Business Central handles a fair amount of finance work without help. Purchase invoices route through approval workflows you configure yourself, reminders and finance charge memos go out on a schedule, incoming payments reconcile against bank feeds, and the aging report pulls from the same ledger everyone else is looking at. For a company posting a few hundred invoices a month, that is usually enough.
The pressure builds when volume climbs, and for Business Central customers it builds at two particular points. The first is the front door. Business Central has no OCR engine of its own. Microsoft’s own documentation is direct about it: the OCR feature is provided by external providers, and you are expected to choose a service package appropriate for your organization and region (Microsoft Learn). Everything arriving as a PDF, a scan, an EDI file or a supplier portal download has to become structured data somehow, and out of the box that somehow is a third party.
The second point is approval. Business Central’s approval engine works, but approvers act on a Requests to Approve page inside the Business Central client. That is a reasonable design when your approvers are accountants. It becomes a bottleneck the moment approval depends on a plant manager, a project lead or a regional director who does not have a Business Central licence, does not want one, and will not open a finance system to unblock a EUR 4,000 invoice.
Business Central has crossed 55,000 customers, a figure Microsoft shared at Directions North America in April 2026, up from roughly 50,000 five months earlier (MSDynamicsWorld). A lot of those companies are growing into exactly these two problems at once. This guide covers what “integrates with Business Central” actually means, what the platform does natively so you are not paying a vendor to rebuild it, and eight tools worth putting on a shortlist.
What “integrates with Business Central” actually means
Every vendor on this list says it integrates with Business Central. Behind that phrase sit three different architectures with different consequences for your upgrade cycle, your data residency position and your IT team’s workload. A listing on Microsoft AppSource tells you less than most buyers assume, because AppSource carries all three.
An extension that runs inside Business Central
This is an app written in AL and installed into your environment, either from the marketplace or through Extension Management. Invoice data stays inside the Business Central database, which means it stays inside whichever Azure geography you selected when the environment was provisioned. There is no second copy of your vendor master sitting in a vendor’s cloud.
The cost is coupling. Microsoft ships two major updates a year, on the first working day of April and October, each with a five month update period, a one month grace period and then an enforced update (Microsoft Learn). During the enforced period, extensions that block the update are uninstalled automatically. Data is retained and recoverable, but your AP process stops until a compatible version is published. That puts your invoice workflow on the same release treadmill as your ERP, and it makes the ISV’s certification speed your problem twice a year.
Extensions are also validated by country. That is why several Business Central ISVs publish separate apps per market rather than one global build, and why “it’s on AppSource” is not the same as “it’s available where you operate”.
A connect app that talks to Business Central over the API
Here the vendor’s platform sits outside Business Central and calls in through the REST API, which is enabled by default on Business Central online. The vendor holds the data, processes it, and writes results back as posted purchase invoices, journal entries or applied payments. On AppSource these appear under a connect listing, which looks identical to an extension listing in search results and is architecturally the opposite thing.
The upside is that the October release does not uninstall anything. The vendor absorbs Business Central’s API changes on their side, and you are not blocked by a certification queue. The trade-off is real and worth asking about directly: your invoice, vendor and customer data now lives in a second system under that vendor’s residency and retention terms. Ask where it is stored, who sub-processes it and what happens to it if you leave.
Throughput is the other thing to check. Business Central’s OData limits run to 6,000 requests per user in a rolling five minute window, with batches capped at 100 operations and a ten minute execution ceiling on REST calls (Microsoft Learn). A well built connector distributes load, uses webhooks rather than polling and retries with backoff. A poorly built one discovers those limits during your month end close.
Middleware and file transfer
The third pattern is an iPaaS layer or scheduled flat files. It is still common for vendors supporting older Dynamics products alongside Business Central, and at least one major AP vendor openly runs API integration for Business Central and file-based integration for its legacy Dynamics lines. File transfer works. It is just batch, which means your ledger is accurate as of the last run rather than as of now, and it means someone owns a set of mappings that nobody documented.
