If you run Dynamics 365 Business Central, sooner or later someone asks who looks after it when things go wrong. That question is showing up in job boards right now. We’ve seen recent ads for a “Dynamics 365 Business Central Support Consultant – Fully Remote – Up to £50,000” and a “Junior Business Central Support Engineer (D365)”. Companies are clearly trying to solve this by hiring.
Hiring can be the right call. But “Business Central support” covers a lot of different work, and one person rarely covers all of it well. This article sets out what support involves in practice, what an in-house hire can and can’t realistically do, what a partner should provide, and a checklist to help you decide.
What “Business Central support” actually covers
When people say they need BC support, they usually mean a mix of these:
- User help. Someone can’t post a document, a report shows the wrong figures, a permission set blocks a task. These are high-volume, usually low-complexity issues that need a quick answer.
- Configuration changes. New posting groups, dimensions, approval workflows, number series, a new company or warehouse location. This is routine work, but it needs someone who understands the accounting consequences.
- Data problems. Incorrect postings, stuck journals, inventory valuation that doesn’t reconcile, item ledger entries that look wrong. Fixing these takes functional knowledge and care, because in an ERP a “quick fix” can create a bigger mess later.
- Extensions and integrations. Your own AL extensions, AppSource apps, and connections to e-commerce, payroll, banking, or Power Platform flows. When Microsoft ships an update and something breaks, the person fixing it needs development skills, not just functional knowledge.
- Update management. Business Central online gets major releases twice a year plus monthly updates. Someone has to test those in a sandbox, check that extensions still compile and behave correctly, and plan the update window.
- Microsoft escalation. Some issues sit with Microsoft, such as platform bugs, tenant problems, or service incidents. Logging and chasing those cases is part of support too.
- Improvement work. New reports, process changes, automating a manual task. This isn’t strictly support, but it tends to land on whoever handles support.
Most organisations need all of these at some point. The question is how to cover them without paying for capacity you don’t use.
What an in-house support hire gives you
There are good reasons to hire someone, and the job ads we’ve seen reflect them.
They know your business. An internal person learns your processes, your people, and your workarounds. They can often tell from a one-line message what a user means.
They’re available. No ticket queue and no contract limits. Someone sits on the same Teams channel as your finance and operations staff.
They build up history. Over time they know why a field was customised, which report the CFO relies on, and what broke last spring.
There are limits, though, and you should plan for them:
- One person, one skill set. A junior support engineer can handle user help and some configuration, but they won’t usually debug an AL extension or untangle an inventory costing problem. A senior consultant may cover functional depth but not development, or the reverse.
- Holiday, sickness, and resignation. If your BC knowledge lives in one head, losing that person is a real risk. Business Central skills are in demand, and that £50,000 remote role is competing for the same people you are.
- Isolation. A single in-house person doesn’t see how other companies solve the same problems, and has no one to sanity-check a risky fix with.
- Uneven workload. Some months are quiet. Then year-end, a major release, or a new integration arrives all at once.
We saw this at a 150-person UK food wholesaler on Business Central online. One finance systems analyst ran everything, including a small AL extension she had written for pallet labels. She left with four weeks’ notice, just before the 2024 release wave 1 update. After the update the extension no longer compiled and labels stopped printing. The warehouse wrote labels by hand for two days. The source code was on her laptop, not in a repository. We rebuilt it from the deployed app in about three days, moved it into Azure DevOps and wrote up how it worked.
What a partner should give you
A Business Central partner’s support offering should fill those gaps. In practice, good partner support includes:
- A team, not a person. Functional consultants for finance, supply chain, and manufacturing questions, plus developers for extensions and integrations, so issues reach someone who can fix them.
- A clear way to log and track issues, with agreed response times and visibility into what’s open.
- Proactive update testing. Validating your extensions and key processes against upcoming releases in a sandbox before they hit production.
- Microsoft escalation handled for you, through the partner’s own channels.
- Documentation. Fixes and changes written down so knowledge stays with your organisation, not with an individual.
Partner support has its own downsides, and it’s fair to name them. A partner won’t know your business as closely as a full-time employee. Ticket-based support can feel slower for simple “how do I…” questions. And a block-hours contract can encourage people to hold back small requests.
Our Business Central support runs on a monthly agreement sized to how much help a client usually needs. Issues come to us by email or through our support portal. Each one gets a reference number and a consultant reviews it and sets a priority based on the impact on the business, so a blocked posting at month-end goes ahead of a new report request. The ticket then goes to a functional consultant or a developer, depending on the problem. We test client extensions in a sandbox before major releases. Every fix is written up in the client’s issue log.
The hybrid model that often works
For many mid-sized businesses the answer isn’t one or the other. A common setup looks like this:
- An internal “super user” or support analyst handles first-line questions, user setup, simple configuration, and training. This may be the junior role in those job ads, or an existing finance or ops person with time set aside.
- A partner handles second- and third-line work: data fixes, extension issues, integrations, update testing, Microsoft escalation, and improvement projects.
- Both work from a shared issue log and shared documentation, so nothing gets lost between them.
This gives you quick answers for everyday questions and depth for the hard ones. It also means your internal person has somewhere to escalate and someone to learn from, which helps with retention. It’s also cheaper than trying to hire one person who can do everything, because that person is hard to find.
One of our clients is a 90-person manufacturer in the Midlands. Their production planner spends about a day a week on Business Central. She sets up new users and permission sets, adds items and routings, and answers most of the everyday questions from the shop floor and the finance team. Around six to ten issues a month come to us. These are usually costing queries, problems with their EDI integration, and sandbox testing before each major release. We both work from the same issue log, so she can see what we have changed and why.
Checklist: deciding how to support Business Central
Work through these with your finance lead and whoever currently fixes things:
- List last quarter’s issues. Sort them into user help, configuration, data problems, extensions/integrations, and improvements. The mix tells you what skills you need.
- Count your customisations. How many extensions and integrations do you run? Who wrote them, and is the source code in your possession?
- Find your single points of failure. If one named person left tomorrow, what would nobody else know how to do?
- Check your update process. Who tests the twice-yearly major releases before they reach production? If the answer is “nobody”, that’s a risk to fix first.
- Decide what needs a same-day answer. Posting blocked at month-end is urgent. A new report request isn’t. Match response expectations to the impact on the business.
- Look at your documentation. Is there a record of customisations, key setup decisions, and past fixes? If not, start one, whichever model you choose.
- Be realistic about the hire. If you’re recruiting, write down which of the categories above that person will own, and who covers everything else.
- Test your partner’s depth. Ask who actually picks up a ticket, whether they have developers on staff, and how they handle Microsoft escalations.
- Agree on escalation. If you go hybrid, define where the internal role stops and the partner takes over.
- Review in six months. Revisit the issue log and adjust. Support needs change after go-live, after growth, and after new integrations.
Talk to us
If you’re about to advertise a Business Central support role, or you already have someone in place and they’re overloaded, we’re happy to talk it through. We’ll look at your current issue mix and setup and give you an honest view of what to handle internally and where a partner adds value. Sometimes the answer is “hire the person and call us for the hard stuff”. Sometimes it’s something else.
Get in touch with us at vizorsol.com and we’ll set up a conversation.