Cloud Bridge Consulting Services implements, upgrades and extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central so finance, sales, inventory, manufacturing and projects run on one connected system instead of a patchwork of spreadsheets, legacy add-ons and disconnected tools.
Most businesses don't decide to outgrow their systems on a particular day — it happens gradually, until finance, operations and leadership are each working from a different version of the truth.
Inventory counts live in one workbook, sales pipeline in another, and month-end close depends on someone manually reconciling exports from three places. Every hand-off is a place errors get introduced and nobody notices until the numbers don't tie out.
Older NAV and GP installations were often heavily customised by consultants who are no longer reachable, run on infrastructure the business now has to maintain itself, and fall further behind as Microsoft's investment moves to the cloud platform.
An ERP implemented to a generic template — rather than configured around how the business actually invoices, ships, manufactures or bills projects — pushes teams back into workarounds, shadow spreadsheets and manual journal entries within a year of go-live.
A second warehouse, a new subsidiary, a jump in order volume or a first move into manufacturing or project billing will find every place the current setup was held together manually — usually at the worst possible time, during month-end or a busy season.
We work across the full lifecycle of a Business Central environment — from first implementation through to ongoing extension, integration and support.
Full lifecycle Business Central implementations scoped around your actual chart of accounts, processes and reporting requirements — not a generic template rolled out unchanged.
General ledger, accounts payable and receivable, multi-currency, fixed assets, cash flow and bank reconciliation, and dimension-based reporting configured for how your business actually closes the books.
Quote-to-cash and requisition-to-pay workflows, pricing and discount structures, approval hierarchies and document flows aligned to how your sales and procurement teams actually work.
Item tracking, bins, lot and serial control, replenishment and warehouse workflows configured for real stock movement — not a simplified pilot setup that breaks under volume.
Bills of materials, routings, production orders, capacity and machine centres, and standard or actual costing configured for discrete or process manufacturing environments.
Job and project structures, resource and time tracking, WIP and job costing configured so project profitability is visible while a project is running, not only after it closes.
Demand and supply planning, vendor and item substitution rules, drop shipment and intercompany flows configured to reflect how goods actually move through your business.
Structured upgrade paths from older Dynamics NAV versions and migrations from Dynamics GP into Business Central. See our dedicated upgrade & migration guidance.
Configuration-first changes wherever the base application supports them, keeping the environment upgrade-safe and reducing what needs to be custom-built or maintained long term.
Where configuration isn't enough, we build extensions in Microsoft's AL language using the supported extension model. See AL extension development for a deeper look at how we approach custom development.
Connecting Business Central to e-commerce platforms, CRM, banking, EDI, payroll and other line-of-business systems through APIs and connectors, so data is entered once and used everywhere.
Approval workflows, notifications and Power Automate flows layered on top of Business Central to remove manual steps around invoicing, purchasing and exception handling.
Business Central implementations succeed or fail on how well they're scoped and configured before go-live. We follow a consistent, structured approach on every engagement.
We map current processes, systems and pain points across finance, operations and reporting, and assess what a legacy NAV, GP or spreadsheet-based setup is actually costing the business.
We design the Business Central environment around your chart of accounts, approval structures, inventory and production model, prioritising configuration over custom code.
Master and transactional data is migrated, integrations to CRM, e-commerce and other systems are built, and any required AL extensions are developed and tested.
We support the transition to live operation, then work with your team to refine configuration, reporting and automation as real usage surfaces further opportunities.
Business Central is Microsoft's cloud ERP platform, built on an architecture designed to stay current, extensible and secure without the on-premises maintenance burden of older Dynamics NAV or GP installations.
Business Central runs as a multi-tenant software-as-a-service application on Microsoft's infrastructure, with Microsoft handling patching, upgrades and platform-level uptime rather than your IT team maintaining on-premises servers.
Custom functionality is built as extensions in the AL language rather than as direct changes to base application code. This keeps your environment upgrade-safe — extensions are re-validated against new releases instead of being overwritten by them.
