Addressing Practical Business Central Limitations Without Added Complexity

Welcome and Agenda

Hi, good day everyone. This is Eric, and today I’m going to take you through some of the free applications available from InsightWorks for Business Central.

Quick agenda: I’ll briefly cover who we are and what we do, then we’ll talk about the broader list of applications that we offer, and then we’ll dive right into the free apps.

Most of today is going to be a software demo, and it’ll take about 45 minutes, give or take. If you have any questions as we go through, feel free to enter those in the question panel in GoToWebinar and I’ll try to answer them as we go along.

We’re recording this as well, so you’ll get a copy of the recording after the session.

About InsightWorks

A little bit about InsightWorks: I won’t go through all of this in detail, but we work primarily in manufacturing and warehousing, with some retail counter sales capability as well.

We work primarily through our reseller partners. So if you have questions about the user experience, or if you want to try out any of our apps, reach out to your partner. They should be able to help you out if they’re one of our resellers. If not, you can always get in touch with us, and I’ll give you some contact information at the end of the session.

If you are a Business Central partner and you’re not one of our resellers yet, please reach out to us as well. We’d love to speak with you and bring you on board. You can think of our free apps as a secret weapon for your own demos to your prospects. They quickly handle those specific little things customers always ask about that aren’t included in standard Business Central, and it allows you to show a much more polished, capable system right out of the gate without any added cost.

Most of the apps are straightforward. You can likely get them working on your own, or you can contact us and we can help you with that. I’ll also give you links at the end to our knowledge base, our forum, and other resources to assist you in getting them up and running.

Application Overview and Where the Free Apps Fit

We have well over 30 applications out there. Today we’re going to focus on just the free ones, but we have many other apps available as well.

At a high level, we focus primarily on distribution, warehousing, and manufacturing. The free apps cover all those areas, but let’s look at how the broader capabilities fit together.

Warehousing and Distribution Flow

For warehousing or distribution, we typically start by planning for procurement or production. We’ll do planning, we’ll do forecasting, and then we’ll also plan fulfillment—what we can ship today.

The Enhanced Planning Pack includes a lot of tools. Two key ones we’ll talk about today—forecasting and purchase/production planning—are free.

Once we’ve planned it and bought it, we need to receive it or pick it. We have a full warehouse management solution called Warehouse Insight, and the free version of that is WMS Express. WMS Express covers the core activities you need in a warehouse, and it’s a great way to add barcoding to your existing inventory and Business Central setup.

With WMS Express, we can do shipping, picking, receiving, inventory counts, and bin movements. You plug it in and away you go.

Once the warehouse work is done, we need to get it out the door. DynamicShip is the subscription-based full shipping solution with multi-carrier rate shopping, freight shopping, international customs, and more. The free version we’ll look at today is OrderShip Express.

The big limitation of OrderShip Express is that it’s domestic parcel shipments only. It does not do international shipments, and it doesn’t do freight or LTL shipments. But if all you need is domestic parcel, you can generate shipping labels, get rates, and get tracking numbers directly in Business Central—without external software—and it’s completely free.

Manufacturing Flow

Manufacturing is similar. We start with planning—production-related and purchasing activities—and there are also analysis tools from the manufacturing perspective. Within the Enhanced Planning Pack, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are free, and we’ll look at those today.

Once we plan everything, we send it out to get scheduled. We have a full Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) solution that can generate an executable schedule while considering constraints like materials, labor, and floor space. Alternatively, if you don’t need all of that power, we have a free Graphical Scheduler that lets you drag and drop production orders and other work to schedule manually. It’s configurable and extendable.

After scheduling, we execute. Shop Floor Insight is for capturing production labor and material output, and Quality Inspector can work with that. Both are subscription-based, but Quality Inspector is essentially becoming free in a sense because Microsoft has licensed a portion of it for an upcoming quality management module that will be included with Business Central. You’ll get a light version included, while the subscription version will continue to offer more capability.

Once that’s done, the flow comes back to the warehouse and shipping side: use WMS Express or Warehouse Insight for processing, and DynamicShip or OrderShip Express to get labels and ship.

Free Apps: Availability and What’s Included

All of these apps are free if you’re using Business Central Cloud. You can go to AppSource and install them—there’s no licensing, no cost, and you don’t even need to tell us you’re using them.

If you’re on Business Central on-premise, these are not available for free. Some can be made available if you’re buying one of our paid apps.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are free for a single concurrent user.

Some of the more technical free tools—typically used by developers, consultants, or implementers—are also very popular because everybody needs them:

• PrintNode Connector for cloud printing (the connector is free; PrintNode itself is a small subscription).
• Import-Export Power Tool for managing data, especially useful for migrations.
• Barcode Generator for adding barcodes to Business Central reports, with sample reports included.

