Data in Business Central

Data in Business Central

The ERP Manager guide is written by Abakion. Read it here and download it as PDF free of charge.

As ERP manager you are responsible for ensuring that data in Business Central is protected, well organized, and available to those who need it. It is a task with many facets: backup, capacity, cleanup, compliance, data quality, and the ability to get data out of the system when you need to.

Backup of Business Central via the admin center

You find your backups in the admin center. Microsoft automatically takes backups of all your environments, both production and sandboxes, and keeps them for 28 days. You don’t need to do anything to ensure that backups are taken. Microsoft handles that.

Restore to any point within 28 days

Through the admin center you can perform a restore yourself to any point within the 28 days. That gives you the ability to roll back to a time when you know the system was in order, if a problem arises with data, apps, or customizations.

When you perform a restore, you create a new environment with the restored database. You can’t restore on top of the existing environment because two environments can’t share the same name.

Recover a deleted sandbox environment

If you have accidentally deleted a sandbox environment, you can restore it. In the admin center you find a list of recently deleted environments, and from there you can recover a deleted environment.

What to consider before a restore

Only perform a restore if you know exactly what you are doing and know the consequences. You lose the work that has been done since the point you restore to.

You can choose to have a professional review the consequences, or you can take the responsibility yourself. Either way, the initiative must come from you.

Backup only covers Business Central

The backup in the admin center only covers Business Central. You also have emails and files that are important to protect. You or an IT-responsible person must have backup in place for everything important for operations. Read more in the security chapter.

Data volumes and capacity usage

You have 80 GB of storage available across all environments as a baseline. On top of that you get an additional quota per user:

Most companies have ample capacity.

What happens when you reach the limit

The system doesn’t shut down or become slower if you reach the limit. Your existing environments keep running undisturbed. You are only prevented from creating new environments or copying existing ones.

As ERP manager it is a good idea to have insight into what is filling up the different environments.

The Capacity page in the admin center

In the admin center you have access to the Capacity page. There you can see:

• how much space each environment uses
• how much of your total quota is used
• whether there are unused sandbox environments you can delete

If you have several sandbox environments that you created for a test three months ago and they are sitting unused, they take up unnecessary space. You can delete them yourself in the admin center. A copy of a 5 GB operating company also takes up 5 GB in the sandbox.

Table Information: which tables take up most space

Inside Business Central you can use the Table Information page to see which tables take up the most space. If you have 8 companies, that means 8 item tables and 8 customer tables. The page can be heavy to run, but it gives a useful overview of where the space is going.

Tenant Media and app data take up more than many think

A typical place where data piles up is Tenant Media. That is where Business Central stores attachments, images, and PDFs. If you send many emails with invoices as PDF attachments, it can take up a surprising amount over time.

It isn’t only Business Central’s own data that takes up space. Your apps can also contribute. If you use an app for scanning purchase invoices, it may store all scanned PDFs directly in the database. At companies with many incoming invoices that can take up considerable space.

How to reduce capacity usage

Some options for reducing capacity usage:

• move app data to external storage like Azure Blob Storage if the app supports it
• move images and documents to SharePoint instead of storing them in Business Central
• clean up unused sandboxes in the admin center
• set up retention policies (see next section)

As ERP manager you must take the initiative yourself to clean up data and watch what is taking up too much space. Your ERP partner won’t do that on their own unless you have agreed they have that task.

Retention policies for data: automatic deletion

In addition to manual checks, you should have a retention policy that handles data that is no longer needed. Business Central stores a lot of data, but not all of it should be kept forever:

• some is necessary for the system to function correctly
• some is necessary to comply with legislation
• the rest is data clutter you can choose to delete

Examples of areas where you can set up policies

You can set up retention policies on, for example:

• sent emails
• archived purchase orders
• archived sales orders
• change log entries
• job queue log entries

How to set up a retention policy

Business Central has a function for retention policies:

1. Choose a table
2. Define a retention period
3. Optionally add filters so only certain records in the table are affected
4. Business Central creates a job queue that automatically deletes records beyond the period

Example of a concrete policy

You can set up a policy like this:

• sent emails: kept for six months
• job queue log entries: deleted after one month
• change log entries: kept for one year

Limitations on retention policies

Retention policies cover by default only a specific list of tables that Microsoft has made available. If you want to create a retention policy on tables from apps or custom-developed functionality, it requires that a developer add the tables.

