Microsoft’s biannual Business Central release cycle has become something that growing businesses genuinely look forward to. Not in the way people used to dread ERP updates — the three-year project, the consultancy bill, the six months of disruption — but in the quieter, more useful way that a platform improving in the background of your operations actually matters. Wave 1 of 2026 is a substantive release. It is worth paying attention to.
This article covers what is actually new, what it practically means if you are running a growing business on Business Central, and where the most significant changes are likely to be felt. We have stripped out the marketing language and the vague gestures towards “intelligent transformation.” What follows is a straight account of what is shipping, what it does, and whether it is worth your attention.
The Short Version
If you only have five minutes, here is what matters in Business Central 2026 Wave 1:
AI agents are no longer experimental — they are being embedded properly into everyday financial and operational workflows. The Payables Agent specifically is now capable enough to handle real accounts payable work autonomously. Expense management has been properly built into the platform for the first time. The Shopify connector has had another meaningful round of improvements for ecommerce businesses. Financial management has gained several new tax and compliance tools that matter for UK businesses specifically. And cloud migration has become significantly easier, which is relevant for any business still running on-premises.
The release covers April through to September 2026. Cloud customers get updates automatically within this window. On-premises customers need to apply updates manually.
The AI Agent Story — Genuinely Useful Now
The Copilot and agent features in earlier Business Central releases were interesting in principle but limited in practice. In Wave 1 2026, that changes noticeably. Microsoft has invested heavily in making AI agents functional in specific, well-defined scenarios — and the results are worth taking seriously.
The Payables Agent is the headline. It processes incoming purchase invoices automatically by reading emails in your mailbox, matching them to purchase orders, and handling the routine parts of accounts payable without requiring human intervention at each step. What is new in this wave is better visibility into what the agent has been doing — a new feature that lets you see which emails in your mailbox the Payables Agent has already processed. This sounds minor but it matters a great deal in practice. When you are handing a routine process to an AI agent, the ability to audit its activity and understand what it has and has not touched is what builds the confidence to trust it with real volume.
There is also a new dedicated task pane for managing all active agents — a single place to see what every agent in your Business Central environment is currently working on, with the ability to stop all active tasks for a selected agent if something goes wrong. This kind of control panel is what separates a toy from a tool. If you are running multiple agents across purchase and sales workflows, having oversight and a kill switch is table stakes.
The agent designer — the tool that allows businesses to envision and build custom AI agents — is moving into general availability in May 2026. This means that businesses with specific workflow automation requirements that do not fit a standard Microsoft agent can now build their own, within Business Central, without needing bespoke development. For a growing business with a distinctive operational process, this is a meaningful capability unlock.
The one realistic note to strike here is that AI agents work best in well-structured, well-maintained data environments. If your Business Central data is messy — inconsistent vendor records, gaps in purchase order coverage, inconsistent document matching — agents will surface those problems rather than solve them. The value of agents is proportional to the quality of the underlying data estate they operate in.
Financial Management — Practical Improvements Worth Noticing
The financial management improvements in Wave 1 2026 are not flashy but they are genuinely useful, and several of them are directly relevant to UK businesses.
Expense management has been properly addressed. Business Central has historically been weak on employee expense handling — it was one of the most common reasons growing businesses ran a third-party expense tool alongside their ERP. Wave 1 2026 introduces native expense reports directly in Business Central, due for general availability in October 2026. Employees submit expenses through the platform, managers approve them, and the resulting entries flow directly into the relevant financial periods. For a business running fifteen to two hundred staff, eliminating a separate expense tool and the manual reconciliation between systems is a meaningful simplification.
Self-billed invoices arrive in June 2026. This is relevant for businesses in sectors where the buyer rather than the supplier generates the invoice — common in agriculture, certain professional services contexts, and wholesale. If your business operates self-billing arrangements, this functionality being native to Business Central removes a customisation that previously required either manual workarounds or partner-built extensions.