If you want the broader version of this argument across ERP platforms, how ERP integration can supercharge your finance processes covers the same ground without the Business Central specifics.
What Business Central already does, and where it stops
Paying a vendor to replicate native functionality is the most common way these projects lose money. Here is the honest line.
On the payables side
Business Central gives you an approval workflow engine with approver hierarchies, delegation, substitute approvers and email notification (Microsoft Learn). It gives you the Incoming Documents page, a job queue that shuttles files to and from an external OCR service, text-to-account mapping and an OCR data correction screen for training. Microsoft is explicit that if your scenario needs a workflow event the default version does not support, the answer is Power Automate.
Microsoft’s own Payables Agent has moved into this space, monitoring a designated mailbox, extracting PDF data through Azure Document Intelligence and drafting purchase invoices for a human supervisor. It is genuinely useful and it is also clearly scoped. At the time of writing Microsoft documents it as English only, billed through Copilot Credits rather than included in the Business Central licence, capped at 100 emails and 500 invoices a day, PDF attachments only, skipping files over ten pages or 5 MB, with no approval flow automation and no anomaly detection (Microsoft Learn).
Read those limits against your own numbers. If you process 300 invoices a month in English from a stable supplier base, you may not need a third party at all. If you process 15,000 a year across five countries with EDI, supplier portals and the occasional fax-quality scan, the gap is capture at scale, line level three way matching with tolerances, and approval routing that reaches people outside finance.
On the receivables side
Business Central is stronger here than most buyers expect. It natively supports customer statements, multi level reminders with grace periods and reminder terms, finance charge memos with multiple interest rates, batch jobs to generate both on a schedule, and an On Hold flag to suppress chasing on disputed entries (Microsoft Learn).
What it does not give you is a customer self-service portal, card or ACH acceptance against an open invoice, payment links on the invoice itself, prioritised or predictive collections, or collector workflow as distinct from scheduled dunning. Reminders are a batch job. Collections is a discipline. The distinction is the whole reason the AR vendors below exist, and it is the same distinction we drew in setting the gold standard for modern collections automation.
Why AP and AR belong in the same evaluation
Most Business Central buyers run these as two projects, usually a year or two apart, because the pain arrives at different times. Payables usually goes first, since invoice volume is visible and late payment is embarrassing. Receivables follows when DSO shows up in a board pack.
Running them separately is defensible. Running them without checking the other side first is expensive, for three reasons.
Integration work does not halve when you do it twice. If you buy an AP tool with its own connector and an AR tool with its own connector, you now maintain two integrations against the same twice-yearly Business Central release cycle, two sets of GL and dimension mappings, and two vendors to coordinate when the October update lands. The second integration project rarely costs less than the first.
Working capital is one number. Your payables position and your receivables position determine cash together, and they sit in two systems that reconcile only in the ledger. Forecasting against that means exporting from both. We covered why this matters in how integrated AP and AR software transforms finance beyond basic automation.
Licensing and TCO look different at the bundle level. Two mid-market point tools frequently cost more over three years than one platform covering both, once implementation, integration maintenance and internal admin time are counted. How to evaluate the total cost of ownership of finance automation software breaks down the categories that tend to get missed.
None of that means you must buy both at once. It means you should know what the AR answer looks like before you sign the AP contract, even if AR is eighteen months away.
Where approvals actually happen, and why Teams is the sharp question here
This is the part of a Business Central evaluation that most shortlists underweight, and it is worth its own section because the answer is unusually clear cut.
Almost every AP tool in the Business Central ecosystem solves the approver problem the same way: a web approval portal. Continia has one, SignUp Software has one, Equisys has one, Rillion has one. The logic is sound. Approvers get a browser link, they do not consume a Business Central licence, and the vendor controls the experience end to end.