Other free tools we’ll touch on include Graphical Scheduler (drag-and-drop scheduling), Doc Extender (drag-and-drop document management with optional SharePoint storage), WMS Express, and OrderShip Express.

One more we won’t show in detail today is the Safety Log Book, which is a simple tool for tracking health and safety events—things like spills, incidents, certifications, audits, and related tracking for manufacturing and warehousing environments.

Demo Overview: End-to-End Flow in Business Central

That’s enough of the PowerPoint—let’s switch over to Business Central and see what these tools look like. We’ll follow the flow: forecasting and planning, then warehouse operations and scheduling, and finally execution and shipping.

If you attended our webinar last week on the Enhanced Planning Pack, you saw the forecasting worksheet, the planning worksheet, and the vendor summary. I’m going to go through those again briefly today.

If you’re on the cloud version of Business Central and you want these for free, the easiest way is to go to AppSource and install the Enhanced Planning Pack. You’ll get a 30-day free trial that includes additional analysis tools, and once the trial expires you still have access to the forecasting worksheet, the planning worksheet, and the vendor summary for a single concurrent user.

Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

We’ll start with forecasting, because we need to figure out what we need to plan. The Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet is a lightweight tool for sales forecasting. If you have very complex forecasting needs—like matching service level agreements or fill rates—it won’t do that.

What it does do is take your sales history for top-level sold items and run it through the Azure AI forecasting engine that Microsoft maintains. It’s similar to the forecasting you can see in Business Central’s item list fact box, but instead of working item-by-item, this lets you work in bulk and interact with the forecast more effectively.

By default, it’s for sales forecasting, but you can extend it—for example, for components—using events. You can filter down to specific items, categories, or locations, including multi-location filtering. Just note that the Azure AI forecasting model has a data limit, so you may need to filter to specific locations or categories to get results. Those limits are on Microsoft’s side and can vary by environment.

In the demo, I’m filtering to chairs across two locations, running a monthly forecast for the next three months, using the past two years of sales data. If you don’t have sales history in Business Central, the short answer is no—you do need that history available. The good news is you can use the free Import-Export Power Tool to import past sales history into Business Central so you can run forecasting.

After selecting an algorithm—these are maintained by Microsoft, and Microsoft provides documentation on them—I’ll run the forecast. In my case, it warns that I asked for 24 months of data but only have 20 months available, and it runs with what’s there.

Once the forecast is calculated, we can use it to update the demand forecast in Business Central. Demand forecasts are part of standard Business Central and can be created and edited manually, but the forecasting worksheet can update them automatically. Then, when we run planning, the planning engine uses that demand forecast to drive supply requirements.

You can have multiple demand forecasts—like low, medium, and high—to compare impacts on planning and costs.

Another option is to use the forecast to calculate reorder points and min/max stocking levels. You can define formulas in the enhanced forecast setup using expression functions that feel similar to Excel. Then you can update item planning so those calculated values update your stockkeeping units or item cards, depending on how you’re set up.

To recap: use forecasted values to update a demand forecast (which drives planning), or use them to calculate and update reorder points and min/max stocking levels.

Enhanced Planning Worksheet

Next, we’ll look at the Enhanced Planning Worksheet. After forecasting, we have an expected demand, and now we need to plan supply. This looks similar to the standard Business Central planning worksheet, but there are key differences.

One big difference is the Calculate Purchase Plan action. This is intended for distribution and warehousing environments where you’re buying to a reorder point, not based on specific demand dates. Unlike the standard regenerative plan, the purchase plan does not look at dates.

For example, if a production order needs a component by the end of February and you have a purchase order arriving mid-March, the purchase plan won’t suggest rescheduling or expediting. It sees you have supply coming and considers it good to go. In warehouse environments where you’re buying to reorder point, you often don’t want constant messages adjusting dates on purchase orders that may already be in transit.

The purchase plan is also much faster, and it’s easier for purchasers to work with in high-SKU environments.

There are options for how reorder triggers work. The default is to use reorder point, but for seasonal purchasing you could use maximum quantity instead, for example to top up to maximum levels or take advantage of vendor discounts.

You can run the plan interactively, or set it up to run automatically via a job queue. If it runs periodically, it can retain and accumulate suggested purchases in the worksheet so purchasers can review them on a schedule.

When the plan runs, you’ll see suggestions for what to purchase (or potentially manufacture, depending on setup). You also get richer fact boxes, like a supply summary and a demand summary, plus availability by location so you can consider transferring stock rather than buying, if another location has inventory.

