For many organisations running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the add-on stack has grown organically over years - each tool justified at the time, most quietly auto-renewed since. But the platform has changed profoundly. Here's how to work out what still belongs.
Nobody buys a bad add-on deliberately. They buy the right tool for a platform that had a gap. The problem is that Business Central has kept moving - two major release waves a year, native AI agents, embedded analytics, intelligent automation across AP, expenses, and order processing - and the add-on decisions, in most cases, have not. They were made against an earlier version of the platform and renewed on autopilot every twelve months since.
The question is no longer "can Business Central do this?". It's "which parts of our add-on stack are still solving problems the platform hasn't already solved?"
This isn't an argument against ISVs. It's an argument against paying for solutions to problems that no longer exist.
Where the platform has moved fastest:
1. Accounts payable
AP automation was one of the clearest gaps in Business Central's native capability and it created a legitimate market for dedicated platforms. OCR capture, intelligent coding, approval routing, duplicate detection: these were real limitations that required real solutions.
The Payables Agent changes that. Invoice ingestion, vendor recognition, account coding based on historical behaviour, and approval preparation are now native capabilities. Organisations who implemented a dedicated AP tool several years ago and have simply kept renewing are the most likely to be overpaying. The right question isn't whether you need AP automation - it's whether your current platform still has the gap that justified a separate licence.
2. Expense management
Receipt capture, itemisation, mileage, approvals, and AI assisted categorisation are moving into the platform. For organisations with standard expense workflows, the cost of maintaining a separate integration - the syncs, the support calls, the reconciliation queries may no longer be proportionate to what the tool delivers.
The honest test: if you were making this procurement decision today, with full knowledge of current Business Central capability, would you make the same choice?
3. Sales order processing
Think about what manual order entry costs. Not in licence fees, in the shared inboxes nobody has time to clear, the PDF attachments re-keyed by hand, the overtime during peak periods, the errors that only surface at dispatch.
The Sales Order Agent processes customer emails and attachments, checks availability, and prepares quotes automatically. The headline benefit is efficiency. The real benefit is resilience, the ability to absorb demand spikes without a headcount decision, and to maintain accuracy when volume is highest and attention is thinnest.
4. Reporting and analytics
Reporting add-ons were often the first purchase organisations made to extend Business Central. Many are still running. Embedded analytics, mature Power BI integration, and live Excel reporting now cover much of the same ground - quietly, without anyone necessarily noticing. If the reporting stack hasn't been reviewed across the last several release cycles,
it's overdue.
Where specialist ISVs still lead
There are scenarios where native Business Central does not meet requirements and is unlikely to soon. Regulated manufacturing. Complex traceability. Advanced warehouse operations. Sophisticated project costing. High-volume EDI. Multi-entity environments with specialised consolidation or governance requirements. For these, specialist platforms remain the right architectural decision.
The goal isn't to eliminate the add-on stack. It's to ensure every component is still solving a problem the platform itself cannot and that unchecked add-on growth isn't quietly becoming architecture complexity, fragmented reporting, and governance overhead.
Five questions before your next renewal
1. What problem are we solving today? | Not what we bought this tool for what operational requirement exists right now? |
2. Can native Business Central cover | A native solution at lower operational overhead may outperform a specialist |
3. What are we really paying? | Add integration maintenance, support, upgrade cycles, training, and the staff |
4. What complexity exists because this sits outside the ERP core? | Fragmented reporting, duplicated data entry, broken audit trails - these costs |
5. Would consolidation improve clarity or control, not just reduce cost? | A cleaner architecture, stronger auditability, and a more trusted source of |
The platform has moved. Have your add-on decisions?
Business Central is evolving faster than most organisations are reviewing their licences. That gap compounds quietly, costs that were justified at purchase become difficult to justify years later, not because the original decision was wrong, but because the platform changed and nobody scheduled the reassessment.
An annual add-on audit doesn't need to become a transformation programme. It starts with understanding what Business Central can now do natively, where specialist capability still adds differentiated value, and where historical architecture decisions may simply need
re-evaluation.
Ready to review your add-on stack?
We work with Business Central customers to conduct structured licence audits, mapping current add-ons against native platform capability, operational requirements, and total cost of ownership.
If you're approaching a renewal cycle, a platform roadmap discussion, or a broader ERP review, we'd be happy to have a conversation.