6. April 2026
Business Central - 2026 Release Wave 1 (28.0)
With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 28.0, Microsoft continues to build on the platform with a mix of practical enhancements across finance, supply chain, and platform capabilities.
This post highlights a selection of features that stand out from a functional perspective. There’s a lot to take in but these are our highlights.
Tax and Compliance
Excise Taxes (Plastic and Sugar) - Microsoft showing they are committed to localisation by introducing functionality to support excise taxes, including plastic and sugar levies. This enables businesses to define relevant Items subject to excise duty and then calculate and report on these taxes. Gone are the days where the Item Ledger was exported and pivoted alongside a data sheet with tax rates in Excel.
Withholding Taxes - another welcome addition allowing tax to be deducted at source. This is particularly relevant for organisations operating internationally or in jurisdictions where withholding tax is standard. We are getting a new set of Posting Groups (Business and Product) and a Posting Setup to define the G/L accounts for withholding tax amounts to post into when a purchase document is posted.
Self-Billing for Vendors
New self-billing functionality allowing businesses to generate Purchase Invoices on behalf of Vendors. A Vendor is marked as Self-Billing and there are new document layout in the style of a sales invoice available from Purchase Invoices to send to Vendors to confirm what has been billed.
Purchase Order Matching Improvements
There are improvements to purchase order matching across both standard invoice processing and the Payables Agent which we discuss in another post.
You can now retrieve both Order Lines and Receipt Lines when preparing a Purchase Invoice. Previously a receipt had to be posted for you to connect a Purchase Invoice to Purchase Orders. In the Payables Agent, Copilot can now refer to Purchase Orders to kick off the three-way match.
In practice, this should reduce the number of matching exceptions, improve accuracy of invoice processing and minimise manual intervention for accounts payable teams.
Quality Management
Our supply chain fanatics are going crazy for this one! Quality checks with your own defined tests/parameters across Purchase Receipts, Production Output, Assembly Output (and on a manual basis). We can define the scope these are required on too - Items, Item Categories and Item Tracking (Lots/Serials/Packages).
Outputs from this new module will be in the form of some new reports and tools - namely Quality Certificate, Certificate of Analysis, Quality Status Overview and Quality Orders Overview.
Expense Management
In this day and age, it's hard to come by a business that does not operate some degree of employee expenses. We always had to go to AppSource and look for a third-party solution to cover this requirement but it looks like Microsoft are finally bringing expense management functionality into the standard product. I'm reluctant to say too much about this feature as it seems to have gone under the radar in this release but nevertheless, it's an exciting addition where we are getting Expense Reports, Expense Posting Groups and Posted Expense Reports with Expense Ledger Entries.
This big unknown here is how this will look on the Business Central mobile app. We are watching this one closely through 2026 and genuinely excited.
External Storage Support
One for the IT admins - Business Central 28.0 introduces support for storing attachments and media outside of the core database. This allows documents such as invoices, images, and file attachments to be held in external storage rather than consuming Business Central database capacity.
This is particularly relevant for customers with high volumes of document attachments (purchase invoices as an example) or large item image libraries. Moving these files externally can help reduce database growth and associated storage costs.