Withholding tax calculation for vendors follows in June, and the calculation of plastic and sugar taxes arrives in July. These are compliance features with a narrower audience — relevant if your business operates in sectors affected by UK plastic packaging tax or if you have international supplier relationships where withholding applies — but if they apply to you, having them built into Business Central rather than managed manually or through a third-party tool is a genuine operational improvement.
The Investment Boost feature for fixed assets, arriving in May, allows UK businesses to configure accelerated capital allowances in Business Central to reflect government investment incentive schemes. For businesses making significant capital investments — machinery, equipment, technology infrastructure — being able to model and account for enhanced allowances directly in the ERP rather than in a spreadsheet maintained by the accountant is a practical time saver.
Financial reporting enhancements are also part of this wave, with improvements to Trial Balance-related Excel reports arriving in the April update. Performance improvements to Excel-based financial reports might not sound exciting, but if your finance team spends significant time waiting for reports to generate, faster is always better.
The Shopify Connector — Growing Businesses with Ecommerce Operations Take Note
Business Central’s Shopify connector has been one of the more actively developed integration points in recent release waves, and 2026 Wave 1 continues that investment with a cluster of improvements that matter for businesses selling online.
Product variant image synchronisation is now available — syncing images of product variants between Business Central and Shopify automatically. For businesses with large product catalogues and multiple variants per product, maintaining image consistency between the ERP and the storefront manually is a genuine overhead. Having it handled automatically reduces the administrative burden on whoever manages the catalogue.
Custom collection assignment allows items exported to Shopify to be automatically assigned to custom collections based on Business Central data. For businesses with complex product categorisation — seasonal ranges, promotional groupings, brand-specific collections — this means the ERP and the storefront stay aligned without manual curation in Shopify.
Checkout currency handling has been improved so that sales documents created from Shopify orders use the checkout currency rather than a default currency. For UK businesses selling internationally through Shopify — particularly those with significant European or US customer bases — this reduces the currency reconciliation friction that used to be a persistent irritant.
Product options based on item attributes allow items to be exported to Shopify with product options derived from their Business Central attributes. This sounds technical but the practical implication is straightforward: the work of configuring product variations does not need to be done twice, once in Business Central and once in Shopify. Define the attributes in the ERP and they flow through to the storefront.
Taken together, these Shopify improvements reflect a consistent Microsoft investment in making Business Central the credible operational backbone for businesses that sell both direct and through digital channels. If you are running a growing ecommerce operation and using Business Central, the connector is now genuinely mature.
Electronic Documents — E-Invoicing Compliance
The electronic document functionality in Business Central continues to expand in Wave 1 2026, driven largely by the growing number of countries mandating e-invoicing. For UK businesses with European suppliers or customers, this matters.
Inbound e-documents can now be linked to purchase invoices directly, reducing the manual matching process when receiving electronic invoices from suppliers who use supported e-document formats. The ability to set a default e-document type on vendor templates means that once you have configured a vendor’s invoicing format, Business Central remembers it rather than requiring you to specify it on each transaction.
A preview of Peppol electronic invoices on the purchase draft page is coming later in the wave — allowing finance teams to review the structured invoice content before it is posted, which is useful for catching format or data errors before they create accounting problems.
For UK businesses with French customers or suppliers, electronic invoicing in France becomes available from July 2026, aligning with France’s planned e-invoicing mandate. If that relationship matters to your business, it is worth being aware of.
UK-Specific: Payment Practices Reporting
One feature that UK businesses should specifically note is the Payment Practices reporting feature, arriving in the UK localisation in June 2026.
UK businesses above a certain size threshold are required under the Payment Practices and Performance Reporting regulations to report twice yearly on their payment terms and actual payment performance to suppliers. This has historically required pulling data from the ERP, processing it externally, and submitting manually. Business Central’s UK localisation support for this reporting brings the data compilation closer to automated — a straightforward but practical improvement for finance teams at growing UK businesses that are caught by the reporting threshold.
Cloud Migration — If You Are Still On-Premises, Now Is a Good Time
Two governance and administration improvements in this wave are specifically relevant to businesses still running Business Central on-premises.
