existing CLEAN symbol, with a version number showing when a table, table extension or table field was marked as Obsolete::Removed.
• For example:
  • CLEANSCHEMA24: The table, table extension, or table field marked as removed in version 24 and deleted in version 26 (2025 release wave 1).
  • CLEANSCHEMA25 or later: The object remains for at least one more cycle of 5 releases. Deletion happens in future releases- version 31 (2027 release wave 2).

What should developers do?

If your app references objects in the Obsolete::Removed state then you need to:

1. Refactor your code: Replace or remove references to these objects before April 2025.
2. Check upgrade code: Ensure that upgrade code doesn’t rely on removed tables, table extensions or table fields.
3. Monitor preprocessor symbols: Use the CLEANSCHEMA symbol to anticipate removal timelines.

Implications for cloud migration

The cloud migration path will change as part of the clean-up:

1. Customers will first migrate to version 25 (2024 release wave 1).
2. Upgrade code then handles the transition to the latest version after clearing obsolete objects.

This new process emphasizes the importance of preparing early, especially for legacy applications with dependencies on obsolete schema elements.

What if you need data from removed tables?

Microsoft recommends that you use the Point-In-Time Restore (PIT) procedure for data recovery, which is consistent with current best practices. If you anticipate needing data from obsolete tables, table extensions or table fields, ensure you plan for PIT backups before the clean-up.

Preparing for the future after the Release Wave 1 clean-up

With these changes, Microsoft continues its dedication to enhancing the maintainability of Business Central.

Next steps for partners:

1. Inspect your code: Identify any dependencies on Obsolete::Removed schema elements using the CLEANSCHEMA symbol and refactor the code accordingly.
2. Prepare migration plans: Incorporate the Step Release process into your upgrade and cloud migration strategies.

By being proactive, you’ll ensure a smooth transition and take full advantage of the benefits of a cleaner, faster, and more unified Business Central.

Additional resources:

Deleted objects in 2025 release wave

•  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/upgrade/deleted-objects-25w1

Maintaining Apps

• Update Lifecycle for Tenant Customizations – Business Central | Microsoft Learn
• Maintain AppSource apps and per-tenant extensions – Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft will host two Office Hour calls for partners to join for questions about this process and next steps:

Option 1: February 13, 4:00 – 5:00PM CET. Please register here

Option 2: February 18, 8:00 – 9:00AM CET. Please register here

The post Essential Clean-Up Guide for Partners: 2025 Release Wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft has separated all Czech-specific functionalities into distinct applications as part of the delocalization process of the Czech version of Dynamics 365 Business Central. The process intended to pave the way for the seamless integration of Czech local functionalities on top of the Worldwide (W1) version of the Business Central. 

Technical Overview

Business Central has been undergoing major changes over the past few years and one of the strategy areas is application modularization, that includes localization layers. This led to critical changes in the Czech localization layer, which has now been converted into a suite of distinct localization apps. The suite contains the following apps: Core Pack, Advance Pack, Banking documents, Cash Desk, Compensation, Advance Payments, and Fixed Assets.

To ensure that both old and new Czech functionalities work in parallel in that transition period. Microsoft made sure that the old code integrated into the Base Application was gradually cleaned up. The last step is to remove Czech specific fields from the Czech Base Application.

In the next major release of Business Central 2023 wave 2 (version 23), the following Czech-specific fields will be removed from the tables, while primary keys will be updated:

• Table 1251 “Text-to-Account Mapping”, field 11700 Text-to-Account Mapping Code: Code[10]
• Table 1252 “Bank Pmt. Appl. Rule”, field “Bank Pmt. Appl. Rule Code” Code: Code[10]

The removal of Czech-specific tables and fields from the Czech Base Application, has also been announced in the list of deprecated features, see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-central/dev-itpro/upgrade/deprecated-features-platform#changes-in-2024-release-wave-2-version-250.

Action Required: Upgrade to Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2

To ensure a successful upgrade to Business Central 2023 release wave 2 (version 23) Czech, perform a forced synchronization of the database schema. Microsoft will ensure a seamless upgrade process for users of the online version of Business Central. However, for those upgrading to this version using Business Central on-premises, it is necessary to set the “schemaUpdateMode” parameter in CZ Base Application to “ForceSync” to synchronize the data model.