The problem is behavioural rather than technical. A web portal is another place to go, another set of credentials to recover, another tab that gets closed. Approvals do not stall because managers refuse to approve. They stall because approving requires leaving whatever the manager was already doing, and the invoice is never the most urgent thing on that person’s screen.
Microsoft’s own tooling gets close to solving this but does not quite. The Business Central app for Teams does four things: look up contacts, share records as interactive cards, share page links, and pin Business Central pages as tabs. It does not do document approval (Microsoft Learn). The separate Approvals app in Teams runs on Power Automate and can be wired to Business Central through the Power Automate connector, but that is a build, not a setting, and the connector currently does not support service principal or managed identity authentication, which limits how it scales.
So when you ask a vendor “can my plant managers approve in Teams”, listen carefully to the answer. “Yes, through Power Automate” means you or your partner are building and maintaining that flow. “Yes, through our portal” means a browser tab, not Teams. A first party Teams app that renders the invoice, the attachments and the approve or reject action inside the conversation is a materially different thing, and at the time of writing very few vendors in this ecosystem offer one.
It is worth being specific about what a Teams approval surface should include before you accept the claim: the invoice image and supporting attachments visible without leaving the chat, the ability to add a note or pull in a colleague, an audit trail that writes back to the ERP, and single sign-on through Microsoft Entra ID so there is no second credential. Anything short of that is a notification, not an approval.
Eight questions worth asking before you shortlist your AP or AR vendor for Business Central
Ask these of every vendor, in writing, and compare the answers side by side rather than the feature matrices.
- Is your Business Central integration an AL extension, a connect app calling the API, or middleware? The answer determines who owns compatibility every April and October.
- Where does our invoice, vendor and customer data physically sit, and who sub-processes it? If the answer is a vendor cloud, get the geography in writing.
- Which Business Central versions and countries is the integration certified for? Country-specific builds are normal in this ecosystem and catch multi-entity buyers out.
- Does it write back at record level, and what exactly comes back? Posted invoice, applied cash, payment status and dispute outcome returning to the ledger is the difference between automation and a parallel system of record.
- Where do approvers approve, and do they need a Business Central licence? See the section above.
- Does it handle AP, AR, or both, and if both, is it one integration or two?
- What happens to our workflow during the enforced update window if your app is not yet certified for the new major version?
- What does year three cost? Not year one. Implementation, connector maintenance, volume overages and the internal admin time nobody budgets for.
For the version of this that applies to any ERP, how to choose the right AP and AR software in 2026 goes deeper on evaluation criteria.
The 8 best AP and AR automation tools for Business Central in 2026
These are ordered by breadth of coverage rather than by preference. Several are excellent at one thing and deliberately do not attempt the other.
1. Serrala
Serrala covers both payables and receivables on Business Central from a single platform, connecting through a documented REST API with bi-directional, real-time sync, so transactions post back as they are processed. Business Central stays the system of record and Serrala runs as the execution layer on top of it.
On payables that means invoice capture across formats, invoice processing and approval routing, a supplier portal and compliant e-invoicing across jurisdictions. On receivables it covers cash application, credit and risk management, collections and a customer payment portal. The architecture is modular, so payables first and receivables later does not mean a second integration project.
The Business Central specific argument is the Teams app. Serrala’s Teams application is certified by Microsoft and listed in Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, and Microsoft’s own certification record describes it as letting users review, approve or reject supplier invoices and credit limit requests directly in Teams, with supporting attachments, notes and the ability to suggest additional reviewers, all inside the chat interface. That record also confirms ISO 27001 certification, Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on with Conditional Access support, data stored in the Netherlands, and no data transfer to third parties or sub-processors (Microsoft app certification). Serrala’s own figures put the effect at up to 90% faster invoice approvals, and there is more detail on the Microsoft Teams app page.
Configuration sits with finance. GL codes, cost centres, vendor master and payment terms are set up by the finance team rather than queued behind an IT project, which matters on Business Central where the customer often has a lean internal IT function and a partner on retainer.
