Getting Started with Business Central: A Practical Orientation

So you’ve been handed a Business Central environment. Maybe it’s been freshly implemented, maybe it’s been running for years with accumulated complexity, or maybe you’re an implementer setting it up for a client. Wherever you’re starting from, the first few hours in BC can be disorienting.

This guide is about getting your bearings efficiently: the things that make the rest of your work faster.

Understand the Role Center First

Your Role Center is the homepage that Business Central loads when you sign in. Unlike many ERP systems, BC personalizes this view based on your user role (Finance Manager, Sales Order Processor, IT Manager, etc.).

Before you change anything, spend five minutes understanding what the current Role Center is actually showing you:

• Cues: the colored boxes with numbers at the top. Each one is a filtered count of something important (open purchase orders, overdue invoices, etc.)
• Activities: links to frequently-used lists
• Charts: graphical overviews of key data

You can change your Role Center from Settings → My Settings → Role. If you’re a consultant setting things up, choosing the right Role Center for each user type is one of the highest-value configuration decisions you’ll make.

Master the Search Bar (Tell Me)

The single most important shortcut in Business Central:

Alt + Q  (Windows)
⌘ + /   (Mac)

This opens the Tell Me search bar. Type anything (a page name, a function, a report) and BC will find it. This is faster than navigating menus, especially when you’re in unfamiliar territory.

Pro tip: Tell Me also searches your data. Search for a customer name and it’ll surface their card directly.

The Three Navigation Patterns

Once you’re past the Role Center, navigation in BC follows three patterns:

1. List pages: showing all records of a type (Customers, Items, Vendors). This is where you browse, filter, and select.
2. Card pages: a single record in detail (Customer Card, Item Card). This is where you view and edit individual records.
3. Document pages: transactional records like Sales Orders or Purchase Invoices. These have headers and lines.

Understanding which type of page you’re on tells you what actions are available.

Filters Are More Powerful Than They Look

The filter pane in any list (open with Shift + F3) supports:

Filter	Syntax	Example
Exact match	=value	=GB
Range	value1..value2	01/01/25..31/01/25
Not equal	<>value	<>Blocked
Wildcard	*partial*	*Smith*
Greater than	>value	>1000

Combine multiple filters across columns. Save useful filter sets with the Views feature; they’ll appear in the left panel of any list page.

Keyboard Shortcuts Worth Memorising Immediately

Action	Shortcut
Open Tell Me search	Alt + Q
Open filter pane	Shift + F3
New record	Alt + N
Edit current record	Alt + E
Go to next/prev field	Tab / Shift + Tab
Post document	F9
Show all actions	Alt + F3

Business Central is genuinely keyboard-friendly once you commit to learning these. The productivity gains are real. For a full reference, see 20 Business Central Keyboard Shortcuts That Actually Save Time.

Dimensions: Don’t Ignore Them

If you’re implementing BC, dimensions are often under-configured at the start and painful to retrofit later. Dimensions are additional classification codes attached to transactions (think: Department, Project, Cost Center).

Get your dimension structure agreed with the Finance team before you go live. Adding dimensions after you have transaction history is possible but tedious.

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That’s enough to get moving. From here, the best way to learn BC is to use it: navigate to a few list pages, open some records, follow the flow of a transaction from quote to invoice. The system becomes logical quickly once you’ve traced a few full workflows.

If you need to customize or extend Business Central, Your First AL Extension walks you through writing and deploying your first AL extension from scratch.