Business Central is an integrated set of business applications designed to service a wide variety of business operations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP system. An ERP system integrates internal and external data across a variety of functional areas, including manufacturing, accounting, supply chain management, customer relationships, service operations, and human resource management, as well as the management of other valued resources and activities. By having many related applications well integrated, a fully-featured ERP system provides an enter data once, use many ways information processing toolset.

Business Central ERP addresses the following functional areas (and more):

• Basic accounting functions (for example, general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable)
• Order processing and inventory (for example, sales orders, purchase orders, shipping, inventory, and receiving)
• Relationship management (for example, vendors, customers, prospects, employees, and contractors)
• Planning (for example, MRP, sales forecasting, and production forecasting)
• Other critical business areas (for example, manufacturing, warehouse management, marketing, cash management, and fixed assets)

A good ERP system, such as Business Central, is modular in design, which simplifies implementation, upgrading, modification, integration with third-party products, and expansion for different types of clients. All the modules in the system share a common database and, where appropriate, common data.

The following groupings of individual Business Central functions are based on the Search menu structure, which is supplemented by information from Microsoft marketing materials. The important thing is to understand the overall components that make up the Business Central ERP system:

Business Central has a role tailored User Interface (UI). In Business Central, there are four instances of the role tailored client (RTC)—one each for Windows, web interaction, tablet use, and as a phone client. Generally the various clients are referred to for the most part based on where and how they are displayed (Windows, web, tablet, and so on).

At the foundation of any ERP system is financial management. Irrespective of the business, the money must be kept flowing with a track of it. Business Central's financial management module contains the tools that help to manage the capital resources of the business. These include all or part of the following application functions:

• General ledger, for managing the overall finances of the firm
• Cash management and banking, for managing the inventory of financial assets
• Accounts receivable, for tracking the incoming revenue
• Accounts payable, for tracking the outgoing funds
• Analytical accounting, for analyzing the various flows of funds
• Inventory and fixed assets, for managing inventories of goods and equipment
• Multicurrency and multilingual, for supporting international business activities

Business Central manufacturing is general-purpose enough to be appropriate for Make to Stock (MTS), Make to Order (MTO), and Assemble to Order (ATO), as well as various subsets and combinations of those. Although off-the-shelf Business Central is not particularly suitable for most process manufacturing and some of the very high-volume assembly line operations, there are third-party add-on and add-in enhancements available for those applications. As with most of the Business Central application functions, manufacturing can be implemented either in a basic mode or as a fully-featured system. Business Central manufacturing includes the following functions:

• Product design (BOMs and routings), for structure management of product components and the flow management of manufacturing processes
• Capacity and supply requirement planning, for tracking the intangible and tangible manufacturing resources
• Production scheduling (infinite and finite), execution, and tracking quantities and costs, plus tracking manufacturing resources' planned use, both on a constrained and unconstrained basis

Some of the functions that are categorized as part of Business Central supply chain management (SCM), such as sales and purchasing, are actively used in almost every Business Central implementation. The supply chain applications in Business Central include all or parts of the following applications:

• Sales order processing and pricing, to support the heart of every
  business
• Purchasing (including requisitions), for planning, entering, pricing, and processing purchase orders
• Inventory management, for managing inventories of goods and materials
• Warehouse management, including receiving and shipping, for managing the receipt, storage, retrieval, and shipment of material and goods in warehouses

As a whole, these functions constitute the base components of a system that's appropriate for distribution operations, including those that operate on an ATO basis.

Although Microsoft marketing materials identify business intelligence (BI) and reporting as though it were a separate module within Business Central, it's difficult to physically identify it as such. Most of the components that are used for BI and reporting purposes are (appropriately) scattered throughout various application areas. In the words of one Microsoft document, business intelligence is a strategy, not a product. Functions within Business Central that support a BI strategy include the following:

• Standard reports: Distributed and ready to use by end users
• Account schedules and analysis reports: A specialized report writer for general ledger data
• Query, XMLport, and report designers: Developer tools to support the creation of a wide variety of report formats, charts, and XML and CSV files
• Analysis by dimensions: A capability embedded in many of the other tools
• Interfaces into Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365, including Excel-communications of data either into Business Central or out of Business Central
• RDLC report viewer: Provides the ability to present Business Central data in a variety of textual and graphic formats, including user interactive capabilities

• Interface capabilities such as Dotnet interoperability and web services: Technologies to support interfaces between Business Central and external software products
• Standard packages for Power BI: Integrated in the role center as well as dashboards

Business Central's relationship management (RM) functionality is definitely the little sister (or, if you prefer, little brother) of the fully featured standalone Microsoft CRM system and Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The big advantage of Business Central RM is its tight integration with Business Central customer and sales data.

