Integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central with Dynamics 365 CRM

When Dynamics 365 Business Central is integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM applications like Dynamics 365 Sales, your business will benefit from having a single, reliable source of truth.

However, it’s also essential to understand the key business decisions and best practices required to ensure your ERP-CRM integration delivers the results you need, such as faster billing, fewer errors and miscommunications, a better customer experience, and more timely reporting.

Table of Contents

• Benefits of D365 CRM to Business Central Integration
• Which Fields Can Be Integrated?
• Which Fields Should Be Integrated?
• Example Integration Mapping
• Integration Best Practices

Which Dynamics 365 Applications Can We Integrate?

Any and all of the Dynamics 365 applications can be integrated together.

In this article, I’ll cover integrations between the most common Dynamics 365 ERP app, Business Central, and any of the 5 Dynamics 365 CRM apps: Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations, and Customer Insights.

This group of CRM apps is also sometimes called “Customer Engagement” or “CE” applications. They are all built on the same flexible technical foundation: Power Platform and Microsoft’s Dataverse.

I’ve brought together business considerations I’m hearing from customers I speak to in my own day-to-day work, as well as technical considerations based on my colleagues’ experience creating these integrations for our clients. Both perspectives are essential to preparing for a successful integration.

To learn about integrations between the CRM applications and the other Dynamics 365 ERP, Finance & Operations, read my colleagues’ articles on the basics of Dual-write and the more technical Dynamics 365 CRM to F&O integration best practices.

Why Integration Matters — The Benefits of Integrating Business Central With CRM

1. Faster reporting and reliable insights. Leaders need up-to-date information they can trust and act on. When I speak with organizations that rely on disconnected systems, they often spend a significant amount of time on tedious data manipulation between tools just to gain real-time visibility of the entire organization on any given day. A CRM to Business Central integration, together with different tools in the Microsoft stack like Power BI, can streamline overall reporting.
2. Faster and more consistent billing. Without integration, finance teams often wait days for salespeople to manually send lists of closed deals before invoicing can begin.  When sales data is integrated directly into the finance system, closed deals can be converted into invoices in hours instead of days, thereby accelerating cash flow and reducing month-end bottlenecks.
3. More efficient manufacturing and warehousing. With real-time inventory data flowing into the CRM, sales teams can quote accurately and avoid overselling products that aren’t in stock — reducing backorders and cancellations. Syncing sales forecasts with production schedules can also eliminate guesswork, cut waste, and optimize resource planning.
4. Leverage more flexible D365 customizations. In general, Microsoft builds its CRM products to be more flexible than its ERP products, and integration means some of your customized calculations and processes from your D365 CRM can be used for invoicing and other processes in Business Central. For instance, your company’s special fields and calculations for work orders in Dynamics 365 Field Service can be shown and used in Business Central.
5. Clearer communication between sales and finance. Manual data entry into multiple systems is prone to costly and confusing mistakes: incorrect shipping addresses, incorrect pricing, and billing errors. Imagine a sales representative quoting a customer using last week’s prices because the latest updates are locked away in a separate finance system. Integration can put sales and finance on the same page.
6. Better customer experience: When a customer interacts with more than one team from your company, it’s important to have all the information about them in a single place. That way, when sales considers pursuing a new opportunity with a customer, for instance, they can check whether or not that customer already has an overdue invoice. This creates streamlined interactions, building trust and consistency in the customer experience.

Now, I should be clear that there is no “one-size-fits-all” pre-packaged integration that will address every company’s specific frustrations and barriers to growth.

Instead, to give you all these benefits, the integration has to be configured to fit your specific business processes, technology, and needs — and your teams need solid training on how to use it. Check out the best practices section below for more.

Which Fields Can Be Integrated Between Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM Apps?

Technically, all of them, but integrating unnecessary fields will slow down your system and make it harder to maintain. That’s why your partner should help you assess your business processes and technical situation to determine which fields need to be integrated and how — unidirectional, bidirectional, etc.

Which Fields Should Be Integrated?

The main decision point for each field in an integration is “Where will this data be used or changed?”

For instance, your team members will probably use account data like email or physical addresses in both sides of your system. It’s often best to have that kind of account data coupled so that your ERP and CRM will always agree on a customer’s address, and you’ll avoid duplicate data entry, confusion, and errors. But other kinds of data (like invoicing details) may only need to be in one side of your system.

Note that your Dynamics Partner can further streamline your integration by using filters on integrated fields, limiting which data is passed between systems. For instance, your Dynamics 365 Sales application will have information about both customers and leads, but you can filter it so that only the customer info gets passed on to Business Central.

What's It Like to Work With Encore?

