Power Automate Workflows for Business Central

Power Automate Business Central Automation
January 28, 2026
4 min read
By Maksymilian Meller

Table of Contents

This is a list of all the sections in this post. Click on any of them to jump to that section.

Why Automate Business Central Workflows?

Manual, repetitive tasks consume valuable time that your team could spend on strategic work. Every time someone copies data between systems, sends a notification email after an order is posted, or updates a spreadsheet from BC data — that’s an automation opportunity.

Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) is the low-code automation platform in the Microsoft ecosystem, and it has a first-class connector for Business Central.

The Business Central Connector

The Power Automate connector for Business Central provides:

  • Triggers — react to events like record creation, modification, or deletion
  • Actions — create, read, update, and delete records in BC
  • Custom API support — call your own API pages and endpoints
  • Environment selection — target sandbox or production environments

The connector uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication and supports both delegated (user) and application (service) permissions.

Common Automation Scenarios

Approval Workflows for Purchase Orders

One of the most popular automations is a purchase order approval flow:

  1. A user creates a purchase order in Business Central
  2. Power Automate detects the new record via a trigger
  3. The flow checks the order amount against approval thresholds
  4. If approval is needed, a request is sent via Teams or email
  5. The approver can approve or reject directly from Teams
  6. The flow updates the purchase order status in BC accordingly

Customer Onboarding

When a new customer is created in Business Central:

  1. A welcome email is sent automatically
  2. A row is added to a SharePoint list for the sales team
  3. A task is created in Planner for the account manager
  4. A notification is posted to the Sales channel in Teams

Inventory Alerts

Monitor stock levels and react proactively:

  1. A scheduled flow runs daily to check item quantities
  2. Items below the reorder point are identified
  3. A summary report is generated and emailed to the procurement team
  4. Optional: a purchase order draft is created automatically

Best Practices

When building Power Automate flows for Business Central, keep these guidelines in mind:

  • Use environment variables for connection references — this makes promoting flows between environments easier
  • Handle pagination — BC API responses are paginated, so use the “Get next page” action for large datasets
  • Implement error handling — add try-catch (scope) blocks and configure failure notifications
  • Respect API limits — Business Central has API rate limits; batch your operations where possible
  • Test in sandbox first — always build and test flows against a sandbox environment

Advanced Patterns

Using Custom API Pages

For complex scenarios, create custom API pages in AL and call them from Power Automate. This gives you full control over the data structure and business logic:

page 50100 "Sales Order API"
{
    PageType = API;
    APIGroup = 'custom';
    APIPublisher = 'mmeller';
    APIVersion = 'v1.0';
    EntityName = 'salesOrder';
    EntitySetName = 'salesOrders';
    SourceTable = "Sales Header";
    // ...
}

Combining with Azure Services

For workflows that exceed Power Automate’s capabilities, you can combine it with Azure services:

  • Use Azure Functions for complex data transformations
  • Use Azure Service Bus for reliable message queuing
  • Use Azure Logic Apps for enterprise-grade integration patterns

Key Takeaways

  • Power Automate’s BC connector enables low-code automation of common business processes
  • Approval workflows, notifications, and data synchronization are the most impactful scenarios
  • Custom API pages give you flexibility when the standard connector isn’t enough
  • Always test in sandbox environments and implement proper error handling