There’s also a vendor planning summary fact box to show expected spend, thresholds like prepaid minimums, and other vendor-related information that helps you decide when to cut a purchase order.

If something looks odd—like a suggestion to buy 50 units when demand appears to be zero—you can use the built-in chart for quick visual verification of sales history. You can also quickly review planning parameters using the planning tab, where you can immediately see things like reorder point, reorder quantity, and reordering policy.

Those planning fields are editable directly on this screen, so you can change reorder point, reorder quantity, or reordering policy right there, and it updates the stockkeeping unit or item card without extra navigation.

If you use order tracking, you can also view reservations and related supply/demand details. You can also view sales history in a tabular format, in addition to the chart.

The enhanced planning worksheet also replaces the standard requisition worksheet, because you can handle drop shipments and special orders right from the same page. If you still need the standard Business Central MRP regenerative plan, it’s still available and works alongside this.

Vendor Summary

I’ll show the vendor summary briefly as well. This provides an overview of running totals of accumulated purchases that are showing up on the planning worksheet.

You can filter what vendors appear—only the ones you care about, specific product lines, or all vendors—and adjust the display based on how purchasing responsibilities are split.

If you’re running planning via job queue, a purchaser may not need to go directly to the planning worksheet. They can come to the vendor summary, see what’s happening for their vendors and product lines, drill down for detail, and decide whether to cut a purchase order.

From there, you can jump into the planning worksheet filtered to a specific vendor, create the purchase order, and optionally release and send it automatically, or leave it open. You can also manage vendor threshold settings from this screen.

Graphical Scheduler

Now that we’ve planned supply, we need to schedule production orders and receive stock. First, scheduling: I’m going to go into the Graphical Scheduler.

Planned orders can be represented visually. The default view is fairly plain, but I’ve customized mine to do things like color coding and showing load percentages on machine centers. There’s a longer video on our website that goes through setting that up.

I also have it configured to include maintenance activities, so if you’re using our maintenance manager application, you can schedule maintenance work orders alongside production.

You can click on orders to see details, highlight related operations, hover to see more information, and drill down to specific documents. You can also drag and drop to move work between centers or adjust timing, and it will reschedule related operations to keep things in sync.

You can customize time scales, create preset views, and build views for different purposes—not just production orders. There are pre-built views for things like quality inspections or warehouse pick assignments, and it’s all configurable, including custom tables, color coding, and displayed text.

WMS Express Demo: Receiving on Handheld Devices

We planned it, we scheduled it, and now we’re ready to execute. Let’s say we’re going to use handheld devices to receive parts we ordered. I’m switching to a scanner running WMS Express.

This is a rugged warehouse-style device, but you can run WMS Express on other Android devices as well—phones, tablets, and dedicated barcode scanners—so it’s very flexible.

Setup and installation is simple. You install WMS Express from AppSource into Business Central, run an assisted setup that generates a report with configuration barcodes, scan those barcodes, and the device installs and configures. Once you know what you’re doing, you can install from scratch in under 10 minutes.

On the device, you can customize the top logo to make it obvious which company or location the device is for. The app provides functions for counts, receiving, and shipping, and if you’re using a more advanced warehouse setup with picks and putaways, you’d see those icons as well.

For receiving, I open the receive function and see a list of purchase orders, and you’ll also see transfer orders. You can scroll, search by PO number, select orders via touchscreen, or use physical navigation keys on devices that have them.

Another option is to scan a barcode. I’m using a barcode sheet I generated with our Barcode Generator app, with barcodes for items, bins, and other values. From the receiving screen, I can scan an item number and it filters the list to only purchase orders containing that item, then I can open the order.

On the document screen, I see what I need to receive, with a grid view that shows more information in a compact layout. There’s also a card-style view if you want a more guided, one-line-at-a-time workflow.

The receiving process is straightforward: scan the item barcode, it finds the line, optionally shows the item picture, enter the quantity, and press OK to record the quantity to receive.

For barcode scanning, we support a wide range of barcode formats using parsing rules. If you scan Business Central item numbers, that’s easy. If you scan vendor part numbers, you can map them using item references, and you can even create those references from the scanner during receiving if you want to.

If you’re handling lot numbers, serial numbers, expiry dates, and similar tracking, the scanner can capture all of that. We can also read that information directly from barcodes automatically.

If there’s nothing to scan, you can still select the line, enter the quantity manually, and you can optionally configure the process to automatically print an internal item label during receiving—using the PrintNode Connector—so you have something to scan later for putaway, picking, or shipping.

You can also customize the device screens by choosing columns, changing column order and widths, and tailoring the display to the information your team needs.

Receiving works similarly for putaways, picks, inventory counts, and bin-to-bin movements. WMS Express covers all of those core warehouse activities.

