Insights

Business Central 29 is here. What changes, and how to use your five-month update window

Business Central 2026 release wave 2, version 29.0, started reaching production environments in early October 2026. New Business Central online customers get it automatically. Existing customers receive a notification when it is available for their environment, and an administrator can schedule the update for any date within a five-month window that ends in February 2027.

Five months sounds generous. In practice it is the time you have to test the update in a sandbox, check that your extensions and integrations still behave, and decide which of the new features you want to switch on. This guide covers what has changed and the order we recommend doing it in.

What is new in version 29

Microsoft lists more than 80 new or improved capabilities in this release. These are the ones we expect South African Business Central customers to feel first.

Agents you can supervise properly

The Payables Agent now proposes purchase order matches. When a vendor invoice references purchase orders, the agent proposes order-line matches, and Business Central checks that the lines are compatible and allocates the invoice quantities. Warnings on quantity, receipt, unit of measure and price are standard Business Central validations, not AI confidence scores, and the agent never posts the invoice itself.
One dedicated task pane shows the tasks of every agent in the environment.
Agent permissions are easier to manage, and agent-generated content can be reviewed directly on the page it affects, with review notifications on lists.

Two practical notes. The Payables Agent uses Copilot Credits, so a billing model needs to be set up for your environment before you turn it on. And it is validated in English only, and it processes invoices that arrive as PDF attachments in a monitored mailbox, so Microsoft recommends an internal-only shared mailbox that your accounts payable team controls.

Reporting that finance will notice

Run several financial reports together and receive them as a single PDF, on demand or on a schedule.
Changes to financial reports are now always logged.
Trace where a G/L account is used across your financial reports.
Brand document reports such as invoices and statements with report themes, using the updated Word add-in for layouts, headers and footers.
Bookmark list views and analysis tabs, and use the system audit fields in analysis mode.

We cover these in more detail in our companion article on version 29 reporting.

Selling and operating

Shopify: manage B2B companies, catalogues and pricing; process order changes, exchanges and refunds; and synchronise tariff numbers and country of origin.
Manufacturing and warehousing: simpler subcontracting set-up that carries instructions into purchase orders, direct transfer orders from warehouse-enabled locations, and less manual work in quality tests and inspections.
Sustainability: track the carbon footprint of fixed assets and item journals, and use formulas to calculate emissions on purchase documents.

Everyday use

Recently used records now appear at the top of lookups, and Tell Me shows what you searched for recently.
Images can be previewed directly in the web client.
Lists can show avatars for the people who created and last modified a record.

For IT and developers

Data queries through the Business Central MCP Server are generally available.
Page Scripting is generally available, which helps teams record and replay test scripts.
A new data model stores all fields of a table and its table extensions together, which Microsoft says makes database operations involving table extensions faster.

Still in preview

Several items in this release are public preview rather than general availability, including the Expense Agent’s AI-driven approvals and VAT calculation on expense reports, EDI document exchange, and the Microsoft Copilot chat experience inside Business Central. Preview features are worth testing, but we do not recommend building a production process around them yet.

Before you click update: one mandatory change to check

Version 29 turns several previously optional features into mandatory ones. The one most likely to cause problems is “Disable SOAP web services on Microsoft UI pages”. If any integration, connector or older add-on still calls a standard Business Central page over SOAP, it needs to move to a supported API before your environment updates. Version 29 also makes UI support for masking sensitive data mandatory.

On-premises customers on version 24 or earlier must upgrade to version 25 before moving to 29, and some objects marked obsolete in earlier versions are no longer in the base application.

A plan for the update window

Confirm where you run. The agent and Copilot features are for Business Central online. If you are on-premises or partner-hosted, your path and timeline are different.
List your integrations and extensions, including any Pivot or third-party apps, and identify anything that uses SOAP against standard pages.
Update a sandbox first and test your critical processes end to end: invoicing, payments, month-end and any integration that moves money or stock.
Decide your agent rules before you switch agents on: who supervises, which approvals still need a person, and how Copilot Credit consumption is billed and monitored.
Pick two or three reporting quick wins, such as a scheduled month-end report package, and set them up straight after the update.
Schedule production for a quiet period, not month-end, and well before the window closes in February 2027.

How Braintree can help

Braintree can review your environment against version 29, test the update in a sandbox, check your extensions and integrations, and help you set up agents and reporting so that the new features are useful from the first week. Contact enquiries@braintree.co.za to talk to our Business Central team.