Microsoft Dynamics Integrations

Business Central or Finance & Operations: two different Dynamics 365 integrations

Very different products live under the Dynamics 365 name. Business Central is the ERP designed for mid-sized companies, with accounting, purchasing, sales and warehousing in a single application. Finance & Operations (now split into Finance and Supply Chain Management) is aimed at groups with several companies, plants and warehouses, and its data model is far broader. Connecting an online store to one or the other is not the same job: the interfaces, the way you authenticate and the way data is published all change.

That is why the first thing we confirm is the exact product, whether it runs in Microsoft's cloud or on your own servers, what extensions or customisations it has and who maintains it. With that picture we design the integration, not the other way round. Many companies also run several legal entities in the same Dynamics 365 environment, and you have to decide which one each store or country is linked to.

What data Dynamics 365 and the online store share

In most projects Dynamics 365 governs products and their variants, units of measure, inventory per warehouse or location, price lists and discounts per customer or price group, credit risk and payment terms. The store contributes orders, new customers and, in B2B, sign-up requests that the sales team reviews before activating them.

Flowing back to the eCommerce are order statuses, shipments with their tracking number and invoices so customers can download them from their account. If you also use Dynamics 365 Sales or another Microsoft CRM application, we define which part of the customer record is written from the store and which is read-only, so sales reps and the online channel don't overwrite each other.

In B2B you also need to decide what happens when a customer exceeds their credit limit or is blocked in Dynamics 365: the store can prevent the order, accept it as pending approval or alert the sales rep. These are business decisions that are carried into the integration and that we agree with finance and sales before development.

How we connect to Dynamics 365

Business Central offers a standard OData-based REST API for customers, items, sales orders or invoices, and lets you publish your own pages and queries as web services or create custom endpoints through an AL extension. In the cloud version authentication uses OAuth through Microsoft Entra ID, with an application registered for the integration.

In Finance & Operations the gateway is data entities: they are read and written over OData when volumes are moderate, and moved in batch packages when full catalogues and price lists have to be imported or exported. Business events let the ERP announce changes instead of being polled constantly. Availability per warehouse and price lists are refreshed in short cycles or when the change happens, orders travel to the ERP the moment they are confirmed, and full catalogues are recalculated outside business hours, when Dynamics 365 is under less load.

When the CRM is part of the project, Dataverse is the meeting point with the Dynamics 365 customer applications. We choose between Azure services or a dedicated connector depending on how many systems need orchestrating and who will monitor the flows.

A Dynamics 365 project coordinated with your Microsoft partner

Almost every company running Dynamics 365 works with a partner who maintains the ERP. We involve them from the analysis stage: we agree which fields are created, which extensions the ERP needs and which part we build on the eCommerce platform, so each side is accountable for its own work.

We test against a Business Central sandbox or a Finance & Operations test environment with anonymised real data, and we review the integration before each version update Microsoft releases, because in the cloud those updates arrive on a regular schedule.

We integrate Dynamics 365 with Adobe Commerce (Magento), PrestaShop, Shopify and VTEX, and with custom-built B2B ordering portals for distributors and sales networks.