What’s planned for Business Central 2021 Wave 1

In this video, I go through the list that Microsoft published with the planned features for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1.

https://youtu.be/EYGf1OhW4dI

In this video, Erik walks through the official list of planned features for Business Central 2021 Wave 1 (version 18), sharing his opinions and impressions on each item. He covers administration improvements, application enhancements (including the highly anticipated dimension corrections), Teams integration, new country localizations, Power Platform updates, client and printing improvements, modern development tools (including report extensions and the ability to add keys to base tables), and onboarding enhancements.

Understanding the “Wave” Concept

Before diving into the feature list, Erik makes an important clarification: even though version 18 arrives in April, the features listed under “2021 Wave 1” won’t necessarily all ship on day one. The concept of a wave means these features will roll out from April through September. We saw the same pattern with version 17, where significant new functionality arrived in 17.1 and subsequent updates. Microsoft delivers features when they’re ready rather than holding everything for a specific date.

Administration

The administration section contains three notable items:

  • Improvements for delegated admins: This is the big one. As a partner user (delegated admin), you can now create and manage job queues for customers. Previously, this wasn’t possible because partner users weren’t recognized as users on the customer tenant. This removes a significant friction point for partners managing customer environments.
  • Improved reliability of database export for larger databases: Erik’s take — this should simply work, so it’s essentially a bug fix. Hopefully it works now.
  • Reassign an environment from one Azure Active Directory organization to another: You can now move an environment from one tenant to another (or ask support to do it for you), which is a welcome addition.

Application Improvements

Erik has been critical in the past of Microsoft not pushing hard enough on the application side, spending most of their effort on the technical platform. While he loves the tech improvements, at the end of the day this is still an application that users need to work with — so application improvements are extremely important.

Assisted Setup for Item Cost Adjustment

Today you can create a job queue for handling item cost adjustment, but it’s not straightforward to set up. This improvement adds a wizard experience: you walk through the setup wizard, and it creates the job queue entry for you. A nice quality-of-life improvement.

Automatic Creation of Lot and Serial Number Information Cards

A welcome addition for anyone working with item tracking.

Bank Reconciliation and Payment Reconciliation Improvements

Very nice to see continued investment in these critical financial workflows.

Changes in Synchronization Between Contacts and Customers

This relates to the Relationship Management module — the “little CRM system that Microsoft forgot about,” as Erik puts it. Currently there’s some funky integration where creating or editing a contact on the customer card triggers synchronization. The change appears to reduce the customer card’s role in this sync process. Erik suggests the Relationship Management module sits in a weird spot — perhaps it should be detached from the base application entirely and replaced with a proper CRM integration. This change may be an indication of the path Microsoft is taking by removing dependencies on this module.

Dimension Corrections — The Killer Feature of Version 18

This is the single biggest feature in the release from a user perspective. Anyone who has worked with dimensions knows the pain of correcting a wrong or missing dimension value on posted entries. Today, you have to credit entire transactions and re-post them just to change a dimension value. Multiple third-party apps exist on AppSource solely to address this problem — that’s how significant the issue is. Being able to fix dimension postings without jumping through all those hoops is, in Erik’s words, “huge.”

Simplified Bank Statement File Import

Currently, setting up bank file imports requires configuring the Data Exchange Definition, which is tedious even for experienced consultants. The improvement appears to be a wizard-based approach — you specify that you have comma-separated files, and it creates the data exchange definition for you. The technical foundation remains the same, but the front-end experience becomes much more accessible. This also ties into the onboarding story.

Better with Microsoft 365

Lookup Business Central Contacts from Within Teams

The Teams integration introduced in version 17 was a good start, and there’s plenty of room for improvement. This feature lets you look up Business Central contacts from within Teams. Erik notes that if it’s limited to only contacts (from the Relationship Management module) rather than vendors, customers, or items, its usefulness may be limited. But it’s a step in the right direction for deeper Teams integration.

Enablement of Word Merge

This is really about fixing something that was broken during the transition from the Role Tailored Client to the web client. The mail merge functionality from the Relationship Management module had been lost — this reintroduces it.

Support for Microsoft Universal Print

Now that Business Central has cloud printing support, adding Microsoft Universal Print is a natural and expected addition.

