In this video, I got through the list of improvements for BC 2022 Wave 1 and give you my opinion on them, let me know if you agree with me:
In this video, Erik reviews Microsoft’s release plans for Business Central 2022 Wave 1 (version 20), covering the full list of planned features across application improvements, development tools, governance, reporting, and more. He shares his opinions on what’s exciting, what’s overdue, and what might be controversial.
Understanding the Concept of a “Wave”
Before diving into the features, Erik clarifies an important concept that often causes confusion: what Microsoft means by a “wave.” A wave is a six-month plan — in this case, running from April through the end of September 2022. Just because version 20 drops on April 1st doesn’t mean every announced feature ships on that date. Features may arrive in version 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, and so on throughout the wave period.
This is a common source of confusion. People see Microsoft announce a feature for a particular wave, expect it in the initial release, and then feel misled when it arrives in a minor update later. But that’s the nature of cloud software delivery — and it’s how waves work.
Application Improvements — The Longest List in a While
Erik is particularly pleased that the application section is the longest on the list this time around. He notes that while the platform, language, and developer tooling have received a lot of attention over recent releases, the actual business application hasn’t evolved as much. With a great platform now in place, it’s time to use it to improve the accounting and business functionality — which is why customers are here in the first place.
Key application features include:
- Blocking deletion of G/L accounts
- Allow sell-to and bill-to customers to be different for jobs
- Bank reconciliation improvements
- Change default company bank accounts on sales and service documents
- Check documents and journals in background — As you create documents, Business Central will validate them in the background (rather than waiting until posting), with a FactBox showing current issues. This is a feature management opt-in, and Erik thinks it’s a great use of background task capabilities.
- Consolidated customer/vendor balances — A very old ask. When the same entity is both a customer and a vendor, you need to see combined balances. Should you pay a vendor who also owes you money as a customer? Erik recalls first building this customization in the mid-90s, so it’s a very welcome addition after decades of requests.
- Fixed quantity in production bills of materials
- Improved and extensible “Adjust Exchange Rate” batch job
CRM Integration: Mapping to Dataverse Option Sets Without Code
Erik highlights this as one of the bigger items on the list, noting that the key phrase is the last two words: “without code.” Currently, payment terms, freight terms, and shipping agents are hard-coded when replicating between Dynamics CE/Sales and Business Central. You’re stuck with a fixed set of option values baked into the CRM schema.
Up to version 19, the only workaround was to create a table extension to extend the enum values, install the extension, run the replication once so the system could discover the new option values — and it was, as Erik puts it, “a mess.” The ability to do this without code is a welcome change, both for developers who can retire those workarounds and for customers who can manage this themselves.
The Shopify Connector Controversy
Microsoft’s announcement of a first-party Shopify connector is one of the more controversial items. There are already multiple Shopify connectors on AppSource, and some ISVs feel that Microsoft is essentially copying their apps and killing their business in the process.
Erik acknowledges it’s a delicate balancing act. You can’t claim that putting an app on AppSource should prevent Microsoft from ever entering that space — after all, there are roughly seven Shopify connectors already, so why shouldn’t Microsoft also build one? On the other hand, there’s a real concern about the platform owner competing with its ecosystem.
Erik also notes that historically, when Microsoft enters an area like this, they sometimes “truly underperform,” so there may well still be a strong market for existing connectors that simply do it better. He plans to cover this topic in a dedicated video.
Bank Integration — Playing Catch-Up
Erik is blunt about the state of bank integration in North America: it’s “terrible” and “almost embarrassing.” Business Central is so far behind competitors — including products that cost $50/month — that bank integration feels like “the stone age.” The planned improvements to standardize the bank reconciliation process are much needed, but Microsoft is clearly playing catch-up here.
Other Application Items
- Support for inventory pick and warehouse pick for jobs
- Synchronizing sales quotes and orders bidirectionally between Business Central and CRM
- Using different G/L accounts for A/R and A/P transactions (for scenarios like bad debts)
- More control over default posting
- New UI for demand forecaster with support for variant codes
- Payment reconciliation journal improvements
- Report selection for projects
- Set default dimensions on locations
Better with Microsoft 365
This section is relatively short, with two main items:
- Better Teams integration — Erik already has three videos on Teams integration and plans a follow-up.
- Outlook add-in: attach files from emails directly to Business Central documents — Erik notes that BC’s built-in document attachment handling is “really bad,” which is actually good news for his SharePoint Connector app. He plans to investigate whether he can hook into this new capability to route attachments to SharePoint.
Development
The development section is notably short this wave, with the following highlights:
Auto-Deploy Dependent Projects in Multi-Root Workspaces
Erik explains that he has deliberately avoided using multi-root workspaces in VS Code because of this exact limitation. When you have multiple dependent projects, deploying one doesn’t auto-deploy its dependencies — you have to manually manage deployment order. This is very “old-fashioned” compared to how Visual Studio handles multi-project C#/.NET solutions. He’s looking forward to this improvement and plans to make a video about it.
Inline Performance Profiler
The existing profiler requires snapshots and debugging workflows. The new inline profiler lets you profile directly from within the client, which is much more convenient.
Other Development Items
- Demo tools and demo data for manufacturing scenarios — Erik questions why this is in the development section rather than being categorized as demo data.
- AL Go for GitHub — Templates for setting up CI/CD pipelines on GitHub, complementing existing Azure DevOps tooling.
- Telemetry: company name as custom dimension in log messages
- Export report dataset to XML from code — The “export dataset to Excel with no layout” feature was added around version 18, but it couldn’t be called from code, which was a strange limitation. Now it can.