OrderShip Express Demo: Shipping Labels in Business Central

Next, we’ll ship it out the door using OrderShip Express. From sales orders in Business Central, I can create shipping labels. In this environment, you may also see other buttons like package worksheet, freight quote, and quick label—those are part of DynamicShip. For OrderShip Express specifically, the main actions are to create shipping labels and view shipped packages.

On the sales order, I’ve predefined FedEx as the shipping agent, but you can leave that blank and choose it later when generating labels. When I click Create Shipping Labels, a page opens showing the shipping agent and service from the sales order, and I can change them if needed.

From there, I enter package details like dimensions and weight. If you use predefined package sizes (like carrier box sizes), you can select those—sometimes you get better rates using their predefined sizes.

Before getting the label, you can click Get Rate to retrieve shipping cost. In the demo, it returns a cost, and I’m charging the customer a 10% markup. You can also change the shipping agent or service to compare options.

There are shipping options you can set as well—like signature required, Saturday delivery, or shipping collect—depending on what the carrier supports. Some of these options can affect the rate, so you can set them and re-check pricing.

To ship, you enter package details (including multiple packages if needed) and click Get Label. That retrieves the label from the carrier and, using the PrintNode Connector, automatically prints it to your label printer at the shipping station—no pop-ups and no extra user interaction.

You can also view shipped packages, and if you need to reprint or handle actions like refunds depending on carrier support, you can do that from the packages page. In the demo, I reprint to show a preview, but typically it just prints automatically through PrintNode.

OrderShip Express also updates the sales order by adding a shipping charge line, recording the cost and the marked-up amount you’re charging, and saving the tracking number.

Setting this up takes about 10–20 minutes, and then you can print shipping labels directly from Business Central.

PrintNode Connector: Streamlined Cloud Printing

Just to expand on PrintNode Connector: when you print something—like reprinting a label—it automatically finds and fills in the correct printer, rather than relying on the standard “handled by browser” printing behavior in Business Central.

With PrintNode Connector, printing goes directly to the printer with no browser print dialog and no extra clicks. You set up rules using standard Business Central printer selections to control which printers different reports go to.

Doc Extender: Drag-and-Drop Document Attachments and SharePoint

I also want to show Doc Extender quickly. Say a customer emailed us a purchase order, we created the sales order, and we want to attach that PDF for reference.

In standard Business Central, you can upload files, but you have to click a couple of times to get to the drag-and-drop window. With Doc Extender installed, you get a drag-and-drop area right on the main page anywhere that the attachments fact box exists.

You can drag a PDF directly onto the page and it uploads automatically. You can configure Doc Extender to upload as a Business Central document attachment, or upload to SharePoint and create a link in the link fact box. That configuration is done in the Doc Extender setup page.

With SharePoint integration, you define your site and folder details, and Doc Extender can create a clean folder structure as it uploads. This also helps with access, because people outside of Business Central can access those documents through SharePoint without needing a Business Central license.

Barcode Generator: Barcoded Reports and Demo Barcodes

Next is the Barcode Generator. One of the primary uses is adding barcodes to reports in Business Central. If you’re a developer, you can add barcodes to any report you like, and it comes with a number of sample reports.

If you search for “barcoded,” you’ll see sample reports like barcoded picking lists, put-away lists, purchase orders, transfer orders, and more. These are based on standard Business Central documents, but with a barcode added—often using the document number.

For example, on a warehouse pick, printing defaults to the barcoded version. With PrintNode Connector, it can also print directly to the warehouse printer automatically. In preview, you can see the standard picking list layout, plus a barcode for the pick document number.

That barcode makes handheld scanning easier: you can scan the pick document number from the paper and jump straight into that pick on the device without searching through lists.

The Barcode Generator is flexible—you can add barcodes to other fields too. Some customers add barcodes for item lines on printed documents when items don’t have barcodes on the packaging.

The barcode sheet I scanned earlier is also included as a sample barcode list. You can enter values, choose barcode formats (including Data Matrix, QR codes, linear codes, and GS1-128), and set sizing options. You can print a sheet for demos and testing, or switch to a tile view to display large barcodes directly on screen for scanning.

Wrap-Up and Support Resources

That takes us through the flow: we did forecasting, planning, scheduling, execution and receiving on handhelds, and then we shipped it out.

If you have any additional questions, go to our website—there’s a chat box—or go to the support area for the knowledge base and the community forum. Talk to your partner if you want to get these applications installed, or reach out to us and we can help you with that.

I don’t see any questions in the panel, so I think we can call it there. Thanks everyone for attending. I hope you found that useful, and I hope you have a great rest of the week.