This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
When Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 was announced, one of the included features was Set Up And Sync Master Data Across Companies I said it sounded interesting, but I needed to get hands on with it.
Well, I’ve recently had the opportunity to do this on a client project.
It is reasonably easy to configure and the data flow from parent to child companies is quite quick, although I’m not sure I would say it is immediate which was the Microsoft claim.
I was also surprised to discover that, despite the name, it allows you to not only synchronise master data, but also setup data, which means that as well as allowing item, vendor or customers to be synced, you can also sync the Inventory, Purchasing and Payables and Sales and Receivables Setup as well.
Fortunately, it is very flexible, allowing you to not only select the tables to sync, but also which fields within the table should be synced and also apply filters to limit the data which is to be synced. So, for example, I might want to limit items to a particular set of inventory posting groups or only customers from a specific region to be synchronised.
With master data management comes great capabilities for synchronising data, but also great risks; a lot of records in Business Central use an id field as the key, but this isn’t generally exposed to users and must never be synchronised, as synchronised records will be assigned a unique key in the child company, meaning another record being synchronised with the original id field will be looking at the wrong record.