Best fit: mid-market and multinational organisations on Business Central, typically processing 20,000 invoices a year or more, operating across multiple entities or currencies, with approvers outside the finance team. Also a strong fit for groups running Business Central in some entities and SAP or another ERP elsewhere, since the same platform covers SAP-embedded and cloud-native deployment options without forcing consolidation onto one ERP.
Worth knowing: Serrala’s Dynamics support starts with Business Central. If your group standardised on Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, confirm scope before you shortlist. It is also a full finance automation platform rather than a point tool, so if your only problem is coding non-PO invoices, it is more platform than you need.
2. Continia
Continia is the default answer in the Business Central ecosystem and deserves to be. Document Capture runs as a native extension inside Business Central rather than as a separate application, which means invoice data never leaves the Business Central database, and the company is Dynamics-only, with over 21,000 customers and a partner network of around 2,000 by its own count. Coverage spans AP capture and approval, with Payment Management extending into vendor, employee and customer payments plus bank reconciliation.
Best fit: small and mid-market Business Central customers who want everything inside the ERP, have a strong implementation partner, and value native behaviour over platform breadth.
Worth knowing: two things. Approval happens in the Business Central client or in Continia’s own web approval portal, not in Teams. And Payment Management is being consolidated into Continia Banking, with new development and sales of the older payment products being wound down and maintenance for older Business Central versions ending in April 2027. If payments are part of your scope, ask which product you are actually buying and what the migration path looks like.
3. SignUp Software (ExFlow)
ExFlow is embedded directly into the Dynamics AP module and carries Microsoft Preferred Solution status on AppSource, which is a meaningful signal on a marketplace where the badge is not handed out freely. It covers capture, matching, approval and coding, with adjacent modules for travel and expense, e-invoicing and carbon reporting. Unusually among Dynamics-focused vendors, it supports both Business Central and Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, which helps if your group runs both.
Best fit: Business Central customers who want AP handled properly and natively, particularly in Northern Europe where SignUp Software’s partner network is deepest.
Worth knowing: AP only. There is no receivables story here, so if collections or cash application is on your roadmap you are buying a second tool and a second integration. Approvals run through ExFlow’s web portal rather than Teams.
4. Medius
Medius brings enterprise-grade AP to Business Central through its own cloud integration, listed on the marketplace for Essentials and Premium, available across 25 countries, with user provisioning through Microsoft Entra ID and SCIM. Master data flows in, invoices come back as purchase invoices and posted purchase invoices with full coding. It is multi-ERP by design, with connectors spanning SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Infor and both Dynamics lines.
Best fit: mid-market and enterprise organisations, often ones running Business Central in some entities and a heavier ERP elsewhere, that want one AP process across all of them.
Worth knowing: AP only, and explicitly not aimed at small businesses. Medius states plainly that alternative integrations for AP automation are not considered, meaning you use their integration framework or nothing. Setup also requires username alignment between the Business Central employee record and Entra ID display names, which sounds trivial and is a common cause of slipped go-live dates.
5. Stampli
Stampli connects to Business Central through a flexible API connection, with a bridge component for on-premises deployments, and is unusually candid about the mid-market: its own material acknowledges that most mid-market companies tailor Business Central to fit industry-specific processes, and the product is built to sit on top of that rather than fight it. The collaboration model, which keeps the conversation about an invoice attached to the invoice itself, is the genuine differentiator.
Best fit: mid-market Business Central customers with heavily customised environments and a lot of back-and-forth on invoice queries.
Worth knowing: AP only. Because it connects over API rather than running inside Business Central, your invoice data lives in Stampli’s cloud, so the residency and retention questions above apply. Support spans 70-plus systems, which is a strength for multi-ERP groups and a signal that Business Central is one of many rather than the primary target.
