In Business Central, users have the ability to both personalise pages on behalf of themselves, and customise pages on behalf of a role. A role, like ‘Warehouse Employee’ or ‘Sales Order Processor’, would typically reflect a standardised configuration for multiple people. After assigning someone a customised role, users can still personalise pages. However, using permissions, you can prohibit access to pages, or prevent particular actions from being done. But if you aren’t limiting access at this level, you can instead view and alter the personalised or customised pages users have. Let’s take a look at how personalisation and customisation in Business Central works!

Personalisation in Business Central

When it comes to personalising your own Business Central, it’s simple to do. Click the settings cog in the top right-hand side corner. Next, click ‘Personalise’.

The Personalise action is accessible after clicking the settings cog in the top right-hand side corner of the screen.

After clicking this, you should see this on the left-hand side:

This allows you to add, move and remove fields. To add fields, click the ‘+ Field’ action. Next, drag the field you want to where you want it. A red marker should appear showing you where you’re aiming, before you let go. One thing to note is, sometimes it feels like fields aren’t showing when you think they should. Often, this is because the page you’re on has filters applied. Remove any filters and then the available fields should show.

If you’d like to move to remove a field that’s currently being displayed, click the little red triangle next to it. Remember, you can only do this after you have clicked ‘Personalise’.

When personalising pages, you can choose to 'Move' or 'Hide' fields. You can also choose to 'Set Freeze Pane', keeping the field displayed constantly on the screen.

The Set Freeze Pane action allows you to keep a field heading in place whilst you scroll across from left to right. This is a feature, often employed in Excel spreadsheets but is very useful in Business Central as well.

Personalising which field values show on closed tabs

Business Central pages are often broken up into tabs. Users can open and close these to show or hide fields. However, it’s often the case that only a single field in a tab is relevant and you don’t want the whole tab taking up page space because of it.

To change what field values display here, click into the tab whilst in personalisation mode. Here, click the red triangle on the right-hand side and you should have these options. If you click ‘Show when collapsed’, it will display it when the tab is closed.

In the image below, you can see the Search Name field value on the closed General tab of a Customer Card.

On the closed General tab of the Customer Card, the Search Name field value displays. This is configurable. You can set several field values to appear in this same fashion.

The ‘Show under “Show more”‘ field allows you to define which fields display when you haven’t clicked ‘Show more’ on a tab.

On fields, users can use personalisation in Business Central to choose whether to show fields under "Show more"' or show the field when collapsed. — Note the ‘Blocked’ field is set to ‘Ship’ here. As only values are displayed on closed tabs, it would just show a blank space if I left the field valueless.

See below:

Personalising the role centre

If you personalise the role centre, you can adjust more than just fields. You have the ability to amend which tiles and charts are present. Note that when you click into a different group of tiles, or space on the page, it will affect which fields you can add. To demonstrate, when I click into the Shopify Activities set of tiles, there’s no available fields to add.

This image shows how using personalisation in Business Central, users can highlights groups of tiles together.

As you can see, there's no available fields to add in the Shopify Activities group of tiles.

However, when I do the same thing on the Activities tiles, there’s an available field to add.

This image shows how I select the whole Activities tab on the Role Center when personalising the page.

In the Activities group of tiles, there's an additional field that can be added.

Notice how the Company hub section has lines going through it. This means it’s currently hidden. If I wish to show it, I can click ‘Show’ action after clicking the red triangle. I can also move it.

When personalising the role center, users can choose whether to show charts or tables of information. The types available here and across the role center are specific to the role assigned to the user.

We covered the role centre in more detail in another post.

User Settings

In the User Settings page, there’ll be a list of all the users who have access to the system. If you click into one of the user records, you will be able to see a host of different things. Firstly, you can set their default Company field, something which we spoke about in another recent blog. In addition to this, we can see the role of the user. Typically, the administrator configures this, for all users, at the point of go-live on Business Central. However, with any retrospective changes, employee additions or role changes, you can make amendments here.

Manage Personalised Pages

If you click into the ‘More options’ and ‘Related’ buttons, you will be able to see the personalised pages. To clarify, when you click on the settings cog in the top right-hand side corner, followed by ‘Personalise’, any changes you make will be on behalf of your user.

In this example, all of the personalised pages in Business Central for JOELA are listed. — Here you can see a list of every single page personalisation I have done on behalf of my user, in the system.

This image displays the personalised pages in Business Central and whether they are affecting the system as they are. As you can see, all of these are not negatively affecting the system.

You can run a Troubleshoot action to test whether any of the personalisation’s have a negative effect on performance. For me personally, this has never detected any issues.

Customisation in Business Central

You can ‘customise’ pages in Business Central. This is essentially personalising a page on behalf of a role in the system. To do this, go to the ‘Profiles (Roles)’ page and click into one of the record lines. Next, click ‘Customise pages’.

On the Profiles (Roles) page, users can click into any of the available roles in Business Central. Here they

From here, navigate your way around the system and make any necessary changes to a role’s appearance in the system.

When this icon is present, it clarifies that you are currently in customisation mode. In my case, it's on behalf of the Accounts Payable Coordinator.

When you’re happy, click ‘Done’ in the top right-hand side corner. It will instruct you to close the customisation tab that opens after you start customising. Your changes will now take effect for users with that role. You may have to refresh the page.

Manage Customised Pages

When you customise pages in Business Central, the system records the change. On the User Settings page, we can see the changes in a list view. Click ‘Related’ and ‘Manage Customised Pages’. It’s important to notice the Profile ID field. The reason this is important is that values will only appear in this screen if they correspond with the role your user is currently set as. For example, if I make a change to the Sales Order Processor role whilst I am currently a Business Manager, I won’t be able to see the changes until I amend my role to match that where the changes took place.

This image shows which pages have been customised on behalf of the Business Manager role.

In the image below, notice how the changes I made for the Business Manager role don’t show. Any customisations in Business Central are role specific and I have since set my role to be Sales Order Processor.

Here, as I have amended my role, the results that show in the Customised Pages section differ.

Closing remarks

Thanks for reading! Personalisation and Customisation in Business Central are an integral aspect to configuring the system to make it truly yours. If you have any questions, please get in contact with us. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to never miss when we post.