You paid for an ERP so that everything would be in one place. The general ledger, sales and purchase orders, inventory, every dimension your finance team dreamt up, the custom tables your implementation partner built for the way your business actually works. It is all in Dynamics 365 Business Central. And you still cannot ask it a question.
Getting a number out means finding the one person who knows where it lives. Getting a new number out means a change request, a partner ticket, and a wait measured in days. We run a Business Central AI assistant that lets the people who need the number ask for it in plain English, from Teams, and get it from the live system with the entries behind it. This post covers what that looks like, where it differs from Copilot, and why your custom tables are the part worth caring about.
Business Central customers are, by definition, businesses that outgrew MYOB or Xero. Wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, importers. They have a Microsoft partner, a Power BI licence they half use, and a finance team that has learnt not to ask for report changes unless it really matters.
The data is fine. The structure is fine. The problem is that the only people who can reach it are the two or three who know the schema, and they are busy. So the operations manager who wants to know what moved out of the Welshpool warehouse last month asks the finance manager, who asks the partner, who quotes four hours. By the time the report arrives the question has changed.
Power BI was meant to fix this. For the dashboards someone had time to build, it did. For everything else, and everything else is most things, the queue is still there.
Microsoft is building Copilot into Business Central, and it is worth being straight about that rather than pretending it does not exist. For the tasks Microsoft has built it for, it is useful, and it will get more useful.
The limit is that Copilot is bounded by what Microsoft builds. It works on the standard tables and the standard scenarios. It will not join your custom contract pricing table to your shortcut dimensions because your business needs that particular view. It cannot, and it is not meant to. Microsoft builds for every Business Central customer at once. Your partner built your environment for you.
That gap, between what the product ships and what your business specifically does, is where we sit. It is a fair, non-defensive thing to say, and we would rather say it than make claims about replacing Copilot that nobody should believe.
We connect Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to your Business Central environment through an open standard called the Model Context Protocol. Claude reads from BC in response to a question typed in ordinary English, and with your approval it can prepare records for posting. It runs in Microsoft Teams or in the Claude app, so nobody logs into a new system.
Three things about how it is built matter more than any list of features.
It reads the live environment. Not a nightly extract into a warehouse. The purchase invoice that landed at 2pm is in the 2:05pm answer.
It acts as you. The connection carries your Business Central permissions. If you can see two of the group’s five companies, that is what you can ask about. Nobody gets a pooled copy of every entity because they opened a chat window.
It discovers your schema. This is the one to pay attention to. The custom tables and fields your partner built are found from your own environment, not from a fixed list we ship and hope matches. If your partner built it, you can ask about it. More on that below, because it is the single biggest reason this works where generic tools do not.
The managed AI service around it handles the connector, the permission model, the logging of every question, and the tuning against your data. That last part is most of the work.
These are working examples, grouped the way a finance and operations team actually thinks.
“What did we spend on freight in July, by site?”
General ledger entries filtered by date, account and dimension, including the shortcut dimensions that normally need a Power BI project to see. Totals, and the entries behind them, with links back to BC.
“Show me the trial balance movement this month against last.”
“Which accounts moved more than 20% versus the same month last year?”
That second one is the month-end question every finance manager asks and answers by exporting two trial balances into Excel. It is one sentence now.
“Who owes us the most, and how old is it?”
“Show me every sales invoice for Acme this year, with the lines.”
“What is our average days-to-pay by customer group?”
Sales invoices, orders, quotes, credit memos and shipments, with their line items, customer balances and payment history.
“What have we got on order from this supplier that has not arrived?”
“Which purchase invoices are sitting unposted?”
“What moved out of the Welshpool warehouse last month?”
“Which items have not moved in six months and what are they worth?”
“Show me stock on hand by location for everything in this category.”
Item ledger entries, variants, categories and locations. The movement questions that are painful to assemble by hand, and that every distributor needs answered more often than they ask.
Every Business Central implementation has custom tables and fields. A contract pricing table for a key account. A compliance field on the item card. A rebate structure nobody outside your industry would recognise. Your partner built them because the standard product did not do what you needed, and they are usually invisible to reporting tools without a project to expose them.
“What is in our contract pricing table for this customer?”
The assistant finds those tables from your environment and answers from them. Business Central custom table reporting stops being a partner engagement and becomes a question. For most of the businesses we talk to, this is where the real money is, because the custom tables are where the business logic that makes them different actually lives.
“Compare margin by product group across both entities this quarter.”
Business Central environments usually hold several legal entities. If you are entitled to see them, you can ask across them. And if a question is ambiguous about which company you mean, it asks rather than guessing.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The wrong company returns an empty result, and an empty result reads exactly like a real but quiet month. An assistant that guesses will occasionally tell you, with total confidence, that you sold nothing. Ours stops and asks.
A reporting tool tells you the supplier’s invoice does not match the purchase order. Then someone opens BC and does the work. The assistant does that part too, but it stops at the point that matters.
“Raise a purchase order for 200 of these from the usual supplier.”
“Update the contact on this customer record.”
“Create the sales order from this email and show it to me before it goes in.”
Changes are prepared and shown for approval first. Nothing posts to the ledger without a person confirming it. We say this plainly because it is the only basis on which a finance team will ever agree to let an AI near their ERP, and they are right to insist on it. The value is in having the order built and checked, not in removing the person who approves it.
Business Central is the system of record, which means almost every question worth real money involves something sitting beside it. Email. SharePoint. The web store. The CRM. Answering those questions today means a person with three windows open and a spreadsheet.
The classic accounts payable job, and one of the most universally disliked.
“This supplier has emailed their invoice. Match it against the purchase order and the goods receipt, and tell me if it is right before I approve it.”
“Go through the AP inbox and tell me which invoices are already in BC, which are new, and which do not match anything.”
The assistant reads the inbox, reads BC, and reports the exceptions. The accounts payable clerk approves the matches and investigates the rest. An afternoon becomes twenty minutes, and the errors that used to slip through because everyone was tired by invoice forty get caught.
“Take last month’s GL movement by dimension and build the board pack in PowerPoint with our branding.”
“Put the stock movement analysis into a workbook and save it to the finance site.”
Assembling the board pack is a real, recurring job that nobody enjoys, and it demonstrates extremely well to a CFO. The numbers come from BC, the template and branding come from SharePoint, and the deck lands where the board expects to find it. Someone still reads it before it goes out. They just do not spend Tuesday building it.
“Which web orders from the weekend have not been fulfilled, and have we got the stock?”
“Which opportunities marked as won in the CRM do not have an order in BC yet?”
“This customer is asking for a credit limit increase. What is their actual payment history and what is currently on order?”
“Which jobs have been completed operationally but not invoiced in BC?”
That last one applies to any business running a separate job, warehouse or logistics system beside their ERP. Work finished but not billed is money sitting on the floor, and it is invisible unless someone checks both systems.
The Microsoft 365 side of all this, meaning email, Teams, SharePoint, Excel and PowerPoint, runs today alongside Business Central. Web stores, CRMs and operational systems vary by business; where yours is not already connected, it is a build rather than a blocker, and once it is on, questions that span it work without a project.
Connecting an AI model to Business Central is not hard any more. The standards are open, the API is documented, and a competent developer can have something answering questions in a week.
What takes the work is that every ERP has places where the data quietly misleads. A dimension that was restructured two years ago, so older entries carry codes nobody uses. A posting group that half the team applies one way. A location that was closed but still has stock against it. Item categories that look like reference data and have not been maintained since go-live.
Point a generic AI at that and ask what you spent on freight in July, and you will get a confident, specific, wrong number. It will look completely reasonable. Nobody will check, because not having to check was the point.
Making a Business Central AI assistant trustworthy means measuring the data against itself, writing down where it misleads, and building those traps into how questions get answered. When ours reports a dimension total, it says whether entries with a missing dimension were excluded. When it reports stock on hand, it tells you if a closed location still holds quantity. That is what a client is paying an integration specialist for, and it is precisely what Copilot or a generic connector cannot do, because neither of them knows your business.
If you implement Business Central for a living, you are probably not an AI integration shop, and you probably have clients asking about it. We are not an ERP partner and have no interest in becoming one. What we do is make an existing Business Central investment answerable in plain English, on top of the environment you built. That is a complementary service, and several of our conversations in this area have started with a partner referral. If you would like to talk about what that looks like for your clients, we are easy to find.
Wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and importers running Business Central, generally with somewhere between 20 and 300 staff, a finance team of a few people, and an operations side that has given up asking for reports. Businesses with custom tables that matter, more than one legal entity, or an AP inbox that eats a day a week.
We are a Perth managed IT provider and we deliver this hands-on, so WA businesses are who we work with most. The connector does not care where you are. If you run Business Central in Melbourne and the questions above are your questions, talk to us and we will tell you plainly whether we can deliver it well. Our virtual CIO clients tend to see this as part of a broader question about what their Microsoft investment should be doing for them, and that is a reasonable way to frame it.
List the reports you have stopped asking for. Every finance team has a mental list of numbers they would like monthly but do not request because the change process is too slow. Write them down. That list is the brief, and it usually surprises the person who writes it.
Find your custom tables. Ask your partner, or whoever knows, which tables and fields were built specifically for your business. Those are the ones no off-the-shelf tool will ever report on, and they are where your business logic lives. If nobody can produce the list, that is worth knowing too.
Watch it answer one of your questions. We have a working demonstration against a realistic Business Central environment with custom tables and multiple companies. Bring your list, pick one, and see the answer with the entries behind it. Twenty minutes, no commitment. Contact us on 1300 EPIC IT or through the contact page.
Yes. A Business Central AI assistant connects an AI model such as Claude to your live Business Central environment so you can ask questions in plain English and get answers with the ledger entries behind them. Ours runs in Microsoft Teams, respects each user’s BC permissions, and links every answer back to the source records.
Partly. Copilot in Business Central is useful for the standard scenarios Microsoft has built it for. It does not report across the custom tables and fields your partner built for your business, and it does not join your data to email, SharePoint or other systems. A Business Central AI assistant built for your environment covers that gap. The two are complementary rather than competing.
Yes. Power BI is the right tool for standing dashboards. Most of the questions a finance or operations team actually asks are one-off, and a Business Central AI assistant answers those directly from the live system without building a report first. Many businesses use both.
Yes, and this is the main reason it works where generic tools do not. The assistant discovers the custom tables and fields in your own Business Central environment, including shortcut dimensions, rather than working from a fixed list. If your partner built it, you can ask about it.
It depends on how the connection is built. Ours reads the live system as the person asking, so each user sees only what their Business Central permissions allow. Every question is logged. Nothing posts to the ledger without a person approving it. Ask any provider to explain those three points before agreeing to anything.
Yes. We are not an ERP implementation partner and do not compete with them. We make an existing Business Central environment answerable in plain English, on top of what the partner built. Several of our engagements have come through partner referrals.