Companies, general ledger entries, dimensions, items, resources, customers and vendors sit in one underlying data model, so a transaction posted in one module is immediately consistent with every module that touches it.
Access is governed through role-based permission sets and Microsoft Entra ID identity, so user access, approval limits and data visibility can be controlled precisely by role, company or department.
Business Central doesn't operate in isolation. It's built to connect to the wider Microsoft ecosystem — Power Platform for workflow and app extension, Dynamics 365 CRM for the customer-facing side of the business, and Azure for integration and identity. Our platform expertise spans this full stack, and our dedicated Power Platform page covers the automation and app-building side in more depth.
The difference between Business Central and a collection of disconnected tools is that finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing and projects all read from and write to the same underlying data — so a change in one place is visible everywhere else immediately.
In practice, this means a sales order consumes inventory that finance can see valued on the balance sheet in real time; a purchase receipt updates vendor liability and stock on hand together; and a project's recorded time and materials flow straight into job costing and revenue recognition — without a separate reconciliation step between systems.
A connected data model is only useful if leadership can actually see it. Business Central's own role-based dashboards give day-to-day visibility, but most of our clients extend that into Power BI for consolidated, cross-module reporting.
Business Central gives operational teams the views they need to do their jobs — open orders, aged receivables, stock on hand. Power BI is where finance and leadership get consolidated reporting across companies, trend analysis over time, and dashboards built around the metrics that matter to the business, not just the transaction. For how we design and build that layer, see Power BI, Reporting & Business Analytics.
Explore reporting & analytics →Every environment is different, and results depend on how disorganised the starting point was and how thoroughly the new system is adopted. In our experience, businesses moving from disconnected tools or a legacy Dynamics NAV or GP setup to a properly configured Business Central environment typically see the following.
Fewer manual reconciliations between systems means finance spends less time chasing numbers and more time reviewing them.
Data entered once in a sales order, purchase order or timesheet flows through to inventory, finance and reporting without being re-keyed.
Job costing that updates as work happens, rather than after a project closes, gives project managers a chance to act while there's still time to.
Moving off self-hosted NAV or GP infrastructure removes the burden of patching, backups and hardware refresh cycles from the IT team.
Configuration-first design and extensions built on the supported AL model mean future Business Central releases are far less likely to break custom functionality.
Adding a warehouse, entity, currency or manufacturing line is a configuration exercise on a platform designed for it, rather than a re-implementation.
Our Business Central work sits within the broader Microsoft cloud stack, which is what allows finance, operations, sales and reporting to stay connected rather than becoming separate systems that need to be integrated after the fact.
If your business is currently on Dynamics NAV or Dynamics GP, moving to Business Central is a structured upgrade rather than a re-implementation from scratch — existing data, processes and institutional knowledge carry forward. We've written a dedicated guide to how we plan and run these upgrades, including how to sequence a migration around your business's own calendar.
See NAV & GP Upgrade GuidanceIt depends heavily on scope. A single-entity implementation with standard finance, sales and inventory modules typically runs from a few weeks to a few months. Adding manufacturing, multiple entities, complex integrations or a migration from legacy NAV or GP extends that timeline. We scope a realistic timeframe during the discovery phase rather than quoting a generic figure up front.
Typically: process discovery and solution design, Business Central configuration, data migration from your existing system, any required integrations and AL extensions, user training, and support through go-live. The exact scope is defined together with you before work begins, and we're clear about what's in and out of scope.
A generic implementation applies a standard template with minimal configuration to how your business actually operates. We configure Business Central around your real chart of accounts, approval structures, inventory model and reporting needs, and we prioritise configuration over custom code so the environment stays upgrade-safe over time.
No — Business Central is a complete ERP on its own, with built-in role-based dashboards and reporting. Power BI and Power Platform become valuable once you want consolidated reporting across entities, more advanced analytics, or workflow automation beyond what's built into the base application. We can implement Business Central alone or as part of a wider platform build.