Users who are upgrading to the on-premises version of Business Central 2023 release wave 2 (version 23) Czech and higher must verify that there are no duplicate records in both tables 1251 “Text to Account Mapping” and 1252 “Bank Payment Application Rule” after the Czech fields have been removed from the primary key. This can be accomplished either by manually deleting the data or by upgrading to any version of BC 22.x where data modifications will be included as part of the upgrade procedures. It is highly recommended to back up the data in these tables before proceeding.

Summary

Czech-specific fields that were previously part of the primary key in Table 1251 “Text to Account Mapping,” specifically Field 11700 “Text-to-Account Mapping Code,” and in Table 1252 “Bank Payment Application Rule,” “Bank Payment Application Rule Code,” will be removed in this new version.

The post Impact of Delocalization Process in the Czech Version of Business Central 2023 Wave 2 Release appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces a new global feature – Electronic Documents. Microsoft has crafted this as a foundational framework, providing a robust base for catering to localized requirements. This innovative approach allows Microsoft to efficiently deliver tailored localization apps for some countries. Furthermore, partners can leverage this model to craft their custom localizations. Given the unique e-document formats and distinct integration services prevalent in various countries, these localization apps are indispensable.

Why did Microsoft deliver it?

Before we delve into the world of E-Documents within Business Central, let’s acquaint you with an important new acronym – CTC, which stands for Continuous Transaction Control. This term signifies the imperative ‘real-time’ invoicing reporting and validation mandated by authorities. CTC encompasses a suite of digital control mechanisms to enhance tax collection and curb tax fraud. Electronic Invoicing stands as a key component of CTC, a model increasingly embraced by numerous countries.

We can easily conclude – this approach will become mandatory in many countries if it hasn’t already. The prospect of different solutions for each country poses challenges. Hence, we’ve developed one global extendable solution as an app, simplifying support for diverse countries.

Exploring the Scope of E-Invoicing Models

Understanding the landscape of E-invoicing can initially seem straightforward – creating an electronic file and transmitting it. However, the reality is more intricate. E-invoicing encompasses various models, including the 2-corner, 3-corner, and 4-corner frameworks. Each country retains autonomy to determine its preferred approach. Moreover, even in non-mandatory scenarios, businesses often opt for E-invoicing to streamline communication.

Our solution encompasses all the corner models mentioned here and facilitates additional messaging capabilities between access points, providing a comprehensive E-documents framework.

How do E-Documents Operate in Sales and Purchases?

E-Documents in Business Central facilitate seamless interaction in both sales and purchase processes. It’s a two-way system, enabling the transmission of electronic sales documents to customers while also receiving electronic documents from vendors. These electronic documents have their own distinct lifecycles, which may not always align with invoice timelines. To accommodate this, we’ve introduced a new entity, the E-Document, linked with the original document in Business Central. This entity hosts a unique information set, including statuses, logs, and potential error notifications or warnings.

Once the system is configured, posting a sales document triggers the automatic creation of an E-Document. Depending on your setup, it’s promptly dispatched to the designated service. You gain complete visibility into its status and can take additional actions as needed.

In the case of incoming purchase electronic documents, you have the flexibility to upload them to Business Central manually. However, if your access-point provider provides a document delivery service, you can configure a Job Queue for automated downloads and E-Documents creation. Here’s the magic: if you’ve mapped vendors’ items with yours through item-references or G/L accounts and there are no errors, the system will effortlessly generate purchase invoices with all the essential details. Your task? Just review and post them.

How to Expand This Functionality?

This framework has been created to speed up your productivity when building electronic invoicing applications by taking care of all the infrastructure work, like subscribing to different posting routines, writing custom mapping logic, logging, error handling, and running jobs in the background.

The framework is designed to improve your productivity in developing electronic invoicing applications. It handles essential infrastructure tasks such as subscribing to various posting routines, custom mapping logic, managing logs, handling errors, and running background jobs. This empowers you to direct your attention towards the specific electronic invoicing logic, including:

• Exporting/Importing documents from Business Central to the local format mandated by the authority.
• Establishing seamless integration with the authority’s endpoint for sending and receiving electronic documents.

To create your local E-Document:

1. Create a new extension adding dependency to the E-Document Core application.
2. Implement a document interface based on the specification mandated by the local authority, using designated endpoints for the sales: Check, Create, and CreateBatch, and GetBasicInfo and PrepareDocument when you expect to receive documents.
3. Implement an integration interface to send/receive documents to the local authority automatically.
4. Enhance user experience by implementing a setup wizard that gathers all necessary configuration details and obtains customer consent for data transmission. This streamlined process ensures a smoother onboarding experience for users.

More details with examples how to extend existing E-Document Core application can be found here.

The post E-Documents as a Global Solution for Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces regional formats for reports, which adds a new dimension of customization for reports. This feature gives you more flexibility to tailor how reports print, according to your unique needs. Addressing inherent limitations, such as the inability to customize region formats for specific reports, the absence of support for designating a specific format for Customers and Vendors, and the reliance on report format settings from My Settings, this enhancement simplifies the reporting experience in Business Central. In this article, we’ll dive into the mechanics of these changes and explore how they enhance the overall reporting process in Business Central.

Behavior and Priority Order

To understand how the new regional format feature works, let’s explore its behavior and order of priority. This insight will help you grasp how Business Central determines the language and format to use for reports in different situations, so you can adjust these settings to suit your business requirements.

1. Request Page: Advanced Settings Take Center Stage

The highest priority in the report generation process resides with the advanced settings on the report request page. When you generate a report, you can specify the language and format you want to use for the report.

Advanced settings in the report request page

2. Report Object in AL: Precise Configuration

The heart of the matter lies in the AL triggers associated with the report object. Reports now include two important properties: Report.Language and Report.FormatRegion. These properties, defined within the AL triggers, play a key role in configuring reports. For many standard document reports in the Base App, these properties are set based on the Language Code and Format Region fields from the document itself. These fields get their values from the corresponding entity settings. For example, the Sales Header report gets its settings from the customer entity.

3. Language and Format in Customer/Vendor Card

If a report should be printed in the language of the recipient rather than in the working language, the developer can add code in the report to handle this. This functionality is already enabled for most reports in the standard Business Central database. The document is printed in the language that is specified in the Language Code field on the Customer or Vendor Card page.

Example of Language and Format Region Codes on the Customer page

4. Language and Format in My Settings

If the report properties mentioned earlier aren’t configured within the AL triggers, Business Central then refers to the settings in My Settings. For example, consider a scenario where a regional format isn’t defined for a customer. In this case, when you print documents associated with the customer, the Report.FormatRegion property won’t have a specific regional format set. Consequently, Business Central will turn to the regional format setting in My Settings as a fallback. While My Settings had a more prominent role in earlier versions, its current function is to step in when no alternative settings are available.

By using this order of priority, Business Central ensures that the report output language and format are based on the most relevant and specific configurations. This approach gives you greater control over language and format customization for individual reports. Ultimately, this feature streamlines the reporting process, making it more efficient and user-centric.

The post Adding Regional Formats to Reports in Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Intrastat is the system the European Union (EU) uses to collect statistics on the trade in goods among EU member nations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central customers that operate in the EU can use the Intrastat Report to meet their monthly reporting requirements. With 2022 release wave 2 of Business Central, we’re introducing a redesigned Intrastat reporting experience with extended features. Here’s what you need to know.

Test in a sandbox first

The new experience is disabled by default. You’ll need to enable it on the Feature Management page in Business Central. We suggest you enable and test it in a sandbox environment with a copy of your production data first. Once you activate the new user experience in your production environment, you can’t go back to the old Intrastat functionality.

New Intrastat reporting experience

The old Intrastat Report was based on journals. In the new report, you’ll see a list of entries, and when you create a new Intrastat Report, it opens on the document page.

Additionally, Intrastat reporting is no longer part of the base application, but is now an extension.

Enhanced functionality

• Data Exchange Framework for reporting. Almost all EU countries require a file for reporting. Previously we created a hardcoded file. Now we use the Data Exchange Framework, and you can easily create timestamped files for export. We include prepared formats for countries for which we have localizations. You can change the out-of-box report or make your own, especially if we don’t have a localization for your country.

