Business Central offers so many different avenues to discover and exploring several areas of the system at a time could be a great help! Let’s take a look at some very specific aspects of Business Central that you might not be aware of and see how they can help you.
The ‘bookmark’ feature
The role center was a new feature to Business Central. With it came elaborate visualisations of your data, highlights on a changeable time scale and quick access to your most valued areas of the system. This last perk is the one I am going to touch on here.
Perhaps you are a member of the sales team and each time you log on, you want to visit the sales orders page, well using the ‘bookmark’ feature, you can. Below, you can see the graphic used to display it on the screen.
In the right-hand corner of the pages, there’s this highlighted icon. When clicked, this will change colour, and then the page you are currently on will be on the main role center at the top, just below the company name.
The ‘pin’ feature
In a similar vein, instead of pinning pages to the home page, you can pin sub-menu’s. What this does is keep these open so that each time you view the page, you won’t have to remember which drop-down button to press in order for all the buttons in the sub-menu to remain visible.
As these images show, these sub-menu options will remain visible without the need to click on the buttons above. Each time you visit this page now, the sub-menu for the default option will be underneath the main set of buttons. For customers, contacts and items, the sub-menu button displayed by default will be the option to make a new record.
Page personalisation
Personalisation is, as the name suggests, the ability to customise the layouts of pages within Business Central. Clicking on the settings cog on the right hand side of the page will open several options, the first of which is ‘personalise’.
Here we see the ‘+ field’ icon on the left side. This allows us to add additional fields to the page we are on. Users can add, remove, hide or move fields on a page to make it to their own liking. This can be very useful for the role centre generally, as it makes navigating the system more efficient. You can have the information you want available on the screen as well as using the bookmarks. The most prominent area where users will look to use this feature is on the role centre where the user can click into specific areas and make amendments as they see fit. This could be adding fields as previously mentioned or showing or hiding particular graphics. This can be especially useful for purchase or sales orders. For example, adding a variant column.
Page inspection
In the right hand side of the screen, we can see a question mark. If you click on it, you can go into the ‘help & support’ and from here ‘inspect pages and data’. This allows you to see every field on that particular page. This can be a useful tool as there are often fields at play within Business Central that aren’t displayed on the screen. This tool enables you to understand, for example, why a transaction won’t post, by showing data that isn’t initially shown on the screen.
The ‘privacy blocked’ field
This next Business Central tip is a short one, but perhaps one of the more nuanced features in this article. The ‘privacy blocked’ feature is for those users who don’t wish to have their data processed. This feature does exactly that. To reach this, visit the relevant customer card. From here, click ‘show more’ on the ‘general’ fast tab. Then just click on the slider to enable it. This will block marketing towards the relevant customer. It’s worth noting this feature is GDPR compliant.
Document sending profiles
This is a very simple task that will be very beneficial in providing customers and vendors with documents in the way they want them. This allows you to set the default method of sending documents to customers. In the search bar, search for ‘document sending profiles’ and click on the result within the ‘pages and tasks’ category.
In order to go about making new document sending profiles, click ‘new’ and fill in the ‘code’ and ‘description’. Clicking on the checkbox will allow you to set this as a default method of communication. If you don’t, it will simply use the default method that the system had in place beforehand. It may be that you want this default method for all your customers and vendors and so once you have set it, that’s it! From here you can choose the sending options in the fast tab below. For the email and printer settings, you can either click to have default settings or to be prompted every time you use them. It may be that you want this default method for all your customers and vendors and so once you have set it, that’s it!
Where you want specific variations for document sending for different clients, you create a method and then assign this to a customer. To do this, click onto the particular customer card you wish to have this applied to and within the general fast tab, you should have the option to select the document sending profile. You may have to click ‘show more’ in order to see this field!
Future Business Central tips
Hopefully there’s something new in there for everyone! If you have anything you’d like to see us talk about or have any tips of your own you’d like to share, get in contact with us by clicking here.