Dataverse and Business Central: When It Fits – And When It Doesn’t

Not sure if you really need Dataverse with Business Central? We explain how it works, when it’s a smart move, and when it’s unnecessary overhead.

Introduction

When people first hear about Microsoft Dataverse, the pitch usually sounds brilliant:

“Central data platform for all your Microsoft apps.”
“One source of truth.”
“Low-code apps in days, not months.”

All fine in theory. In practice, we’ve seen Dataverse add huge value in some Business Central projects – and create completely unnecessary cost and complexity in others.

In this article we’ll walk through:

• What Dataverse actually is (in plain language)

• How it connects to Dynamics 365 Business Central

• When Dataverse is a smart move with BC

• When you should absolutely not bother

• The benefits, risks, and things to watch out for

This is based on real Business Central projects we’ve been involved in with UK SMEs, not just Microsoft marketing slides.

What is Microsoft Dataverse?

Dataverse is Microsoft’s cloud data platform that sits behind many Dynamics 365 apps (Sales, Customer Service, Field Service) and Power Apps.

In simple terms:

Dataverse is a secure, standardised database in the Microsoft cloud, with a common data model, APIs, and security built in – designed to be shared across multiple apps.

Key points:

• Data is stored as tables (entities) – e.g. Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case.

• Security is built-in – roles, teams, field-level security, auditing, etc.

• It powers Dynamics 365 CE apps by default – Sales, Customer Service, Field Service.

• It plugs natively into Power Apps and Power Automate – ideal for low-code apps and workflows.

• It’s fully managed by Microsoft – backup, scaling, performance, updates.

You can absolutely use Business Central without Dataverse. Business Central has its own database and data model. Dataverse is an additional platform that sits alongside BC when it makes sense.

How Dataverse connects to Business Central

There are two main ways Business Central and Dataverse work together.

1. Standard integration (out-of-the-box)

Business Central includes a built-in Dataverse connection and integration projects. These use:

• Integration table mappings to define what syncs and how.

• Job Queue Entries in BC to run the synchronisation on a schedule (near real-time, not true streaming).

Out of the box, you can sync key data such as:

• Customers ↔ Accounts

• Vendors ↔ Accounts (or a separate vendor concept)

• Contacts ↔ Contacts

• Items ↔ Products

• Opportunities, quotes, and sales orders

• Selected pricing data

This allows Dynamics 365 Sales users, for example, to see relevant Business Central data, and lets BC use CRM data where needed.

2. Custom integration via Power Platform and APIs

You can also integrate via:

• Power Automate (flows)

• Power Apps (canvas/model-driven apps)

• Direct API calls (Business Central APIs and Dataverse Web API)

Typical scenarios:

• Custom apps in Dataverse or Power Apps that collect data and push it into BC.

• Workflows that span several systems – e.g. SharePoint, BC, a custom app, and a CRM process.

• Bespoke integrations to other SaaS or on-prem systems using Dataverse as the hub.

In all cases, Dataverse is acting as a shared data layer between Business Central and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Dataverse vs Business Central – who is the data master?

Once you connect BC and Dataverse, you have to decide who owns what.

You’ll often see the following pattern:

Dataverse acts as the “system of engagement” for customers, contacts, leads, and opportunities; Business Central stays the system of record for finance, stock, and posted transactions.

That’s a common approach, but it’s not the only option. For each type of data (customers, items, prices, orders, etc.) you need to decide:

• Which system is the master

• Which direction the sync runs

• What should happen if there’s a conflict

This is one of the big architectural decisions – and it’s where projects go wrong if someone just ticks all the synchronisation boxes and hopes for the best.

When Dataverse makes sense with Business Central

Here’s where we’ve seen Dataverse genuinely earn its keep.

1. You’re using (or planning) Dynamics 365 Sales or other Dataverse apps

If you’re serious about CRM and want proper:

• Pipeline management

• Lead and opportunity tracking

• Sales forecasting and activities

…then Dynamics 365 Sales (built on Dataverse) is the natural fit.

In that case:

• Dataverse is already part of your stack.

• Core entities like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Activities live there.

• Using the standard BC–Dataverse integration makes sense. You’re joining the ERP to the CRM platform, not bolting on a random extra database.

Trying to do CRM inside Business Central alone quickly becomes painful for sales teams. This is exactly the situation Dataverse is designed for.

2. You have multiple apps that all need the same shared data

Common scenarios:

• You have a field service or engineer scheduling solution plus a CRM, and they all need shared customer, site, and asset data.

• You’re building several internal apps – for service, projects, installations – all needing the same customer and contact information.

• You plan to use portals (Power Pages) or external user access where customers need to self-serve.

Here Dataverse can act as the shared data model for:

• Customers

• Contacts

• Assets / equipment

• Sites / locations

• Cases / tickets

Business Central then focuses on what it’s good at: finance, inventory, purchasing, and order processing.