Country and Regional

With version 18, four new countries officially join the Business Central family:

  • India (which has generated particular excitement due to its unique GST requirements)
  • Greece
  • Romania
  • Turkey

What’s particularly interesting about these localizations is that, unlike older country versions, they are app-based. These four countries are not built on modified base objects but are supported by apps on top of the W1 (worldwide) version. This is the direction all country localizations need to go, because some of the current base-code localizations — Erik specifically calls out the New Zealand localization — are, to put it politely, not ideal.

Microsoft Power Platform

  • Enable Power BI connectors to work with APIs instead of web services only: A natural progression that was overdue.
  • Synchronize item availability from BC to Dynamics 365 Sales (CE): Many customers will be very happy with this improvement.
  • Virtual tables for Microsoft Dataverse: Erik admits to reading the description multiple times without being entirely sure what it means. It could be that Dataverse can see BC tables as virtual tables, or that you can set up table relationships between native Dataverse tables and BC tables. If you know the answer, Erik invites you to share in the comments.

Modern Clients (Printing and Performance)

Erik notes with some amusement that Microsoft still labels this section “Modern Clients” even though there are no non-modern clients anymore. The section covers the usual performance and usability improvements, but the main focus is on printing:

  • Report API allows passing the layout needed for report execution: Today this requires a workaround involving calling a specific function in a single-instance codeunit. Being able to pass the layout as a parameter directly would be a significant improvement.
  • Running reports in the background: This is huge and users will love it.
  • User can change the assigned printer before printing: This is functionality that existed 30 years ago in older NAV clients but was lost in the transition to the web client. Especially valuable now with cloud printing — you might default to a cloud printer but sometimes want to get a PDF instead.
  • Printing from the mobile app: Erik didn’t even realize this wasn’t already supported.

Modern Development Tools

Two major additions stand out for developers:

Adding Keys to Base Tables

Erik shares a real-world example: he was working on posted sales invoices and posted sales credit memos, needing to filter on the external document number. The invoices table had a key for this field, but the credit memos table did not — resulting in good performance for invoices and poor performance for credit memos. Being able to add keys to base tables solves this problem. There’s some question about whether you can also add keys to other extensions’ tables — Erik saw conflicting information on Twitter from Microsoft, so this remains to be confirmed.

Report Extensions

This is arguably the biggest developer feature of the release. You can now extend a report’s data set and request page. The request page extension works similarly to a page extension. But the data set extension is truly transformative.

Today, if you need to add a single field to an existing report, you have to:

  1. Make a complete copy of the report
  2. Subscribe to the report substitution event to replace the base report with your copy
  3. Manually merge any changes Microsoft makes to the base report in every cumulative update

This is fragile, error-prone, and creates maintenance headaches. Report extensions eliminate this entire workflow. One important detail: there is no extension of the layout itself, but you can switch the layout — so you make a copy of the layout and register it as a custom report layout. Combined with the data set and request page extensions, this makes the system significantly more reliable and developers significantly happier.

For reference, here’s what a basic AL extension project looks like — the foundation upon which these new report extension capabilities will build:

// app.json (project configuration)
{
  "id": "27b30fa5-54ff-41af-9ef5-bcd41dfc5377",
  "name": "WhatsNewinBC25",
  "publisher": "Default Publisher",
  "version": "1.0.0.0",
  "platform": "1.0.0.0",
  "application": "25.0.0.0",
  "idRanges": [
    {
      "from": 50100,
      "to": 50149
    }
  ],
  "runtime": "14.1",
  "features": [
    "NoImplicitWith"
  ]
}
// A simple page extension example
namespace DefaultPublisher.WhatsNewinBC25;

using Microsoft.Sales.Customer;

pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
    trigger OnOpenPage();
    begin

    end;
}

With version 18, the same extension pattern that works for pages (as shown above) will become available for reports — allowing developers to extend report data sets and request pages without copying the entire report object.

Onboarding

Onboarding is always a big deal — how to get users onto the system, help them figure out setup and daily workflows, and reduce the learning curve. Erik acknowledges that Business Central is not as easy to onboard for new users as it should be (some people have even written books to help). He welcomes any effort to make onboarding easier and is glad to see it receiving significant focus in this wave, even though there’s still lots of room for improvement.

Conclusion

Business Central 2021 Wave 1 brings a solid mix of improvements across the board. The standout features are dimension corrections (the killer feature for users), report extensions (the killer feature for developers), and meaningful application improvements like bank reconciliation enhancements and simplified bank statement imports. The addition of four new app-based country localizations shows the right direction for the platform’s international growth. Erik expects more features to be announced as the wave progresses, and plans to do a deep dive into the actual AL language additions once the development bits become publicly available.

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