• Configurable Checklist Report. After you fill in the Intrastat Report, you can run a configurable Checklist Report to make sure the information you entered is correct, and that all fields you indicated are mandatory have been entered.
• Fixed asset reporting. You can also include fixed assets in your report.
• Weight and supplementary unit management. For both goods and fixed assets, you can easily configure the weight and supplementary unit of measure and, if needed, recalculate weights and supplementary units without changing any other values.
• Manual corrections. You can manually correct your lines, and edited lines are indicated.
• More report configuration options. The new Intrastat Report configuration has more options, and you can also adjust your reporting in the Data Exchange Definition settings. You can set file export preferences, default values, which country will be the base for reporting, how to treat VAT numbers, and more.
• Service Declaration is coming soon as a separate app. Service Declaration, or Intrastat for Services, will be available in November 2022 as a separate app. Business Central will report services that come from the purchase and sale of items configured as services, resources, and item charges.

Technical information

• Now modularized and open source. With the new Intrastat application, the Business Central development team continues to apply the strategy of modularizing the common application layer (base application). At the same time, we’re providing more capabilities for partners to contribute by making both the Intrastat app and report formats open source.

• Developed for extensibility. The central part of the design is the Intrastat core app. The app allows a partner to define business in two ways:
  • Use the app logic with the report format exposed through the Data Exchange Framework to generate the report
  • For a heavily customized solution, define logic through the standard report configuration on the VAT Report Configuration page (suggest lines, content, response handler, and validation object)
    
    To support extensibility, the app has 47 integration events. If you need to submit more than that, use the standard process.
• Customizable formats. After receiving many requests to allow easier report format modifications, we decided to expose the format through the Data Exchange Framework to support text and XML files. Microsoft will continue to provide changes in accordance with local market law requirements, but users may customize the format and keep their own version of the format definition. The Intrastat core application will have a common format defined in DataExchDefMap.xml in the AppResources folder.
• Country formats. The Intrastat core extension supports all countries and follows the existing Intrastat logic. For several countries, the required Intrastat format is significantly different. Microsoft is releasing country-specific apps, which will be developed on top of the Intrastat core app. Both Intrastat core and country apps will be preinstalled by default but must be enabled in Feature Management. Developers can choose to develop their solution on top of a common application layer, the Intrastat common application, or an Intrastat country app.
• Open-source app. Our goal is to open the source code completely, both the app code and report formats. The formats will be exposed as Data Exchange Framework schema and shared through GitHub. Like other first-party apps, the app code will be available on GitHub at ALAppExtensions/Apps/W1 at main · microsoft/ALAppExtensions (github.com).

When will the new Intrastat reporting experience be available?

The new Intrastat experience is available starting in October 2022 with 2022 release wave 2 for all countries using the W1 version and country apps for Austria, Spain, and Sweden. Other country-based apps for Microsoft localizations only will be available in November 2022. Service Declaration will be available as an additional app in the same release starting in November.

For EU countries without Microsoft localization

What if you’re in an EU country where Microsoft doesn’t provide localization? In that case, partners can start by adding country-based features on top of the Intrastat core app as soon as the W1 version is available.

If you see some obstacles in this process, please contact us. Our intention was not to create a new Intrastat only for Microsoft localizations, but to create a solution that our partners can easily extend to meet local requirements.

Action needed

You should transition to the new Intrastat app soon. The existing Intrastat functionality will be supported until 2023 release wave 2 to provide enough time for a smooth transition. However, we encourage Business Central customers to move to the new Intrastat app before then.

Important notes:

• Existing Intrastat functionality is being deprecated. The Intrastat objects in the base application (27 in total) will be tagged for obsoletion and will be available until 2023 release wave 2.
• The transition process is one-directional. Once you move to the new Intrastat app, users will not be able to return to the old experience.
• No data will be transferred in the transition.
• There is no overlap between the existing and new Intrastat objects, so there is no risk of data corruption.
• Users who try to access existing Intrastat pages will be redirected to the new experience.
• To modify the assisted setup, use the following setting:
  [EventSubscriber(ObjectType::Codeunit, Codeunit::"Feature Management Facade", 'OnAfterFeatureEnableConfirmed', '', true, true)]

Learn more

For more information about the new Intrastat reporting experience, read the documentation:

Work with Intrastat Reporting – Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Set Up Intrastat Reporting – Business Central | Microsoft Learn

Learn about more globalization features in Dynamics 365: Reduce complexity across global operations with Dynamics 365 – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog

New to Dynamics 365 Business Central? Try it for free.

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