3. You want a serious low-code app platform

If your strategy includes:

• Building multiple Power Apps for different teams

• Using Power Automate heavily for cross-system workflows

• Possibly exposing data through portals

…then Dataverse is normally worth the investment:

• It gives you richer data modelling than SharePoint or Excel.

• Security and auditing are built for business apps, not document storage.

• Performance and relationships scale better as you add more apps.

We’ve seen SMEs try to build everything on Excel or SharePoint lists. It works at first, then collapses under its own weight. Dataverse exists precisely to avoid that.

4. You need to share data beyond finance and ops users

A classic pattern:

• Finance and operations teams live in Business Central.

• Sales, service, and project teams live in Dataverse-based apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, Service, or custom Power Apps).

• Management needs reporting and dashboards across both worlds.

In this design:

• Dataverse becomes a controlled front door for non-BC users.

• Business Central remains the financial and transactional backbone.

• You don’t have to give everyone a BC licence just for inquiry access.

You do need to watch the licensing (more on that later), but architecturally this can be very clean.

When Dataverse is overkill (and you shouldn’t use it)

Now for the part most partners gloss over.

Dataverse is powerful, but for many small and mid-sized UK businesses it’s simply too much – at least at the start of the journey.

1. You’re not using Dynamics 365 Sales or other Dataverse apps

If you don’t have:

• Dynamics 365 Sales

• Dynamics 365 Customer Service / Field Service

• Any serious Power Apps footprint

…then dragging Dataverse into the picture “just in case” is usually a mistake.

You’re adding:

• Another platform to configure and secure

• Integration mappings and sync jobs to maintain

• More moving parts that can fail

And getting very little value back.

2. Your only aim is “get data into/out of Business Central”

If your scenarios are things like:

• Send website orders into Business Central

• Integrate BC with a warehouse or carrier system

• Connect BC to an e-commerce platform

Then, frankly, you probably do not need Dataverse.

Better options:

• Direct integration via Business Central APIs

• An integration platform (iPaaS) or middleware

• Targeted Power Automate flows directly against BC, without Dataverse in the middle

In these situations Dataverse just becomes an extra hop and extra place to debug when something breaks.

3. Your team is already stretched thin

Dataverse brings operational overhead:

• Someone needs to understand the Dataverse data model and security.

• Someone has to monitor the Business Central Job Queue Entries running the sync.

• Changes in BC or Dataverse have to be coordinated so mappings don’t break.

If you don’t have either:

• An in-house team comfortable with Power Platform and Dataverse, or

• A partner who actively manages this as part of their service

…you can very quickly end up with a fragile, half-working integration that everyone is scared to touch.

4. You’re trying to control licensing and platform sprawl

You don’t buy “Dataverse” as a standalone product in most SME scenarios. Instead you get Dataverse entitlements as part of:

• Dynamics 365 apps (e.g. Sales, Customer Service)

• Power Apps and Power Automate licensing

• Some Microsoft 365 plans (with very limited Dataverse rights)

The problems start when:

• You roll out more Dataverse-backed apps than your licences really allow.

• You burn through Dataverse storage capacity with unnecessary data.

• You discover that what you want to do actually needs premium Power Apps/Power Automate licences.

For a lean SME that just wants Business Central plus a few integrations, Dataverse can easily cost more than it returns.

The benefits of using Dataverse with Business Central

Used in the right way, Dataverse can be a real asset alongside Business Central.

1. Central customer and contact engagement layer

Dataverse gives you:

• A shared model for customers, contacts, and related entities.

• A clean way for CRM, service, and custom apps to use the same customer data.

• The ability to keep Business Central focused on financial and operational use of those customers.

We like the split:

• Dataverse: customer engagement, relationships, activities, pipelines.

• Business Central: invoicing, credit control, stock, purchasing, fulfilment.

2. Better tools and UX for sales and non-finance users

Sales and service users generally prefer:

• Tailored CRM-style screens

• Pipelines, Kanban boards, and activity timelines

• Dashboards focused on their KPIs

Dataverse and Dynamics 365 Sales provide exactly that. You still link everything back to Business Central, but you’re not forcing salespeople into ERP screens designed with accountants in mind.

3. Strong low-code platform for apps and workflows

Power Apps + Dataverse gives you:

• Custom apps that share a standard data model

• Proper relationships, business rules, and validation

• Good security and auditing for business-critical processes

This is far more robust than stringing together spreadsheets, Access databases, and half-documented SQL tables.

4. Use virtual tables instead of copying everything

One of the most useful (and often overlooked) features is virtual tables.

Business Central can expose data as virtual tables into Dataverse:

• The data stays in Business Central.

• It appears in Dataverse as if it were a local table.

• Power Apps and Dynamics 365 apps can read the data on demand.

That means you can:

• Surface BC data to Dataverse users without duplicating it.

• Reduce Dataverse storage usage.

