The Role Centre was a feature added in the first added in NAV 2009. It’s your gateway to the pages important to you. It’s an extremely flexible homepage for users to use how they wish, designed to save you time and give you the analytics relevant to you.
By Role or by User
The Role Centre can be tailored for a Role or for individuals. The main advantage of doing it for Role is that, by giving a group the same features, it smooths the learning curve. People will be able to find out different features and help each other become accustomed to it. It also reduces the risk of people adding fields and links to their role centre which exceed their authority which is defined within Permissions.
To edit the Role Centre for everyone designated to that Role, follow these steps:
- Go to the ‘Profiles (Roles)’ page
- Click on the Profile you wish to edit
- Click ‘Customise Pages’
- A new tab will be opened
- You can personalise the Page as you wish. Just check the top-left corner to make sure you are working on a Role basis and not by individual user
- Once you have finished, click ‘done’ and then proceed to close the tab
If you have Role Centres tailored to individual Users, it has the bonus of being completely tailored to that person’s needs. Furthermore, as that individual will have been the designer for these changes, it means they’ll be fully aware of what’s where. They’ll have full authority of doing their role in the most efficient way possible. The difficulty with using a standard Role Centre template is that, well, it is a template. No business is the same, and a business manager in one business may have entirely different responsibilities to another. The appearance of a Role Centre template won’t cater to that without personalisation.
For any changes specific to yourself and not an entire role, don’t make them from the ‘Profiles (Roles)’ page. We will next look at what changes you can make.
Bookmarks
Underneath the company name you are in, are various links. These take you to pages within the system or provide shortcuts to performing actions. To add another one, go to the page in question. Following this, in the top-right corner of the page there should be several icons. One of those is the bookmark. By clicking this, you will add the page to your Role Centre. In this example, I used the Work Centres page. See below:
To clarify, this works by User and by Role, depending on if you do it through the Profiles (Roles) page or not.
Personalisation
When it comes to changing layouts of pages within Business Central, Personalisation is your best friend. This lets you define which fields appear where and which are removed from sight. For instance, strip out the page links and visuals unrelated to your role.
On the large scale, entire sections can be moved or hidden.
Equally, individual fields can be moved, hidden or added. If you see below, several fields can be added to the page that aren’t there by default. Different parts of the page will have fields catered to that area available to add. Within each highlighted section (red square), fields are specifically tailored. Not all sections will have additional fields to add but it grants flexibility. If you decide to ‘hide’ fields, then those removed will subsequently be found in this ‘add fields to page’ section. As a result of these changes, you can begin to make the Role Centre as personal to you and your team as possible!
Charts, graphs and Power BI
One of the benefits of the Role Centre is its ability to display data in varying forms. By default, pie charts and graphs can be employed to display data. Additionally, Power BI can be linked to Business Central. Power BI is one of four members of the Microsoft Power Platform and is an app designed to display data sets with advanced reporting tools; there’s a plethora of ways to share your insights. To see whether Power BI is already available to you, check which applications you currently have: https://myapplications.microsoft.com/
If you don’t currently have Power BI, there should be a link towards the bottom of the Role Centre:
Below is an example of a Power BI dashboard, just to give you some familiarisation with the tool.
I hope this has triggered a few lightbulbs and given you an idea of how you can modify role centres for you or your colleagues, to make the system a more efficient environment. If you have any questions, please get in contact with us.