What’s New in Business Central Wave 1 Release 2026

The Dynamics 365 2026 Release Wave 1 outlines the new features and enhancements that will roll out between April and September 2026 across the full Dynamics 365 product suite. The release introduces new capabilities designed to help organisations transform their business through AI‑driven innovation, automation, and improved user experiences. 

A central theme of this release wave is the expansion of Copilot and agentic AI experiences, embedded across sales, service, finance, operations, and analytics. These capabilities help users make faster decisions, automate routine tasks, and surface insights directly within everyday workflows. 

Key areas include: 

• Customer engagement: Sales, Customer Service, Contact Center, and Field Service receive deeper AI support to improve pipeline management, service orchestration, scheduling, and customer experience across all channels. 

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP): Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, Commerce, Human Resources, and Sustainability Manager gain enhancements that improve automation, compliance, planning, sustainability reporting, and operational efficiency. 

• Cross‑app capabilities: New finance and operations cross‑app enhancements strengthen the AI foundation, introduce richer Copilot chat experiences, and deliver the general availability of Immersive Home, a modern AI‑driven landing experience. 

• Customer Insights: Data and Journeys continue to evolve as the AI grounding layer, enabling real‑time customer profiles and intelligent, end‑to‑end customer engagement. 

• SMB focus: Dynamics 365 Business Central accelerates its move toward intelligent ERP with AI‑powered agents for sales and purchasing, along with major improvements in developer productivity and Copilot extensibility. 

 

The focus of this release is on AI‑powered automation and making the system easier to extend and support. New AI agents help automate everyday sales and purchasing tasks, reducing manual work and improving accuracy. This means transactions can be processed more quickly, with less effort from users. 

Business Central also works more closely with Copilot, allowing customers and partners to design and extend AI‑driven experiences directly in the application. This opens the door to smarter assistance that fits naturally into day‑to‑day workflows. 

Behind the scenes, there are major improvements for developers and partners, making it quicker and easier to build, test, and maintain solutions.  

 

Copilot and AI agents in Business Central 

Dynamics 365 Business Central uses built‑in AI to help your team work faster, reduce manual effort, and focus on what matters most. Business Central also includes AI agents that can automate entire business processes with human oversight. For example, an accounts payable agent can read supplier invoices, match them to vendors and accounts, and prepare them for approval - saving time while keeping people in control. 

All AI features are built with enterprise‑grade security, privacy, and compliance, following Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles, so your data remains protected.  

 

Financial Reporting Enhancements 

The key enhancements made to Financial Reporting focusses on how reports are discovered, created, distributed, and managed. 

Key improvements include: 

• A new tile-based view that helps users quickly understand report status and relevance, and recent activity. 

• Greater control for report authors over formatting, branding, categorisation, and lifecycle status, resulting in clearer and more professional reports. 

• Automated report distribution to groups and the ability to analyse all dimension values in a single run, reducing manual effort and speeding up access to insights. 
• Enhanced administrative controls, including global defaults and an audit log to track report usage. 

Overall, these enhancements help organisations deliver timely, well‑governed financial insights with less manual work and better visibility into how reports are used. 

 

Payment Practices in the UK localisation

New UK regulations mean businesses must report more detailed information about how and when they pay suppliers. With this update, Business Central helps you meet these requirements automatically, without relying on manual spreadsheets or extra admin work. 

Business Central now tracks key payment performance details for you, including late payments and payments delayed due to disputes. When a purchase invoice is disputed, this is clearly recorded and linked to the payment, making reporting more accurate and transparent. 

When it’s time to submit your report, the required information is already available and can be exported in a simple CSV file for submission or further review. This reduces effort for finance teams, improves accuracy, and helps maintain stronger, more transparent supplier relationships - while keeping your business compliant with UK legislation. 

 

Supply Chain Management 

In the 2026 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 Business Central helps businesses better manage purchasing, inventory, and delivery from end to end. The focus on quality management and subcontracting, improve reliability, efficiency, and supplier relationships. 

Key improvements include: 

• Item Variant Pictures now allows you to add pictures to item variants, making it easier to distinguish between similar product options such as different colours or sizes. Visual identification using tile and tall tile views helps reduce confusion and improves accuracy across sales, manufacturing, and fulfilment processes. Images can be managed directly from the Item Variant Card, where users can take a photo, import an existing image, export it, or delete it as needed. This enhancement improves clarity when working with large assortments of variants and supports faster, more accurate variant selection. 
• Approval of Requisition Worksheets and Item Journals gives organisations stronger internal control over purchasing and inventory changes. This ensures that inventory adjustments and planning decisions are reviewed and authorized before they are posted or converted into purchase documents. Approval workflows can be applied to item journal batches (including item, physical inventory, and output journals) and to requisition and planning worksheet batches. While an approval is in progress, records are locked to prevent changes, and users can approve, reject, delegate, or add comments directly from the workflow. 

These enhancements improve audit readiness, reduce risk, and help ensure purchasing and inventory activities align with business policies.  

 

Word Add-in 

Another interesting feature added in this release is easier document layout editing with the enhanced Word add‑in. 

• Business Central now makes it much easier to update invoices, orders, and other documents directly in Microsoft Word, without needing technical skills or developer support. 

• With the enhanced Word add‑in, users can quickly find the right data fields, insert them into documents, and build tables more easily. The improved experience helps teams keep documents consistent, professional, and on‑brand, while making updates faster when layouts need to change for branding, localisation, or customer requirements. 

• Changes can be made directly by business users, organisations spend less time waiting for IT support and can respond more quickly to change.  

 

Sustainability Management 

Expanded sustainability management capabilities help organisations measure, track, and report environmental impact more effectively. 

Businesses can collect sustainability data directly in Business Central using journals and purchase documents, supported by formulas, open APIs for emission factors, and Copilot assistance to estimate carbon footprints when data is incomplete. The solution supports tracking emissions, water usage, and waste across multiple entities and locations, and allows the purchase of carbon credits. 

Progress tracking is simplified through a dedicated Sustainability Role Center, with baselines, targets, scorecards, and KPIs. Reporting is enhanced with built‑in reports, Excel, Power BI dashboards, and financial reports that link sustainability data to general ledger information. The solution supports compliance with regulations such as CSRD, CBAM, and EPR, and enables transparent reporting of Scope 3 emissions, helping organisations strengthen compliance, insight, and brand reputation. 

 

What does Business Central Wave 1 mean for your organisation?