Identifying Process Gaps in Business Central: 7-Step Guide
Updated: 3 days ago
Table of Contents
Why Process Gaps Stall Business Central Implementations
Most Business Central projects do not fail because of bad software. They fail because nobody mapped how work actually flows before configuring the system. Identifying process gaps in Business Central is the work of comparing how your teams operate today against how the system expects them to operate, then deciding what to change. At Alliason, we have spent over 40 years of combined Microsoft business application experience watching mid-market firms hit this wall. The pattern repeats: go-live arrives, users keep old spreadsheets, and reporting falls apart.
A process gap is the distance between your current state and the target state the system was designed to support. Left unexamined, those gaps turn into rework, delays, and unreliable numbers.
Watch Out The most expensive mistake is skipping process discovery because "we already know our business." Teams that skip this step typically spend far more time fixing data and retraining users after go-live than they would have spent mapping the process upfront.
Business Central Process Mapping: Documenting Your Current State
Business Central process mapping is the practice of drawing your existing workflow, step by step, before you touch configuration. The goal is a current state picture honest enough to show where work queues up. A good process map answers three questions:
Who touches this task?
What triggers it, and what does it produce?
Where does the work wait?
Choosing the Right Mapping Method for Your Team
Pick the method your team will actually finish. A whiteboard session beats a perfect diagram nobody completes. For most mid-market teams, a simple swimlane sketch works best: one row per role, one column per stage.
For a distribution company, that might mean mapping order intake, credit check, pick, pack, ship, and invoice across sales, warehouse, and finance. The moment you draw it, the handoffs become visible. That is usually where the bottlenecks live.
Business Central Requirements Gathering: Capturing What Users Actually Need
Business Central requirements gathering is the step where you separate what users say they want from what the business needs the system to do. Run short sessions with each role, not one big meeting. Ask what slows them down, not what features they want.
A common mistake is treating every request as a requirement. Most requests are workarounds for a broken process. Capture the underlying problem, then decide later whether standard functionality solves it.
Pro Tip Record the reason behind each requirement, not just the requirement itself. Six months later, when someone asks why a field exists, the "why" is what saves you from rebuilding a workaround you already fixed.
Running a Business Central Fit-Gap Analysis That Surfaces Real Problems
A Business Central fit-gap analysis compares each mapped process against what the system does out of the box. The output is a list: fits, partial fits, and true gaps. Rank each gap by business impact, not by how loud the request was.
The difference between a useful fit-gap and a wish list is evidence. For every process step, capture the Business Central page, table, or setup area that supports it, and note what the standard flow assumes. That is what turns "purchasing feels slow" into "the Purchase Order approval workflow has no escalation rule, so requests sit in the Approval Entries queue for days."
A practical way to structure the analysis is to walk each end-to-end process through four Business Central layers:
Document flow, Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Transfer Orders, Warehouse Shipments, and their status transitions. Where does a document stall between Released and Posted?
Setup and configuration, Purchasing & Payables Setup, Sales & Receivables Setup, Inventory Setup, General Ledger Setup, and approval workflow configuration. Does the setup match the process you mapped?
Master data, Items, Customers, Vendors, Chart of Accounts, and Dimensions. Missing or inconsistent master data creates gaps that look like process problems.
Integrations and extensions, What is handled outside Business Central (spreadsheets, third-party apps, custom extensions) and where does that handoff break?
Separating Configuration, Training, Data, and Process Problems
This is the part most guides get wrong. Not every gap is a software gap, and misdiagnosing one type as another is how projects balloon.
Gap Type | What It Looks Like in Business Central | Typical Fix |
Configuration | System can do it, but setup is wrong, e.g., no approval workflow on Purchase Orders, or posting groups misaligned | Adjust setup, no code |
Training | Users don't know the feature exists, e.g., they re-key sales lines instead of using the Get Shipment Lines function | Retrain the role |
Data | Wrong or missing master data, e.g., items without units of measure, customers without payment terms | Clean and reload data |
Process | The workflow itself is broken, e.g., three people approve the same invoice, or credit checks happen after picking | Redesign the process |
Integration | A handoff to an external system fails or duplicates work, e.g., a spreadsheet still feeds the general ledger | Fix or retire the integration |
A quick diagnostic: if the standard Business Central page already does what the user wants, the gap is configuration or training. If the page exists but the data behind it is wrong, it is a data gap. If no standard page supports the step at all, you are looking at a process or integration gap, and that is where customization conversations should start, not end.
Pro Tip Before you log a gap as "needs customization," open the standard page and try to complete the step yourself. Most practitioners find that a surprising share of "missing features" are already there, just not configured or not taught.
Building a Repeatable Audit Procedure to Identify Process Gaps
You need a procedure you can run again every quarter, not a one-time exercise. The unique angle here is that Business Central already records most of the evidence you need, the audit is less about asking people what hurts and more about reading what the system has been telling you.