Learn how Encore helped a trade union enhance their member engagement and strengthen security with both Dynamics 365 Business Central and a Dynamics 365 CRM application — creating one unified solution to empower their team.

Read Case Study

Which Fields Should Not Be Integrated?

If your users just need to view  the data for a field from one system in the other interface, then we can display it via Power BI, virtual tables, or another method. That can take much less effort than a technical integration for that field.

If, for instance, salespeople need to check warehouse inventory conveniently, that could be shown inside Dynamics 365 Sales via Power BI. To your salespeople, that would look like the inventory information is “in” their CRM application, but your system will often run faster and be easier to maintain if we do this via Power BI rather than technically integrating that field.

Here’s another example: You may hold price lists in your CRM application like Dynamics 365 Sales, and in Business Central you need those values for invoicing. But you generally don’t want the price list itself in your ERP. You want the calculation of the price to happen in the CRM, and then you want the invoice line item to get passed over to Business Central.

Bidirectional vs Unidirectional Integration

The difference between bidirectional and unidirectional integration is whether data for a field flows “both ways” between the ERP and the CRM, or whether it flows in only one direction. We usually suggest unidirectional for most fields.

Users can change a field that you set up with bidirectional integration in either the CRM or the ERP application. This may seem convenient to each individual user, but it means that it may not be clear by whom or how the field should be changed. This can lead to confusion and errors later. If a manager is trying to figure out why a certain account name was changed, for instance, they may not be sure whether a sales or finance person made that change.

Note that there is a potential downside to unidirectional data – some users may find it counterintuitive to have a field they can see in both systems, but can only edit in one. Training from your Dynamics Partner, along with good interface design, can help mitigate this problem.

Note that you can choose a different integration “direction” for each field.

Example Integration Mapping

Here’s an example integration mapping, along with two examples of fields we probably wouldn’t integrate.

The integration map for your business should be developed with the guidance of a skilled Dynamics Partner who has taken the time to learn your business needs and processes.

Best Practices for Integrations

Over the years, we’ve seen what works—and what doesn’t—when connecting Dynamics 365 Business Central with CRM. Although comprehensive technical knowledge of these integrations takes years of technical training and experience, here are some practical tips to avoid some of the most common gotchas.

• Start with the out-of-the-box integrations. Microsoft’s out-of-the-box connectors are designed to handle 80–90% of standard scenarios. Resist the urge to over-customize on day one; custom code adds cost and complexity – make sure there’s a clear business and technical reason for each customized integration.
• Balance real-time data with performance. Everyone thinks they want instant updates, but syncing every field in real-time can slow your system. Use scheduled syncs where possible and reserve real-time for truly critical data.
• Focus on critical fields. Don’t try to sync everything. Identify the must-have data points like customer IDs, product info, and billing details. Keeping it lean improves performance and reduces sync errors.
• Decide on your source of truth. Define which system owns which records—leads, customers, billing details. If CRM owns leads, then Business Central shouldn’t override that info and vice versa.
• Test before go-live. This sounds obvious, but it’s sometimes tempting to try to “speed up” a project by skipping proper testing. Always use a sandbox or staging environment to validate mappings and workflows, and involve front-end users in testing. Catching issues early saves time and significant headaches later.
• Plan for conflicts. Conflicts in terms of the data in the different systems will happen eventually. Set clear rules for determining which system takes precedence when data changes in both places, and ensure your team understands how to handle these scenarios.
• Train your team. Technology alone won’t deliver success. Make sure end-users understand how the integration helps them, and make sure they get the hands-on training they need to leverage it. Let each group of users know what to expect in terms of how their actions will affect fields other teams see (and vice versa). A lack of guidance is one of the top reasons integration projects fail to deliver the business results a client expects.

How to Prepare for the Integration: Document Your Processes

To tailor your Dynamics 365 integration to meet your specific needs, your partner will require a detailed explanation of your current business processes and pain points.

This information helps us advise you on how to improve those processes with the new technology, and then determine the details of how each field should be integrated, whether it needs any filters or if/then logic, etc.

Note that your processes may change over the course of the implementation and integration, but that change should itself be well documented.

Integrate Your System With a Trusted Partner

As with all ERP and CRM decisions, choosing the right partner for your integration is as important as choosing the right software. Ensure you work with a company that provides honest advice, technical skills, and change management assistance you need.

At Encore, we implement both Dynamics 365 CRM and Dynamics 365 Business Central together with the rest of the Microsoft suite of tools for business.

We’d love to help you create a more complete, integrated business system that better aligns your team and processes with your strategic goals. If you’d like to know more about what it’s like to work with us, please read the case study of our work with a major construction union, which needed a comprehensive Dynamics 365 solution to enhance their member engagement and strengthen their security.

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