Also falling under the heading of the customer relationship module is the Business Central service management (SM) functionality. The different functionalities under RM and SM are as follows:

• Relationship management:
  • Marketing campaigns, to plan and manage promotions
  • Customer activity tracking, to analyze customer orders
  • To-do lists, to manage what is to be done and track what has been done
• Service management:
  • Service contracts, to support service operations
  • Labor and part consumption tracking, to track resources that are consumed by the service business
  • Planning and dispatching, to manage service calls

The Business Central human resources module is a very small module, but it relates to a critical component of the business: employees. Basic employee data can be stored and reported via the master table (in fact, you can use the human resources (HR) module to manage data about individual contractors in addition to employees). A wide variety of individual employee attributes can be tracked by the use of dimension fields:

• Employee tracking: Maintain basic employee description data
• Skills inventory: Inventory of the capabilities of employees

• Absence tracking: Maintain basic attendance information
• Employee statistics: Tracking government required employee attribute data such as age, gender, length of service

The Business Central project management module consists of the job functionality that's supported by the resources functionality. Projects can be short or long term. They can be external (in other words, billable) or internal. This module is often used by third parties as the base for vertical market add-ons (such as construction or job-oriented manufacturing). This application area includes parts or all of the following functions:

• Budgeting and cost tracking, for managing project finances
• Scheduling, for planning project activities
• Resource requirements and usage tracking, for managing people and equipment
• Project accounting, for tracking the results

From the point of view of a developer, Business Central consists of about almost six thousand potentially customizable, off-the-shelf program objects, plus the integrated development environment (IDE/Visual Studio Code) development tools that allow us to modify existing objects and create new ones.

Let's start with basic definitions of the Business Central object types:

• Table extension: Table extensions allow for the creation of companion tables that are linked to tables defined by Microsoft in the base product or by other solutions.
• Page customization: Page customizations allow controls in existing pages to be modified and moved. As they are primarily a tool for use by end users, they are outside the scope of this book.
• Page extension: Page extensions allow controls in existing pages to be added or hidden.

• Table: Tables serve both to define the data structure and to contain the data records.
• Page: Pages are the way data is formatted and displayed appropriately for each of the client types and user roles.
• Report: Reports are provided for the display of data to the user in hard copy format, either on-screen (preview mode) or via a printing device. Report objects can also update data in processes with or without data display.
• Codeunit: Codeunits are containers for code that's been utilized by other objects. Codeunits are always structured in code segments called procedures.
• Query: Queries support extracting data from one or more tables, making calculations, and outputting them in the form of a new data structure. Queries can output data directly into charts, Excel, XML, and OData. They can be used as an indirect source for pages and reports.
• XMLport: XMLports allow for the importing and exporting of data to/from external files. The external file structure can be in XML or other file formats.
• Profile: Profiles allow the definition of Role Centers and group page customizations.
• Control add-in: Control add-in objects allow the display of HTML5 visualizations based on data from Business Central. These objects can send back events that can be used to trigger additional code.

Business Central includes an extensive set of software development tools. The Business Central development tools are accessed through Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code includes the Application Language (AL) compiler extension. All Business Central programming uses AL.

The Visual Studio Code IDE is Microsoft's most popular code editor and is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. The images used in this book will be from Windows. You can download Visual Studio Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/:

When we open Visual Studio Code, we will see five icons. The icons appear on the left-hand side part of the screen. The icons determine the navigation part that appears on the left-hand side of your screen. If you click on an icon twice, the navigation part will be hidden and allow full screen code editing.

The EXPLORER view is the default view when you open a project. It allows you to view the files in a project and select one or more files for editing. The EXPLORER view is shown in the following screenshot:

The SEARCH view provides an advanced search and replace option within the files of your project. The SEARCH view is shown in the following screenshot:

Visual Studio Code provides access to a built-in connection to SOURCE CONTROL. When source control is activated, all changes that are made to files are automatically tracked and displayed in this window: