Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Reviews

We are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for Microsoft Excel to track all business-related data.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is its ease of use, data customization, and smooth integration.

There are some aspects of the solution that is complex.

I have been using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for approximately three months.

The stability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is great. There is always a potential security issue. 

I rate the stability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central a nine out of ten.

The solution is highly scalable.

We have approximately one or two people using the solution in my organization.

I have not used the vendor's support.

I have not used a solution similar to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The initial setup is simple. We did the implementation for the complete solution within one month.

The price of the solution could be reduced to improve their offering.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central a nine out of ten.

Microsoft Dynamics is primarily used in financial or service companies. It isn't suitable for manufacturing. 

I like Microsoft Dynamics' simplicity. The interface is excellent, and it's a highly mature product. You can hardly find any bugs in the product. 

The Microsoft brand is also crucial. When you pitch this solution, customers know Microsoft and understand the advantage of native integration between Microsoft products and MS Dynamics Business Central. Another thing is customization. We can easily build a custom solution if somebody wants one.

Microsoft Dynamics is higly stable.  It's a mature product, so there aren't any bugs.

I wouldn't say that Microsoft Dynamics is very scalable.  

Microsoft provides the tech support, so there aren't any problems. 

Installation is on the cloud. Microsoft provides it, so I don't have to deal with the installation.

Licensing is okay. License subscription prices are okay.

My overall rating for Microsoft Dynamics NAV is five or six out of 10. Some things are good, and a few things are bad. 

It's an ERP solution, so it integrates our departments for production planning.

It's quite useful for our production line, and it's easy to configure to our requirements.

I would like to have more frequent updates.

I have used this solution for eight years.

The stability is fine.

We haven't seen any problems with the scalability.

If we have any concerns, we escalate to our IT team.

Setup is straightforward.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

I primarily use this solution for internal financial accounting.

The most valuable feature is that it's completely stacked with Microsoft solutions like PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. That is the best DNA, which Microsoft offers you while using the solution.

In the next release, I would like to see a quality check module - Navision doesn't have one, and the industry very much requires it.

I've been using Dynamics NAV for the last twelve years.

Dynamics NAV is very scalable.

The initial setup is easy - because it stands on Microsoft offerings, it's simple and intuitive to use.

I would rate the pricing of this solution at three out of five.

From a Navision standpoint, I think Dynamics NAV is very versatile and competitive compared to its competitors. I don't think there's any improvement needed on the Navision side. Microsoft offers a complete end-to-end solution for organizations of all statuses and sizes. I would rate Dynamics NAV nine out of ten.

We are into pension funds administration. Our core function involves onboarding of clients, management pension funds and remittance of client pensions when they meet the criteria set out for disbursement. The management process of pension funds involves collection of clients monthly pension contributions and investing the asset to generate additional value for our clients and this is where MS Navision comes into the picture.

We essentially use MS Navision as our backend ERP system being used in managing all the records and potential costumer requests. However, we use a different system in managing our investment booking process.  

Invariably, there is a handshake between our MS NAV system and investment solution which helps to create the unitization process and generation of fund price.

It helps to automate the management and processing of clients funds

One of the reasons why NAV was best suited for us was the fact that it was customizable. All the functions aren't off-the-shelf. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We're actively looking at migrating to Business Central by the end of the year. This is due to the fact that support for the solution would have ended. MS Business Central is Microsoft's replacement to MS NAV which would reached it's end of life this year.

It would be nice if the integration process was much easier.

I don't see any reason why Microsoft can't use a standard Microsoft development environment  to develop it. It makes it hard for my development team to create additional module using another development language C/side

We've been using NAV for more than 10 years. We even upgraded from the 2015 to 2017 model. We have been using the product for a very long time at this point.

The solution is quite stable. We have no complaints. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable.

The product is quite scalable. If a company wants to expand it, it can do so.

Technical support has been good over the time. However, Microsoft is ending support in June of this year, which is why we need to move away from the product.

There are two things to keep in mind with the initial setup. The installation is different from customization. Installing NAV is pretty easy, however, as a customer, we have to get a Microsoft partner to help us build the models that we want to have on it, which leads to additional costs. That said, in terms of installing it, it's pretty straightforward.

In order to get the solution to suit our environment, it took us six months to deploy the a fully functional solution.

We do need the assistance of a Microsoft partner to help us customize certain models.

There are additional costs involved due to the fact that you need Microsoft partners to help build out specific modules that are not out of the box.

Microsoft is stopping support for NAV this year, which is why we are planning to migrate to Business Central. We expect it to have good technical support and also easy to use. Most  likely, the solution will be similar, so that we don't need a lot of training on the new system before or after migration.

While I would normally recommend the solution to other organizations, the problem right now is that the product is no longer being supported by the OEM. 

I would suggest that organizations planning to move to MS NAV should focus on MS Business central instead.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Microsoft products are very good in general. This product is flexible, easy to use, intuitive, and has good capabilities. The solution does well in India because of the solid brand Microsoft has created.

The solution is not best suited for larger-scale businesses. The features are lacking, there could be more add ons available. There are some other areas that are lacking but there are separate solutions for those other areas not covered in this solution. For example, field services and CRM are in Dynamic 365 and there is no BI feature but there a separate application for that called Power BI.

I would like to see some project related feature in upcoming releases of the application. Some companies are professional service companies and they can also be project-based. Having some projects features would be helpful. If they are not including manufacturing, then at least they can add features for project-based companies.

I have been using this solution for 13 years.

We had some issues with the stability with NAV2016. There were times when it would crash when we were doing a high amount of data entry.

The solution is best suited for small businesses especially those offering services and distribution.

There has not been an updated version of this solution since NAV2016 here in India. Microsoft is releasing the replacement on April 1st, 2021 called Business Central and we already have many customers that are going to migrate.

The installation is easy.

We did the implementation of the solution.

I have some subscription-based customer and a few customers who have perpetual licenses that hosted the application on the cloud.

If I was going to rate the solution in terms of global positive effectiveness, I would give it an eight out of ten. However, if I was going to rate it out of the sum of features and functionality, then I would rate it a four or five. 

Overall, I rate Microsoft Dynamics NAV a six out of ten.

We have the standard NAV and we also have a vertical that's developed for the auto dealership business industry. Both of them are based NAV but the vertical is also based on Dynamics NAV. It has simplified a lot of the issues in product selections and the like. The reseller is certified on their platforms, and we obviously use the product. We have quite a strong partnership with Microsoft.

The solution is very well integrated and doesn't require a lot of work in that respect. We're happy with it. One of the advantages is that, for example, the vertical covers all aspects of the functionality for the various areas of operations and integrates easily with the existing office products, BI, and CRM. On top of that, there are a lot of resources available for this platform to do whatever integration is required. Essentially, we use the SharePoint product, Offices 365, the mail, all are well integrated. On top of that, there are a few other functionalities that could be coming out on Office 365 which would help us to improve our processes. 

Because the platform is open, the ERP is open. Sometimes we have to do a few customizations for improving our internal processes which we do that as we go along, we've got all the GDPR things in there. It covers a lot of the aspects that we need to manage. An improvement would be the customizations that we do tend to limit by adapting our processes to the software. I'd say we'd be adapting around 60-70% and customizations would be around 30%. We don't want to diverge a lot from the standard version.

We have to deal with a lot of audit issues coming from various places which is a time-consuming process. Auditors like to see who has got permissions for this and that. That's a bit of a hassle to get it out, but we do it. It's not the functional side that's an issue.

I'd like to see the ability to address certain queries simplified. Not operational queries, but business issue queries, from the perspective of somebody who's managing the software.

I've been using this solution for around 14 years. 

It's quite a stable product. 

What we consider as a large customer here, or a large base here in Mauritius would be considered small in other countries. We've scaled up to about 700 users or so and it's scaled pretty well. We started with like 150 or 200, now we are 700, but it scaled quite well. No big issues there. We have plans for expansion in the future. We have four engineers trained on the software to deal with all support issues. 

We don't interact directly with Microsoft for support. We go through our service provider. If you look at the Microsoft model, Microsoft or our vertical company does the software, and then they deploy it for partners. We go to those partners. We've been with them for around 14 years and support has been quite good the whole time.

No, it's not complex. Microsoft has done a lot since our first version in 2006, we don't have to do any major upgrades anymore. It doesn't take like three days to do an upgrade. Now it's a very simple process that takes about half a day to move to a new version. So they've broken down the upgrade process into chunks that we receive every three months or every four months. So in terms of manageability is much better. We don't have to do a big upgrade project anymore. They've done a lot of work on this for the past years, and it's now very easy to do things in there, to do those projects.

If we require customization, we go to the service provider. We also have project managers on the side who come up with various options and solutions. Then it goes through a certification process. If customization is required, we go to our service provider, who is certified to change the system. So we don't do any development as such.

Our plan is to move most of our workload to the cloud, so we've been concentrating on Office 365 for the past couple of years. We're nearly there, but there are still a few things to move over. After that, we will be looking at an Azure infrastructure for the ERPs. The coronavirus has accelerated the move.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement.

Usability and UX/UI functionality. These features make implementation of projects much simpler. It allows smoother adoption of the new system and processes.

NAV supports inter-company activities for two areas: Finance and orders.

• The finance part allows creating intercompany journals and intercompany buy/sell invoices.
• The orders part allows creating and transferring intercompany purchase/sales orders. The operation is semi-manual.

• Inter-company functionality: Relatively shallow and mostly manual
• Alerts: Many customers are required to define system generated alerts. These are based on data changes and due dates by the user as personalization. This function does not exist.
• One has to send the inter-company document to the outbox, process the outbox at the receiving company, process the inbox, and then create the document. This process is somewhat long and requires several steps.
• The system does not support the synchronizing of modifications and bi-directional updates.
• The most significant issue is the lack of the inter-company logistic functionality. It is not possible to send/receive shipping documents, serial numbers, and lot numbers.
• Users require the ability to define alert rules that will trigger the receipt of alerts from the system if the alert condition is met. For example, if a customer's balance exceeds USD10,000, then send me a notification. The "big brother" Dynamics AX, does have this functionality, and it is very useful.

I have been working with Dynamics NAV for four years.

I have not seen any stability issues. My projects were based on 0 to 150 users and there were no such problems.

The ease of the initial setup, data conversion, and rapid start are the strengths of this solution.

Do not compromise on the level of the consultants to reduce costs. Skilled staff will do things better and faster.

Minimize customizations and maintain a solid change management plan.