The ability to migrate to the cloud from any SQL database arrives in April 2026. Previously, cloud migration tools worked well for businesses running specific supported on-premises versions but were more constrained for businesses running older or more customised environments. The expansion of migration support to any SQL database removes a barrier that was holding some businesses back from moving to Business Central Online.
The cloud migration tool has also been updated to support reimplementation projects — the scenario where a business wants not just to lift-and-shift to the cloud but to use the migration as an opportunity to restructure or re-implement its Business Central configuration. This matters because the lift-and-shift approach to ERP migration often carries legacy problems into the new environment. Having tooling that supports a cleaner reimplementation is a better answer for businesses whose on-premises setup has accumulated years of workarounds and technical debt.
If your business is still on-premises, the combination of these migration improvements and the increasingly strong AI and automation capabilities in Business Central Online makes 2026 a credible year to make the move. The gap between what the cloud version can do and what on-premises can do is widening with every release wave.
Sustainability — For Businesses With Reporting Obligations
The sustainability features in Business Central have developed meaningfully over the last few release waves, and Wave 1 2026 continues that direction. Full value chain tracking of Scope 3 emissions is now available, allowing businesses to add carbon footprint data to product invoices and project records.
The ability for Copilot to suggest gas emissions in sustainability journals — arriving later in the wave — reduces the manual work of maintaining emissions data by having AI propose entries based on available information and then allowing finance or sustainability teams to review and approve.
For growing UK businesses that are beginning to face sustainability reporting requirements — either from investors, from large customers requiring supply chain emissions data, or from regulatory direction — having these capabilities built into the ERP is considerably better than managing them in a separate tool or a spreadsheet. If sustainability reporting is not yet on your radar, it will be.
Connecting Business Central Data to Power BI
One area that Wave 1 reinforces — though not through dramatic new features so much as continued platform improvements — is the integration between Business Central and Power BI. Stronger APIs for analytics tool connectivity mean that connecting Business Central data to Power BI reporting environments is more reliable and more capable than in previous versions.
For growing businesses, this matters because Business Central’s built-in reports, while improved in every release, are not always sufficient for the kind of management information that leadership teams and boards need. Building Power BI reports and dashboards on top of Business Central data — pulling financials, sales performance, inventory, and operational metrics into interactive dashboards that decision-makers can explore without involving the finance team every time — is one of the highest-value data investments a Business Central-using business can make.
NetMonkeys works with UK businesses on exactly this — connecting Business Central to Power BI and building the reporting layer that makes ERP data genuinely accessible to business leaders. If your Business Central investment is not yet matched by a reporting environment that gives your leadership team real visibility, that is a gap worth closing. You can find out more about our Power BI services at www.netmonkeys.co.uk/power-bi.
What Should You Actually Do With This?
If you are already on Business Central Online, most of this arrives automatically. The practical steps are:
Review the AI agent features — specifically the Payables Agent — and assess whether your accounts payable data quality and process maturity is at the point where autonomous processing would add value rather than create noise. If it is, Wave 1 2026 is the moment to start piloting it seriously.
Check your Microsoft licensing position relative to the expense management feature. If your business currently runs a standalone expense tool, the native expense reports arriving in October represent a potential consolidation — but only if the functionality meets your requirements. Review it before renewing any existing expense platform contracts.
If you sell through Shopify, go through the connector improvements methodically. Several of them will save meaningful catalogue management time.
If you are UK-based and above the threshold for Payment Practices reporting, make sure your team knows the June 2026 availability date and plans to adopt it rather than continuing manual processes.
If you are still on-premises, use this wave’s migration improvements as the prompt for a genuine conversation about timing. The platform case for moving to Business Central Online has never been stronger.
And if your Business Central data is doing a lot of work to run your business but not much work to inform your leadership team’s decisions, that is the conversation to have with NetMonkeys. The ERP holds the data. Power BI is how you make it visible. The combination is considerably more powerful than either alone.
Get in touch with the NetMonkeys.