Pick one end-to-end process, order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, or inventory-to-fulfillment. Do not audit everything at once.
Pull the current state map and confirm it still matches reality with the people who do the work.
Extract the evidence from Business Central (see the data sources below).
Compare against the target state and log every gap with a named owner and a business impact score.
Sort by impact and effort, then assign the top items with target dates.
Set a review date and track whether the gap actually closed, re-pull the same evidence to confirm.
Key Reports and Telemetry Data to Pull From Business Central
Let the data tell you where the process hurts. Business Central telemetry and standard reports show cycle time, queue length, and where documents stall. The specific sources worth pulling each cycle:
Approval Entries, the queue of pending approvals. Long dwell times here usually mean the approval workflow has no escalation or delegation rule.
Open Sales Orders and Open Purchase Orders, documents aging past normal cycle time point to a stall in picking, shipping, or receiving.
Item Ledger Entries and Value Entries, repeated adjustments or reversals signal process drift, not just counting errors.
General Ledger Entries and the Chart of Accounts, manual journal entries that recur every period are a sign a process is being worked around.
Job Queue Entries and Job Log, failed or long-running jobs reveal integration and background-processing gaps.
Change Log, who changed what, and when, often exposes workarounds that never made it into the process map.
Power BI reports built on Business Central data, if your organization has them, cycle-time and throughput trends are the fastest way to spot a degrading process.
A common pattern is that the same three or four documents appear at the top of the aging report every quarter. That repetition is the signal, a one-off delay is noise, a recurring one is a gap.
Watch Out Telemetry shows you where the process hurts, not why. Pair every data signal with a short conversation with the role that owns the step, or you will fix the symptom and miss the cause.
Discovery Questions to Ask Each Role
When you do talk to people, ask questions that surface mechanism, not opinion:
What do you do when the system won't let you proceed?
Which step do you re-do most often?
What do you keep in a spreadsheet because Business Central doesn't show it the way you need?
Who do you wait on, and how do you know when they're done?
What did you stop doing after go-live because it was too slow?
Those answers, cross-checked against the reports above, give you a gap list that is both evidence-based and human-validated, which is what makes it survive the next quarter's review.
Business Central Customization vs Standard Functionality: Making the Right Call
The default should be standard functionality. Every customization adds cost, testing, and upgrade risk. Before you approve one, ask whether the process can change to fit the system instead.
Where customization is genuinely needed, scope it tightly and document why. What most teams miss is that a small process change often removes the need for a large customization entirely. That trade-off is the whole decision.
Key Takeaway If a process gap can be closed by changing how people work, do that first. Customization should be the last resort, not the first.
Prioritizing Fixes and Assigning Ownership Across Roles
A gap list without owners goes nowhere. Assign each fix to a named role, not a department. Finance owns the credit check gap. Warehouse owns the pick confirmation gap. Give each one a target date and a way to measure success.
Then connect the fixes to business goals: shorter cycle time, fewer errors, cleaner reporting. This is where senior-led guidance pays off. Alliason's Confidence Roadmaps define scope, risks, and costs upfront so leadership can prioritize with evidence, not guesswork.
Process gaps will surface in any Business Central project, whether it is a new implementation or a recovery of an underperforming system. The difference is whether you find them before go-live or after.
At Alliason, we help teams map current state, run fit-gap analysis, and separate configuration, training, data, and process problems so fixes land where they matter.
Our senior-led approach and Confidence Roadmaps reduce project risk and align your technology with business goals. Start the conversation with us and turn stalled processes into measurable results.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a fit-gap analysis in Business Central?
A fit-gap analysis compares your current business processes against what Business Central delivers out of the box. It identifies where standard functionality fits your needs and where gaps exist. Those gaps then get prioritized: some close through configuration, some through training or data cleanup, and only a few justify custom development. The output is a clear list of what to change and why.
How do you identify process gaps before implementing Business Central?
Start by mapping your current workflows for order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and inventory management. Interview the people who touch each step daily, then compare their actual process to Business Central's standard flow. Document every point where the two diverge. Group those divergences by root cause: configuration, training, data quality, or a genuine process gap. This gives you a prioritized list before you spend on customization.
When should a business customize Business Central instead of changing its process?
Customize only when the process is a genuine competitive advantage or a regulatory requirement. If the gap exists because your team has always done something a certain way, changing the process is faster and cheaper. Business Central's standard functionality covers most mid-market needs. Each customization adds upgrade cost and testing burden, so reserve it for cases where the business case is clear and measurable.
What are common process gaps in Business Central projects?
Frequent gaps include manual approval workflows that Business Central can automate, inventory costing methods that don't match actual operations, and reporting structures that require data from multiple modules. Other common issues: user permissions that are too broad or too narrow, unit of measure mismatches, and unmanaged master data. Most surface during requirements gathering or early user testing if you map processes first.