6. Tipalti
Tipalti’s strength is global supplier payments rather than invoice capture, and that framing matters. The Business Central integration is configured entirely from Tipalti’s own interface with no extension installed, mapping one Tipalti payer entity to one Business Central company, then syncing vendors, bills, payments and items with field, dimension and GL mapping. If you pay suppliers across many countries and currencies and the payment execution itself is the hard part, this is the specialist.
Best fit: Business Central customers with international supplier bases, high payment volumes and multi-entity structures, particularly in technology, marketplaces and services.
Worth knowing: the payer-to-company mapping cannot be changed after the first sync, which makes the initial entity design decision permanent in practice. Payment terms must originate in Business Central, and syncing bills without vendors can fail where new vendors are created on the Tipalti side. AP only, and the breadth of the payments platform is more than an AP-only buyer typically needs.
7. Versapay
Versapay is the most established AR option with a purpose-built Business Central presence, published on the marketplace under its ChargeLogic lineage following the 2020 merger. It covers payment processing and posting to cash receipts journals, invoice presentment and delivery, a customer payment portal, collections and reconciliation, across cards, ACH, bank transfer and cheque, with visibility surfaced in the Business Central Role Center.
Best fit: mid-market B2B companies in wholesale distribution, manufacturing and professional services that want customers to be able to pay an invoice online and see their account.
Worth knowing: the evidenced payment coverage is North America. If you invoice across Europe or APAC, confirm coverage for your markets before you get attached to the demo. AR only, so payables is a separate purchase.
8. Quadient AR
Quadient AR, formerly YayPay, brings collections workflow, customer communication and cash application to Business Central through prebuilt bi-directional connectors, with a dedicated Business Central landing page and separate integrations across the wider Dynamics family including GP and NAV.
Best fit: B2B finance teams with multiple subsidiaries and currencies that need collections workflow and customer communication rather than payment processing.
Worth knowing: the Business Central integration is thinly documented publicly compared with the rest of this list, so ask for the technical specification and a reference customer on Business Central specifically rather than on Dynamics generally. Public documentation also does not evidence promise-to-pay tracking or payment plans, which are worth confirming if your collections process depends on them. AR only.
Matching the tool to your Business Central environment
A few shortcuts, offered in the spirit of saving you three demos.
If you are under roughly 5,000 invoices a year, in one country, in English, with approvers who all hold Business Central licences, start by testing what you already own. Configure the native approval workflow properly, evaluate Microsoft’s Payables Agent against its documented limits, and see what is actually left over. Plenty of companies buy automation to work around a workflow nobody ever finished configuring.
If your problem is purely capture and coding in a single-country Business Central estate, a native extension is the cleanest answer and Continia or SignUp Software are the obvious places to look.
If your problem is that invoices sit for eleven days waiting on a manager who does not open Business Central, the question is not OCR accuracy. It is where approval happens. Weight the shortlist accordingly.
If you run Business Central in some entities and SAP, NetSuite or another ERP elsewhere, buying a Business Central-only tool solves one entity and creates a reporting problem across the rest. Multi-ERP platforms exist for this reason.
If you are a smaller organisation and want AP and AR from one lightweight vendor, BILL has offered a two-way Business Central sync since 2021 and covers both, though it is aimed at the small business and lower mid-market end. At the opposite extreme, HighRadius has a Business Central listing but is built for enterprises processing well over 10,000 invoices a month, and the fit for a typical Business Central customer is worth testing hard before you engage.
For the wider market across every ERP, our guides to the top 10 AP automation software solutions and the top 10 AR automation software solutions cover the same vendors without the Business Central lens. If a comparable evaluation for a different ERP is useful, the 7 best AP and AR automation tools for IFS follows the same structure.
How Serrala works in a Business Central environment
Serrala has spent 40 years automating finance processes for the office of the CFO, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 sits alongside SAP, NetSuite, IFS, Infor, Sage, Workday, Epicor, Unit4, QAD and Acumatica in a connector library that Serrala builds, certifies and maintains directly.
