Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: The UI Pain Points No One Talks About

Dynamics 365 Business Central is genuinely powerful ERP software. The back-end is capable: strong financials, solid manufacturing and distribution logic, good API coverage. If you run Business Central, your data is almost certainly in good shape. The problem is how your team experiences that data every day.

These are the five specific UI pain points that emerge most consistently with Dynamics 365 BC deployments at UK manufacturing and distribution SMEs.

1. Navigation complexity

Business Central is organised around Role Centres — dashboards that are supposed to surface what each user needs. In practice, Role Centres require significant configuration to be genuinely useful, and most implementations ship with a generic layout that suits nobody in particular. The result is a navigation model built on modules and sub-menus that requires staff to know where to look before they can find anything. New staff often take three to four weeks to become independently effective. Experienced staff develop elaborate shortcuts that disappear the moment their Role Centre is updated.

2. Order status visibility

A customer calls. Where is their order? In Business Central, answering that question reliably requires navigating: Sales Orders → find the order → Posted Shipments → Warehouse Shipments → carrier reference. That is four to five screens and two to four minutes per query. For a sales team fielding 30 order status calls a day, that is two to three hours of productive time spent on information retrieval. The data exists. The journey to reach it is the problem.

3. No native customer-facing portal

Business Central has no native customer portal. Every customer query about order status, invoice history, account balance, or stock availability requires a member of your staff to log in, navigate, find the answer, and relay it back. There is no mechanism for customers to self-serve — regardless of how straightforward the question is. This is a structural limitation of the ERP, not a configuration issue.

4. Mobile experience

The Business Central mobile app handles simple approval workflows reasonably well. For warehouse staff, shop floor operatives, or field sales teams who need fast, role-specific screens on a mobile device, it falls short. The interface is a scaled-down version of the desktop experience — not a purpose-built mobile workflow tool.

5. Reporting requires an expert

Business Central’s native reporting is functional but limited. The Power BI integration is genuinely useful — but it adds licensing cost, requires configuration expertise, and introduces another application that staff need to learn. Management information that should be available at a glance typically requires either a Power BI specialist or a weekly export and re-format in Excel.

What the Business Central API enables

Business Central exposes a well-documented REST API that covers the entities that matter most for UI development: Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Items (stock), Customers, Vendors, Posted Invoices, Warehouse Entries, and more. Authentication uses OAuth 2.0 via Microsoft Entra ID — meaning the interface layer can use the same SSO your staff already use for Microsoft 365.

A purpose-built interface built on this API can surface exactly what each role needs — live order status for customer service, role-specific dashboards for warehouse, live KPIs for management — without any of the navigation complexity of the native Business Central UI.

Is customising Business Central itself a better option?

In some cases. Business Central customisation via AL development can address specific pain points — but it costs £40,000–150,000+, requires a Business Central partner, is upgrade-dependent (your customisations need re-validating with each ERP update), and is limited to what the ERP vendor’s architecture allows. An independent interface layer is faster, cheaper to build and maintain, more flexible, and entirely under your control.

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