Clean up open purchase orders that are already completed

A good example: purchase orders that are fully received and fully invoiced still sit open in the system. When you post the invoice, Business Central doesn’t delete the open purchase order. You have a purchase order sitting there that nobody needs, but that fills up your lists and can confuse planning runs. You shouldn’t delete them manually. Set up a job queue that performs the cleanup.

We recommend that the job queue cleans up continuously so it can take the deletions in small chunks. If Business Central has to evaluate several years of data at once, it feels overburdened.

G/L entries have separate rules

Rules for deletion of general ledger entries are governed under Finance setup, where it can be date-controlled. Most jurisdictions have legal requirements to retain accounting data for a number of years, so you need to know what applies in the countries where you operate.

GDPR and personal data in Business Central

As ERP manager you must address whether your company handles personally identifiable data in Business Central, and whether you do so in compliance with the law.

Personal data vs. sensitive personal data

Both types are subject to GDPR, but sensitive personal data imposes stricter requirements on how you handle and store it.

Data responsibility: your company is the data controller

Your company is the data controller. Microsoft is the data processor. Microsoft ensures that data is stored securely and encrypted in their data centers, but they take no responsibility for how you use data in your solution. Your ERP partner can help with the setup, but it is you who must know the rules and define the requirements.

Map your personal data in Business Central

The first step is to find out whether you have sensitive personal data in Business Central and where it sits. Examples:

• national identification numbers may sit on employee cards and actually also on customer cards
• bank details and contact data
• union membership on the employee card
• absence reasons from time registrations in the projects module (illness, children, private matters)
• data from external systems via integrations

The employee card deserves particular attention. Business Central has, for example, a field for union membership, and that is sensitive personal data. If you use the projects module and receive time registrations with absence reasons, you can quickly end up with information about employees’ illness, children, and other private matters sitting in the system.

Think broader than master data

When you post documents with personal information, the information sits in the posted document. All users with access to posted documents can potentially see it.

Also think about free-text fields. Comment fields on customers, contacts, and vendors can contain all kinds of things. If your salespeople use Business Central as a CRM system and write notes about contacts, personal information can quickly accumulate that you should have a position on.

Classification of sensitivity at field level

Business Central has a tool for classifying data. You can classify fields by sensitivity:

• Sensitive
• Personal
• Confidential
• Normal

The classification forms the basis for your further handling of GDPR in the system. Microsoft makes the tool available to make your administration easier, but it is your responsibility to classify correctly.

Access management for personal data

When you know where your personal data sits, you must ensure that only the right users have access. You do that through security groups. In Entra ID you define which groups a user belongs to, and in Business Central you link permission sets to the groups.

Permission sets work on objects, not fields

Permission sets govern access to objects such as tables, pages, and reports, not to individual fields in a record. There is no functionality to ensure that a user may see a record but not certain fields in it (for example a national identification number).

If you hide a field on a page, it is only a user interface customization. Users with permissions for personalization can add the field back themselves.

You can easily restrict which tables, pages, and reports a user may see, but the restrictions work on entire tables, pages, and reports, not at field level. If you have a need for data-dependent permissions, talk to your ERP partner about how to solve it.

Masking and monitoring of sensitive fields

From 2025 Business Central has had a masking function that can hide values in text fields so they are only shown when the user actively clicks a show icon. It is light protection against shoulder-surfing in open office environments, but it doesn’t replace access management, because the data is still available in the system.

Field Monitoring on critical personal data fields

Set up Field Monitoring on critical fields such as national identification numbers and bank details. Field Monitoring sends an email to a responsible person every time someone changes a monitored value. It is a good supplement to Change Log because you are notified immediately instead of first discovering the change the next time you look at the log.

Handling subject access requests

GDPR gives individuals the right to access, rectify, delete, and restrict the processing of their personal data. Business Central has a Data Privacy tab in the Role Center for user administration, where you can handle that type of request. That assumes you have classified your data correctly.

What you can handle yourself vs. what requires your partner

The most important point is that you as ERP manager take the initiative. Find out what personal data you have, and ensure that it is classified and protected. Your ERP partner can help with the setup, but you have the responsibility yourself.

Data quality of master data

Do you as ERP manager also take responsibility for the quality of data in Business Central?

It is an important task to ensure that master data in Business Central is correct, whether you or someone else has the job. As ERP manager you must know who is responsible for which master data. It is always a slightly bigger task than you initially think.

Questions that must be answered

• which data must be registered on an item, and in what form
• what must a customer card contain for invoicing to be possible
• what are the prerequisites for a Power BI report to be accurate

The consequences of poor data quality

It is bad enough if colleagues don’t trust the data in ERP or in reporting. It can also lead to wrong decisions.

Example: you have caps categorized as clothing and T-shirts as accessories, and you can see that you make good money on clothing, so you want to scale up T-shirts. That would be a mistake because the data is wrong.

In many companies people can’t agree on what the unit cost of an item is, because everyone pulls data and calculates in their own way. We have met companies where people can’t even agree on what the item number for an item is.

Use templates for consistent record creation

A simple step that can help is to use templates. Business Central has templates for creating, for example, items, customers, and vendors.

If you set up item templates with the right default values, categories, and posting groups, you ensure that new items are created consistently. As ERP manager you should have a position on:

• which templates should be used
• who may create and edit them

It is a low-tech tool, but it makes a big difference for data quality over time.

Approval workflow for master data creation

Consider whether there should be an approval workflow on creation of master data. Should a newly created vendor be approved before it can be used? That is a question you as ERP manager must address, and it ties into the chapter on roles and permissions.

Data quality across companies and integrations

If you have many companies, data discipline is especially important to ensure that master data stays synchronized across companies.

Data quality is also about the quality of the data you receive via integrations from external systems. That is one of the reasons we see so many challenges with item numbers and unique IDs in companies with multiple systems. If you receive data from other systems, you need a position on:

• who owns the data standard
• how data quality is ensured

Master Data Management is a discipline

Master Data Management is a discipline in its own right. It requires well-defined work processes and frequent checks. Few companies have a dedicated Master Data Manager, but everyone needs there to be a role that has the responsibility.

There is no automatic agreement on what good data quality is. It must be harmonized and managed. If there is no standard for how data should be created, it ends up being created in many different ways, and you have a problem that grows every day.

Getting data out of Business Central

Business Central isn’t a closed box. You can get data out of the system in several ways.

Excel integration: Open in Excel and Edit in Excel

The Excel integration has become quite clever. From most list pages in Business Central you can click the Share icon and choose one of two options:

If you need to update prices on 200 item lines, it is far faster to do it in Excel than to type it in line by line in Business Central. You can use formulas, copy data from other sources, and when you are done, you publish the changes back.

Subscriptions and shared reports

You can subscribe to data so you can continuously extract a specific data set, for example all item ledger entries for a given period, and build Excel reports on top of it. The reports you can save and share through Business Central’s report layer, so colleagues have access to them directly from the Role Center.

Customizing printouts via Word and Excel

You have the ability to manage your printouts and document layouts via Word and Excel. In the past, that kind of report customization typically required consultant help and many hours. Today you as ERP manager can get far yourself if you are comfortable with Word and Excel.

Analysis directly in Business Central without external tools

You don’t always need to extract data from Business Central to analyze it.

Analysis mode on list pages

The Analysis mode function lets you build pivot tables directly on list pages in Business Central. You can:

• group, filter, and summarize data
• save your analyses and quickly return to them
• use Copilot support to build analyses

It is a function that is being used more and more.

Financial Reporting (formerly Account Schedules)

If you work with financial data, Business Central has a function called Financial Reporting. It was previously called Account Schedules. It is a tool where you can build your own financial reports with rows and columns and draw on G/L accounts, dimensions, and budgets. You can build quite advanced reports directly in Business Central, without external tools.

Power BI for Business Central

Microsoft has launched a new generation of standard Power BI reports for Business Central, covering:

• finance
• sales
• purchasing
• inventory
• manufacturing
• projects

The reports are installed as Power BI apps, and much can be displayed directly inside Business Central. You can get far with analysis and reporting without investing in custom-built BI solutions.

The interaction between Power BI and Business Central deserves its own guide, so we don’t dive further into the details here. You can confidently take it on. There are good possibilities, and it has become much easier.