Having worked on Business Central for months now, there had always been an “obvious” comparison between the features that were available with the RTC versions of NAV and were “sort of” missing in Business Central.

Seemingly Microsoft realizes that and had been working actively on it. Some of these were added in the October 2018 Release, a lot shall be added in the April 2019 release as Microsoft announced in their release note for the upcoming release of Business Central.

Apart from adding the productivity features, as I had experienced (and also acknowledged by Microsoft support folks) there had been a lot being done for performance optimization on Business Central, which is due to release on April 19. As a matter of fact, it is quite evident from the April 2019 release notes.

“..We’ve invested heavily in boosting performance, reliability, and scalability of Business Central, across the platform and business application”

“We will continue to enhance the application through our focus on performance in the most used areas. …they will experience faster responses as a result of optimizing the application code, such as optimizing how quickly the Home page loads, and performance improvements in key application scenarios that are used on a daily basis.”   ~ Microsoft

Below are some of the key highlights business users expect to see in the Business Central April 2019 release:

• Write longer names and descriptions on masters, documents, Journals, and Ledgers
• Improvised Export to Excel – with filters
• Auto Save indicator on pages 

• Physical Inventory Order and Physical Inventory Recording pages to better structure your Physical Inventory counting
• Ability to add multiple Items to a Sales and Purchase document with the option of default quantity prefilled
• Easier creation of Sales Orders for new item codes: Control New Item and Customer creation from lookups on sales documents
• Ability to Merge duplicate customers or vendors
• Ability to add Shortcut Dimension values directly to Journal and Document lines without opening the Dimensions page
• Work in Document focus mode for the line item on the Documents, easier working on long documents
• Customer and Vendor statistics FactBoxes to show payments and last payment dates info

• Personalize your screens for quick entry, navigate through specific fields only on the page

• Users shall be able to personalize the Action Bar on every page, hide or reorder actions, Navigation Bar on Role Centers and pin any list there
• Report selection added for Warehouse Documents

• The most awaited: Create your own views on List pages, similar to “Save Views as” of earlier versions of NAV RTC

• You will have it finally: Ctrl+Alt+F1 will open Page Inspection to see the full content of the record
• Better plan and schedule the auto-application of updates/releases as part of maintenance by Microsoft, no sudden outages to the production environment   

Microsoft D365 Business Central International Availability: