Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2026 release wave 2 is here, with Update 29.0 introducing a new collection of features and improvements.
Not every useful change arrives with a big headline. In our latest What’s New in Business Central webinar, some of the biggest reactions came from comparatively small improvements that could remove everyday frustrations or save users time.
From creating a single PDF containing your month-end reports to finding recently used records more quickly, here are five Business Central Update 29.0 features we think are worth knowing about.
How many times each month do your team run individual financial reports to only then to combine or distribute them as one reporting pack?
Business Central Update 29.0 introduces the ability to create a financial report package containing several financial reports. This means that you could, for example, group your trial balance, balance sheet and profit and loss report into a single month-end pack.
Rather than opening each report separately and repeatedly applying the relevant date or dimension filters, you can define the package once and run the reports together. Business Central will then produce a single PDF containing the reports in the package.
The report package can also be scheduled. In our recent webinar, Paul Cartwright demonstrated how a month-end pack could be configured to run monthly and sent by email to specified recipients. If email isn’t selected, the resulting report can instead be made available through the report inbox in the user’s Role Centre.
This is a practical change that will remove some of the repetitive work involved in producing the same collection of financial reports every month.
Microsoft describes this Update 29.0 feature as “Run multiple financial reports and get a single PDF output.”
Getting Business Central documents to reflect your organisation’s branding has traditionally required more work than many businesses would expect.
Update 29.0 introduces report themes, allowing supported Business Central document reports to use themes and header and footer layouts created in Microsoft Word.
A Word theme can control elements such as fonts, colours, headings and table styles. A separate Word document can be used to define the header and footer.
Once approved in Business Central, these elements will be applied as a global default or to an individual report or report layout. They can also be assigned at company level, which is useful for organisations managing more than one company or brand in Business Central.
Microsoft notes that Update 29.0 initially supports only a limited number of reports but we fully expect further report support to be released in later updates.
Microsoft calls the feature “Brand document reports with report themes.”
Business Central can now show the values you have used recently when you open a lookup. This could be a customer, item or another value selected from a drop-down list.
Rather than searching the full list each time, you can return to a value you selected recently. The list is personal to the individual user and ordered according to how recently the values were used.
This simple, new feature also applies to Business Central search, helping users return to pages they have recently opened.
This was the feature that received some of the biggest reactions when the TVT team reviewed the release internally. While this is not a dramatic change, it is a real time-save if you work with the same customers, products or records regularly.
As Paul Cartwright explained in our webinar, businesses have previously asked for additional functionality to help users find favourite or recently used records. Having recent values available as part of the standard Business Central platform provides a much simpler alternative.
Microsoft describes the Update 29.0 capability as “Show recently used in lookups”.
Attachments are useful, but the process of viewing them has not always been especially smooth.
In the past, opening an attachment could mean downloading the file, finding it in your downloads folder and opening it in another application. In some cases, the file could be transferred to OneDrive so it could be previewed there.
Update 29.0 now makes it possible to preview supported attachments within the Business Central web client. For someone who regularly checks documents attached to orders or other Business Central records, this small improvement could make the overall workflow feel much more natural as they will no longer have t open another app to check a document in business Central.
Microsoft’s Update 29.0 overview names the feature “Preview images directly in web client”.
Business Central already records useful system information against its records, including who created a record, when it was created, who last modified it and when it was modified.
The difficulty has been that this information hasn’t always been readily visible to the user. Accessing it could require additional development to add the relevant fields to a page.
Update 29.0 makes these system audit fields available through analysis mode. Users can now add the fields to an analysis view and use them to understand who created or last modified particular records. This feature will make it easier to identify recent activity without opening records individually. It will be very useful when investigating a change, answering a colleague’s question or understanding the recent history of a record.
Microsoft describes the Update 29.0 feature as “Use system audit fields in analysis mode and in profiles”.
While Update 29.0 is relatively light on major front-end functionality compared with the previous version, what Microsoft has done this time is invest in the underlying platform, tooling and architecture supporting Business Central.
And the customer-facing improvements that have been delivered are extremely valuable.
Report packages will reduce the repetitive work involved in month-end reporting. Report themes give organisations more control over the appearance of supported documents. Recent values make frequently used records easier to find. In-client previews remove unnecessary steps from viewing attachments. And access to system audit fields makes it easier to understand who created or changed a record.
Individually, these may feel like small changes. When used every day, they they will make Business Central noticeably easier to work with.
Watch our What’s New in Business Central webinar to see Paul Cartwright demonstrate some of the changes introduced with Business Central 2026 release wave 2, Update 29.0.
You can also explore the complete list of changes in Microsoft’s official Update 29.0 documentation.