Change which features are displayed

Business Central is designed to help you run your business regardless of the size and complexity. At the core of the product, you find essential features, such as financial reporting, sales, purchasing, and inventory management. As business complexity increases, you can turn on functionality for manufacturing and service management, for example.

You can define the product complexity level, and thereby which features the company's users get access to, by changing the Experience setting on the Company Information page. Note that the experience setting can also be changed by adding certain extensions from AppSource. For more information, see Customizing Business Central Using Extensions.

The following table lists the experiences that are currently available.

Experience Impact on User Interface
Essential Shows all actions and fields for all common business functionality.
Premium Shows all actions and fields for all business functionality, including Manufacturing and Service Management.

The experiences that can be selected in Business Central reflect the solution licenses, called plans, that are defined for the product. For information about the Essential and Premium plans, see Business Central on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 marketing site. See also the Business Central Licensing Guide.

Important

Users of type Team Member, Internal Admin, External Accountant, and Delegated Admin can be assigned a different plan than other users in the solution. Only users of type Evaluation or Premium can change the value in the Experience field from Essential to Premium.

Note

In 2024 release wave 1, a user with the Premium plan can sign in to a company that's using the Essentials plan. However, the Premium user can't use any of the features that the Premium license provides. The same isn't true in the opposite direction. Users who have the Essentials plan can't sign in to a company that's using the Premium plan.

Prior to defining a company's experience setting, you define users' access to specific functions and pages by assigning permission sets. For more information, see Assign Permissions to Users and Groups.

The Experience setting applies to all users in a company, but each user can personalize their own experience further by changing page layouts and content. For more information, see Personalize Your Workspace.

Enabling premium features after upgrading a plan

Users are assigned to plans in Microsoft 365 Admin Center in connection with the general work to create the Business Central users. For more information, see Add users and assign licenses at the same time.

To update plan changes in users groups

Security groups are new to Business Central in 2023 release wave 1. They're similar to the user groups that this article mentions. Like user groups, administrators assign the permissions to the security group that its members need to do their jobs.

User groups will no longer be available in a future release. You can continue using user groups to manage permissions until then. To learn more about security groups, go to Control Access to Business Central Using Security Groups.

When you have made a change to users plans in Microsoft 365 Admin Center, such as assigned more users to the Premium plan, you must update Business Central to reflect the change.

  1. Sign is as an administrator.
  2. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Users, and then choose the related link.
  3. On the Users page, choose the Update users from Microsoft 365 action.

To select the Premium experience

You can now proceed to select the new experience.

  1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Company Information, and then choose the related link.
  2. On the Company Information page, on the User Experience FastTab, select Premium in the Experience field.

Help assumes the Premium experience

All feature descriptions in user documentation for Business Central assume the Premium experience, meaning the descriptions cover the full scope of UI elements.

See also

Personalize Your Workspace
Customizing Business Central
Assign Permissions to Users and Groups
Creating New Companies
Change Basic Settings
Work with Business Central

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