Microsoft has published the release notes for Business Central version 28, which reaches general availability in April 2026. The preview has been available since early March, and the feature table is substantial.
What stands out in this release is not a single headline feature. Version 28 is a layered release: platform evolution in the background, a large number of practical improvements across core business processes in the foreground. For most users and partners, that second layer is where the real impact will be felt.
Relevant documentation: What’s New in Business Central 2026 Release Wave 1 (v28)
Supply Chain and Operations: Many Small, Useful Changes
A significant portion of the release sits under supply chain management, and it is dense with specific, verifiable features that address friction points in daily operations. Here is what is confirmed at general availability:
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pictures on item variants | Store variant-level images directly on the Item Variant Card, importable or captured with a device camera |
| Item attributes per variant | Assign and override attribute values at the variant level; attributes sync from the item with a single action |
| Purchase orders from drop shipments | Create purchase orders directly from sales order drop shipment lines; drop shipments now appear in Order Planning and Planning Worksheet |
| Post drop shipment purchase invoices independently | Post purchase invoices for drop shipments without requiring the related sales invoice to be posted first |
| Reverse drop shipments | Undo posted drop shipments when both the sales shipment and purchase receipt are not yet invoiced |
| Match purchase invoices to multiple lines | Match a single purchase invoice line to multiple order and receipt lines; includes auto-receipt capability for unmatched lines |
| Filter receipt and shipment lines | Filter by Order No., Your Reference, External Document No., Vendor Order No., Vendor Shipment No., and Item Reference No. when getting lines into invoices |
| Email posted sales shipments and return receipts | Send posted shipments and return receipts by email, with PDF attachment support, aligning them with the existing sales invoice experience |
| Approval workflows for item journals and requisition worksheets | Send item journal batches and planning worksheets for approval before posting or converting to purchase documents |
| Manufacturing usability improvements | Serial number handling in output journals, location-aware capacity and overhead posting, and configurable non-certified BOM warnings |
| Service contract orders respect One Service Item Line/Order | Contract service order creation now correctly applies the One Service Item Line/Order setting from Service Management Setup |
| Quality management (preview) | Full quality check lifecycle covering purchase receipts, production and assembly output, with quarantine procedures and quality certificates |
None of these are headline features. But they remove friction that users encounter every single working day, and that matters more than it is often given credit for.
Relevant documentation:
- Managing Inventory in Business Central
- Managing Purchasing in Business Central
- Manufacturing in Business Central
Shopify Connector: Variant Support and Checkout Currency
The Shopify connector receives meaningful improvements in version 28. The connector also updates to the Shopify API released in January 2026, which is required before the 2025-07 API reaches end of support on June 30, 2026.
Key additions at general availability:
- Sync images of product variants between Business Central and Shopify, so each variant displays the correct image in the store
- Export items with product options based on item attributes, mapping up to three attributes as Shopify product options to create structured variant combinations
- Assign custom collections to exported items, which is also the foundation for Shopify tax override scenarios based on product category
- Use checkout currency when creating sales documents from Shopify orders, giving full control over shop currency versus presentment currency per shop
Variant-level image sync in particular has been a gap that forced workarounds for businesses with visually differentiated product lines.
Relevant documentation: Shopify Connector for Business Central
Reporting and Data Analysis
The reporting area continues its steady evolution, with a noticeable focus on governance, layout management, and modernized outputs:
- Report layout lifecycle management: administrators can set layouts to Draft, Pending Approval, Approved, or Retired, giving proper governance over which layouts users can access
- Financial reporting enhancements: authors can display the company logo, override defaults per report, and run reports over all dimension values; users can schedule to distribution groups and combine multiple reports into a single PDF; administrators get a new audit log for report usage
- Modernized inventory reports: RDL layouts replaced with Excel and Word layouts across Inventory Top 10, Item Availability, Item Expiration, and several others; a new Item Age Composition by Quantity and Value report is introduced
- Default document language at company level: a new field on Company Information ensures customer-facing documents use the correct language regardless of the UI language of the user generating them
- Enhanced Subscription Billing Power BI app: updated layouts across 14 reports, new profitability visuals, map charts, and drill-back to Business Central transactions
The technology is not the bottleneck in most Business Central analytics environments. Adoption is. Users do not struggle because the reports are absent. They struggle because reporting is not embedded in their daily workflow.
==> I covered this in more detail in a recent post: Business Central Analytics: The Technology Is Not the Hard Part
Relevant documentation:
Governance and Administration
This area has real substance in version 28 and is easy to overlook in a long release.
| Feature | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Permissions Overview page | GA | Unified view of permission sets across all installed apps; filter by object, extension, scope, or permission set; see which security groups and users hold each set |
| Database index management per company | GA | View index storage usage and SQL usage statistics per table; disable non-unique low-usage indexes to reduce storage costs and improve write performance |
| Read-only permission APIs | GA | Query permission sets, object permissions, security group mappings, and user assignments from external tools such as Power BI |
| Read-only approval workflow APIs | GA | Query workflows, user mappings, and action history externally; intended for audit and security reporting scenarios |
| Cloud migration from any SQL database | Preview | Partners can build reusable AL-based migration engines for non-standard SQL sources; integrates with the Cloud Migration wizard as a Generic Custom migration type |
| MCP server for Admin Center | Preview | Exposes Admin Center APIs through Model Context Protocol; AI agents can query environment status, schedule updates, list extensions, and propose follow-up actions with explicit user confirmation |
The MCP server for Admin Center is early-stage infrastructure, but it signals clearly where agent-driven administration is heading.
