Can you keep Dynamics 365 Business Central and modernise everything around it?
Yes. Business Central's own API is one of the more modern ones we work with, which makes this more straightforward than for most systems: keep it as your system of record, and build a bespoke, real-time interface on top of it — no rip-and-replace, no ERP migration, nothing lost from the setup your business already runs on. This is what Sysgraft calls a graft: a precise join between a new intelligent layer and the systems you already own.
Should you replace Dynamics 365 Business Central, or build around it?
For most £1.5m–£20m+ UK businesses, the honest answer is: build around it.
Business Central is usually not the problem. The problem is that Business Central was never designed to be a live, cross-business dashboard for leadership — it's an ERP system, and it does that job well. The frustration leaders feel ("why can't I see margin in real time?", "why does month-end still take a week?") isn't a reason to tear Business Central out. It's a reason to add a layer it was never meant to provide.
Ripping out a working ERP system to solve a reporting and visibility problem is one of the most expensive mistakes a mid-market business can make: months of migration, retraining, data risk, and disruption — to fix something a graft would fix without any of it.
What connecting to Business Central actually involves
Business Central has the most modern API surface of the systems we work with — OData v4 REST endpoints covering around fifty-five standard business entities, authenticated through Microsoft Entra ID. If you're already a Microsoft estate, the authentication side is largely solved before you start.
The detail that shapes the build is that Business Central's rate limits are enforced per user, not per environment — roughly 6,000 requests per user in any five-minute window, with five concurrent requests. That has a counterintuitive consequence: an integration running everything through one service account can get throttled while the environment as a whole is barely working. Spreading the load across several service principals raises the ceiling. It's the kind of thing that looks like a performance problem and is actually an architecture decision.
There's also a timetable worth knowing about, because it affects anything built now. Microsoft is retiring the SOAP endpoints, and the legacy OData UI page endpoints are deprecated from version 30 (2027 Wave 1). Anything built against those will need reworking. New integrations should target API Pages at /api/v2.0/ — which are also materially faster than the legacy route. Part of what a subscription buys you is somebody tracking those release notes and handling the change before it becomes your problem.
Common questions about modernising around Dynamics 365 Business Central
Can custom software sit on top of Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Yes. A bespoke interface can draw live data from Business Central through its data connections and present it alongside data from your CRM and other systems — giving leadership one real-time view without changing how Business Central itself works.
Can I get a real-time dashboard from Business Central without replacing it?
Yes. Business Central's OData surface makes this straightforward — a dashboard can read live across its standard business entities and sit alongside your other systems, no export required.
Is Business Central the problem, or our processes?
Often, neither is fully the culprit. Business Central does what it's built to do, including for businesses already deep in the Microsoft estate — the real gap is that it was never meant to be the one screen leadership checks, and that's an integration problem, not a reason to replace a system that's otherwise working.
Can I connect Business Central to my CRM and see both in one place?
Yes. Grafting an interface across Business Central and your CRM lets customer, sales and finance data appear together — particularly useful if your CRM is Dynamics 365 Sales, since both already sit in the same Microsoft ecosystem.
Does keeping Business Central limit what AI can do later?
No. Business Central's API is genuinely one of the more modern ones we work with, which if anything makes the case the other way — a well-documented API doesn't help if the data behind it never gets joined to anything else. Fragmentation is the constraint, not the ERP.
Modernising isn't migrating
The software industry has trained businesses to believe that "modernising" means a large, disruptive replacement project. It doesn't have to. Grafting a new layer onto Dynamics 365 Business Central is modernisation without the migration — you move forward on visibility and capability while everything that currently works, including whatever else sits in your Microsoft estate, keeps working.
See how the whole process works, step by step →
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