For Business Central customers the practical argument has two parts. The first is the connector: a documented REST API integration with bi-directional real-time sync, so payments and invoices post to Business Central as they are processed rather than overnight, with Business Central remaining the financial system of record. The second is where the work actually gets done. Capture, matching, approval routing, cash application, credit decisions and customer communication run in Serrala, and the results are written back where they belong. No parallel system of record, no export-and-reconcile step at close, no custom middleware for your partner to look after through the next release.
The Teams app is what makes this land differently on Business Central than on other ERPs. Approvers who will never log into a finance system approve supplier invoices and credit limit requests in the tool they already have open, with the document and its attachments in front of them, and the decision writes back to the ledger. Serrala’s own figures put process efficiency gains at up to 80% and approval speed at up to 90% faster. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration page has the current scope, and our earlier write-up of the Teams app covers how it came about.
If you want a number before you talk to anyone, the AP automation ROI calculator takes a few minutes, and there is an AR equivalent if receivables is the more pressing case. For the wider picture of how finance automation and ERP systems fit together, the ERP integration overview is a good place to start.
Frequently asked questions about Business Central finance automation
Does Business Central have built-in AP and AR functionality?
Yes, and more than most buyers assume. Business Central natively provides approval workflows with approver hierarchies and delegation, an Incoming Documents framework, text-to-account mapping, customer statements, multi-level reminders with grace periods, finance charge memos and batch jobs to run them on a schedule. What it does not include is an OCR engine, which Microsoft explicitly leaves to external providers, or collections workflow as distinct from scheduled dunning, or a customer self-service payment portal.
Can I approve invoices in Microsoft Teams with Business Central?
Not out of the box. Microsoft’s Business Central app for Teams shares records and pins pages as tabs but does not perform document approval. You can build approval into Teams using Power Automate and the Approvals app, which is a development and maintenance commitment rather than a configuration step, or you can use a vendor that ships a first-party Teams approval app. Very few vendors in the Business Central ecosystem do, so treat it as a qualifying question rather than an assumption.
What is the difference between an AppSource extension and a connect app?
An extension is written in AL and runs inside your Business Central environment, so data stays in the Business Central database and inside your chosen Azure geography, but the app has to stay certified against Business Central’s twice-yearly major releases or it can be uninstalled during the enforced update window. A connect app runs outside Business Central and calls the REST API, so releases do not disrupt it, but your data is held in the vendor’s cloud under their terms. Both appear on AppSource and look similar in search results.
Do I need Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations rather than Business Central for serious AP automation?
No. The capability gap that matters is between Business Central and the automation layer on top of it, not between Business Central and Finance and Operations. Business Central customers routinely process six-figure annual invoice volumes with a capture and approval platform layered over the ERP. Do check which Dynamics products each vendor supports, though, because several are Business Central only and several are Finance and Operations only.
Can I automate AP and AR separately, or do I need both at once?
Separately is fine and common. The thing to avoid is buying an AP tool without knowing what your AR answer looks like, because a second vendor means a second integration maintained against the same release cycle, a second set of GL and dimension mappings, and working capital data split across two systems. Decide the destination, then sequence the journey.
How long does a Business Central AP or AR automation project take?
It depends on entity count, integration scope and how clean your master data is, but the honest range for a single-entity Business Central deployment is weeks rather than quarters, with multi-entity and multi-country rollouts running in phases over several months. The variable that moves the timeline most is rarely the technology. It is how long it takes to agree the approval matrix.
Does adding an automation platform change which system is the system of record?
It should not. Business Central stays the financial system of record. The automation layer handles capture, matching, routing, cash application and customer communication, then posts the results back into Business Central. If a vendor’s architecture requires you to treat their platform as the source of truth for financial data, that is a significant decision and it should be a deliberate one rather than a side effect of the integration design.