API and Integration Direction
Version 28 continues the pattern established across multiple previous releases. Standard APIs expand, OData on Microsoft-owned pages moves further toward deprecation, and new APIs arrive for specific integration scenarios.
New APIs confirmed in this release:
- Read-only APIs for permission sets and user mappings (auditors and IT staff)
- Read-only APIs for approval workflow history and user mappings
- Sustainability APIs covering Goals, ESG Reporting Staging, Emission Value Entry, and Purchase Lines with Sustainability Detail
The pattern for any integration work remains stable: API pages for transactional scenarios, API queries for read scenarios, standard APIs wherever they exist. If you are still choosing between the two approaches for custom integrations:
==> I covered the decision in detail here: API Pages vs API Queries in Business Central: When to Use Each
Relevant documentation: Business Central API Reference
Copilot and Agents: More Specific Than the Headline Suggests
The Copilot section of the release notes is longer than in previous versions, and the features are concrete enough to read carefully.
At general availability:
- Payables Agent inbox discovery: the agent assigns a category to emails it has processed, making it easy for colleagues working the same mailbox to see what the agent has already handled
- Dedicated agent task pane: a single panel accessible from anywhere in Business Central shows all tasks from all agents, including suggestions, validations, and links to draft documents
- Inline review of agent-generated content: suggestions appear directly on the page where you are working, without requiring navigation to a separate task pane
- Item insights with advanced KPIs: a new Item Statistics page provides inventory value, expired inventory value, sales growth rate, net sales, gross margin, and return rate across fiscal period, fiscal year, last fiscal year, and lifetime
- Avatars for record creators and modifiers: list pages now show visual avatars for the user or agent that created or last modified each record, making agent-contributed records immediately visible
- Stop all active tasks for an agent: a single action with a confirmation dialog stops all running tasks for a selected agent
In public preview: developers can use Business Central AI resources in their own Copilot extensions, removing the need to manage a separate Azure OpenAI subscription for partner-built AI features.
These are incremental improvements to how agents operate in practice, not features that replace business logic or development decisions. The same principle applies in development tooling.
==> The gains from GitHub Copilot in AL projects are practical and cumulative: Where GitHub Copilot Actually Saves Time in AL Projects
Relevant documentation: AI and Copilot in Business Central
Developer Experience: Several Concrete Additions
The AL development experience receives more than incremental polish in version 28. There are genuinely new capabilities worth knowing before April.
| Feature | Status | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Semantic search on data and metadata | GA | A new Semantic Data Search codeunit lets developers run similarity-based queries on records without relying on traditional filter logic |
| BC-Bench benchmarking framework | GA | Inspired by SWE-Bench; provides measurable, repeatable benchmarks for evaluating agent performance on real AL coding tasks such as bug fixes and test creation |
| Run AL tests from VS Code | Preview | Uses the built-in Test Explorer in VS Code to discover and run AL tests; tests must be published to a BC server first; experimental and subject to change |
| Download symbols from NuGet feed | Preview | New AL: Download Symbols from Global Sources command pulls packages from Microsoft’s public NuGet feeds; custom feeds and country/region-specific packages supported |
| MCP Server for AL troubleshooting | Preview | Available during active debug sessions when execution is paused; coding agents can retrieve the call stack, inspect variable state across frames, and place breakpoints programmatically based on ongoing analysis |
| Fully qualified names for AL objects | Preview | Run codeunits, pages, and reports and open record references using fully qualified names, reducing ambiguity across extensions that share similar object names |
The MCP troubleshooting server deserves specific attention. When execution is paused at a breakpoint, GitHub Copilot or another coding agent can use the server to analyze the actual runtime state: the full call stack, variable values across frames, and source code for the relevant execution frame. This is early infrastructure, but it points toward a development workflow where agents can introspect running AL applications rather than working from static context alone.
Relevant documentation:
Extensibility: Continued Improvement
Version 28 continues the multi-release pattern of adding events in standard processes and improving existing extension points. This work is rarely highlighted in release summaries, but it is one of the most valuable long-term investments in the platform.
Better extensibility means cleaner extensions, lower upgrade risk, and less accumulated technical debt. Every release that adds properly designed events to a previously hard-to-extend standard process reduces the need for partners to copy or modify standard objects. That reduction compounds over time.
Preview Sandboxes: The Right Time to Test Is Now
Version 28 is available in preview until general availability in early April 2026.
You can create a new sandbox on version 28 from the Business Central Admin Center by setting the environment type to Sandbox and the version to 28.0 preview. You can also update an existing sandbox to the preview version, which is a more realistic test because it runs against your own data, setup, and installed extensions.
A practical checklist for the preview period:
- Deploy your extensions and run real business scenarios, not just technical smoke tests
- Validate integrations and API usage, particularly any that touch drop shipment flows or purchase invoice matching
- Review extensions that subscribe to the drop shipment posting events removed in this release (OnCheckAssocOrderLinesOnBeforeCheckOrderLine and OnBeforeCheckAssociatedSalesOrderLine in Codeunit 90)
- Identify which supply chain improvements address friction your users already experience and plan adoption accordingly
- Test the new developer features, particularly AL tests from VS Code and symbol download from NuGet, in your own extension projects
Relevant documentation: Prepare for Major Updates with Preview Environments
Final Thought
Version 28 is not a headline-driven release. The value is distributed across dozens of specific features, most of which are small and practical on their own but add up to a meaningfully better product across supply chain, reporting, developer tooling, administration, and the Shopify connector.
Read the supply chain improvements carefully and identify which ones address real friction in your customer environments. Review the developer additions. Spin up a preview sandbox this week.
Do not wait until April. Start testing now, while there is still time to adjust.
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