Erik notes there’s essentially nothing new from a language perspective in this wave, but he plans to do his usual comparison of the new compiler against the old version to look for hidden changes not mentioned in the release plan.
For reference, here’s a simple AL extension showing some of the current language capabilities — page extensions, triggers, labels, and type conversions:
pageextension 50100 CustomerListExt extends "Customer List"
{
actions
{
addfirst(processing)
{
action("Open the bank Statement here Sheryl!")
{
RunObject = page "Bank Account Statement";
ApplicationArea = all;
}
}
}
trigger OnOpenPage();
var
s: Text;
d: Decimal;
l: Label 'Hello YouTube';
da: Date;
dt: DateTime;
begin
s := 'INVOICE1000';
s := l.
d := 123.456;
da := today();
dt := CurrentDateTime();
Message('%1 vs %2', d.ToText(), dt.ToText(true), format(dt, 0, 9));
end;
}Governance and Administration
Custom Managed Encryption Keys
Customers will be able to use their own encryption key from Azure Key Vault to encrypt their Business Central environment database at rest. Erik wonders whether this means full database encryption — which would be a significant improvement from a compliance perspective — but the description is vague enough that he’s “prepared to be disappointed.”
Lockbox Consent for Microsoft Support
Customers will be able to explicitly consent to Microsoft support accessing their data through a lockbox flow. Erik diplomatically notes that Microsoft support “is a complicated topic” with “certainly room for improvement.”
Default Permission Set Assignments for New Users
This addresses a real pain point. Currently, when you add a new user to your Azure AD, you can’t assign permissions in Business Central until they’ve logged in — because the user record doesn’t exist in BC yet. The user’s first experience is often an error about missing permissions, after which the admin assigns permissions, and the user has to log in again. This improvement should make that first-time experience much smoother.
Permission Set Handling Enhancements
Erik expresses a cautious hope here. Permissions have been a “constant source of support calls” in versions 18 and 19, and he sincerely hopes that Microsoft fixes the existing permission issues before building more on top of them.
Microsoft Power Platform
- Database data change events — Business Central virtual tables will emit data change events just like native Dataverse tables, enabling Power Automate triggers on insert, modify, and similar operations.
- Improvements to the Power Automate and Power Apps connector
Modern Clients (or Just… “Clients”)
Erik reiterates his recurring complaint: why is this still called “Modern Clients”? There’s no classic client anymore, no Windows client — this is the only client. It’s been around for at least four years and is no longer “modern.” The section title needs an update.
Planned improvements include:
- Copy link option in the Share menu — Page URLs aren’t easy for users to share, so this is a welcome addition.
- Progressive Web App replacing the Windows desktop app — The desktop app was always just a wrapper for the website anyway. Now the browser hosts the page instead of a standalone executable. No big deal, but it makes sense.
- Usability improvements — Including enhancements to the peek function (the popup when you click a customer on a posted invoice) and better scroll behavior when expanding FastTabs so the next tab’s caption remains visible.
Onboarding
- Context-aware links in the help pane — Erik appreciates this as a middle ground. Ancient versions of the product had context-aware help (press F1 and get relevant help), which was lost along the way. While Microsoft understandably can’t document every single field anymore, context-aware help links in the help pane seem like a good compromise.
- Guided help for finding settings and personalization tools
- Rich text support in teaching tips and tours — Bold, underline, links to other in-app entities from teaching tips.
Reporting — The Big One: Excel Layouts
Financial Reporting with Account Schedules
Account schedules are getting some love with features like landscape printing, control over showing zeros, category filtering, and support for 15 columns (enabling 12 months plus totals). Erik appreciates the improvements but makes an impassioned plea for Microsoft to rename the feature.
The name “Account Schedules” is, according to Erik, a translation mistake made 27-28 years ago. In Danish, the word for “sheet” and “schedule” (as in a school timetable) is the same. Someone translated the Danish word using the school-planner meaning, and it stuck. Nobody understands that “Account Schedules” is where you do financial reporting. Erik’s sincere hope: just call it “Financial Reporting” and be done with it.
Excel Report Layouts
This is the feature Erik is most excited about. The concept: you can use Excel to design report layouts, similar to how Word layouts work today. The report data gets exported to Excel as data tabs, and you design another sheet with your formatting and formulas. When Business Central generates the report, it regenerates the data sheet but preserves your designed sheet — producing custom Excel reports.
Erik confirms there will be dedicated videos on this feature.
Service and Platform
- Performance: database insights through virtual tables in the client
- More telemetry — Erik appreciates Microsoft’s continued investment in telemetry but raises a concern: telemetry should not become an excuse for poor UI. He specifically calls out AppSource submissions where failures just say “go look at telemetry” rather than surfacing the actual error messages. Telemetry is great, but it’s a double-edged sword if it replaces proper user-facing feedback.
Summary
Business Central 2022 Wave 1 is shaping up to be a strong release, particularly on the application side. The highlights include background document validation, consolidated customer/vendor balances, the Shopify connector (controversial as it may be), much-needed bank integration improvements, Excel report layouts, and various quality-of-life enhancements across permissions, onboarding, and the web client. The development tooling list is shorter than usual, but auto-deploying dependent projects and the inline profiler are welcome additions. Erik’s biggest hopes: that Microsoft fixes existing permission issues before building more, renames “Account Schedules” to “Financial Reporting,” and delivers real database encryption. His biggest concern: that telemetry doesn’t become a crutch for skipping proper UI work.