• Avoid some of the complexity of bi-directional synchronisation.

If you mostly need visibility of BC data in CRM or apps, virtual tables are often a better choice than full-blown sync.

5. Future flexibility

Once your data model is in Dataverse, it’s easier to:

• Add additional Dynamics 365 modules

• Build more Power Apps and portals

• Integrate with other services that already speak Dataverse

If you’re deliberately building a wider Microsoft-based platform around your ERP, Dataverse is usually part of that long-term picture.

Risks and gotchas to watch out for

If you do go down the Dataverse route, go in with your eyes open.

1. Data duplication and sync conflicts

Synchronising data between BC and Dataverse introduces:

• Two systems holding similar data.

• Background synchronisation jobs that can succeed or fail independently.

• The potential for conflicts if users edit the same records in both places.

You must be crystal clear on:

• Which system is the master for each table.

• Which fields are allowed to be edited where.

• How you’ll handle failures – alerting, retry, or manual intervention.

Ignoring this and “syncing everything both ways” is a guaranteed way to create a mess.

2. Synchronisation is only near real-time

The standard BC–Dataverse integration is driven by Job Queue Entries in Business Central:

• Jobs run on a schedule and push/pull batches of changes.

• Frequency can be tuned, but it’s still near real-time, not true streaming.

• If jobs fail and nobody notices, you can quietly accumulate a backlog.

That’s fine for most business scenarios, but it’s not suitable for ultra-high-volume, high-frequency transactional mirroring. If you try to push every detailed ledger entry into Dataverse, you’ll simply chew up capacity and integration overhead for no good reason.

Use Dataverse synchronisation for:

• Master data

• Key documents and summaries

• What people genuinely need outside BC

…and not every last transaction.

3. Security and permissions get more complex

Once Dataverse is in play, you’re managing:

• Business Central permission sets and companies.

• Dataverse security roles, teams, and field security.

• Sharing and ownership rules in Power Apps and Power Automate.

• Possibly external access through portals.

Get it wrong and you either:

• Lock people out of what they need, or

• Expose far more data than you intended.

Someone needs to own the security model across both sides, not just BC.

4. Licence and capacity creep

A few realities to be very clear about:

• Dataverse capacity accrues at tenant level and can be exhausted.

• Serious use of Dataverse almost always needs proper Power Apps / Power Automate licences or Dynamics 365 licences.

• Some Microsoft 365 plans include limited Dataverse usage, but they’re not a free ticket for unlimited custom apps.

One detail many SMEs miss:

If your Business Central users are going to work directly in Dataverse apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, custom model-driven apps, portals), they need the right Dataverse-enabled licences. A BC licence alone does not give unlimited Dataverse rights.

If nobody watches this, you can end up with unbudgeted licence and capacity costs as projects grow.

5. Multi-company integration is more involved

In multi-company setups:

• Business Central adds a company identifier to Dataverse records.

• Integration mappings can behave differently depending on how they’re configured per company.

• You have to decide whether Dataverse should hold data for one company, multiple companies, or all of them.

If your BC environment has several companies and you don’t think that through up front, your Dataverse tables can become a tangle of mixed-company data very quickly.

How we’d decide: a practical decision guide

Strip the marketing away and the decision usually comes down to four questions.

Are you using, or seriously planning to use, Dynamics 365 Sales or other Dataverse-based apps?

• • Yes → Dataverse will be part of your world. Design BC to integrate with it.

  • No → Keep reading.

Do you need multiple apps to share a common, well-structured data model?

• • • Yes → Dataverse is worth serious consideration.

    • No → Direct BC integrations may be simpler and cheaper.

Do you have the appetite and budget to manage an extra platform properly?

• Yes → Dataverse can pay off, especially over time.

• No → Focus on getting more from Business Central first.

What’s the immediate priority: sort out core finance/ops, or fix CRM and customer engagement?

• • If you’re still wrestling with basic finance, stock, and reporting in BC, we’d stabilise that first and park Dataverse.

  • If BC is under control but your sales and service processes are a mess, then Dataverse plus Dynamics 365 Sales may be the right next move.

Conclusion

Dataverse and Business Central can work brilliantly together – when you genuinely need:

• A shared data platform for multiple apps, and/or

• Proper CRM and customer engagement on Dynamics 365, alongside ERP on Business Central.

For plenty of smaller UK businesses, though, dragging Dataverse into the first phase of a Business Central project just adds cost, risk, and complexity before the basics are under control.

Our simple rule:

• If you’re building a broader Microsoft platform around BC – CRM, apps, portals, workflows – Dataverse is your friend.

• If your priority is “get ERP in, get control of finance and operations” – keep it lean and stay focused on Business Central.

You can always introduce Dataverse later when the business is ready for it.

Next step

Want to see if Dataverse is a fit for your business or have questions? Get in touch and we’ll help you work if Dataverse will work for you.