It’s that time of year when Business Central drops its next wave — except this cycle broke two habits Microsoft has kept for years, and it broke them at the same time.
Business Central 29.0 has been live as a public preview sandbox since the first week of September 2026, and for the first time, Microsoft actually put a calendar on it: general availability is scheduled for the first week of October. Every previous preview, you had to guess the GA date from the usual release rhythm. This time it’s just sitting there in the docs.
The second habit it broke is buried in the fine print of that same page, in a sentence that matters more than anything in the feature table: “Features are no longer linked to release plans.” The Wave 1/Wave 2 release plan you’ve bookmarked twice a year for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse is being phased out — replaced by a continuously updated AI at Work Roadmap. If you’ve been waiting for the official 2026 Wave 2 release plan to show up, it’s not coming. Not in the format you know.
I’ll get to what that actually means for how you track BC further down. First, the part that pays the bills: close to 70 new or changed features across 13 product areas, every single one tagged Preview, none of it production-ready yet. Here’s what’s worth your attention.
Copilot and Agents: A Quiet PO-Matching Fix, and the Expense Agent’s Biggest Jump Yet
The Payables Agent gets a small, easy-to-miss improvement: purchase order matching now also runs against line amounts and expected receipt dates, and draft finalization aligns more closely with your receipt-on-invoice settings. Nothing structural — just a noticeably more accurate agent that was already doing real work.
The Expense Agent is a different story. Six new preview features land at once — by far the biggest single jump any built-in agent gets in this update:
| Feature | What it actually does |
|---|---|
| Mileage calculation by date range and vehicle type | Configure changing mileage rates per vehicle type instead of maintaining one flat rate |
| Interim approver on submit | Route a report to a temporary approver before final sign-off |
| Automatic withholding tax calculation | Calculated directly inside the expense report |
| AI-powered policy check in the approval flow | Flags out-of-policy or inconsistent line items, across lines and across reports |
| Improved duplicate detection | Now checks against receipts that are already posted, not just pending ones |
| Travel requisitions | Plan and approve trips upfront, with multi-traveler support and their own approval flow |
That’s not a feature list, that’s a job description. The Expense Agent is quietly stepping out of the “capture the receipt” role and into the approval and compliance work that used to sit with a human reviewer or a bolted-on workflow tool. If you’re running BC consulting for clients with any kind of expense volume, this is the part of the preview worth a real look — not the part Microsoft is shouting about.
One more thing worth knowing if you’re building anything agentic against BC data: the MCP Server picks up new tools for custom data queries. Agents can now define, validate, and run their own queries against data that doesn’t have an existing API page yet — a query path that doesn’t require exposing a page first. If Dynamic Tool Mode and API pages have been your only way in so far, this is a second door.
Development: 23 Entries, and Two That Actually Matter Outside the Dev Team
Development is the largest single block in this preview — 23 entries, most of them squarely for AL developers and tooling. Two are worth knowing even if you never touch AL code.
A new data model for table extensions. Until now, fields added through a table extension lived in their own separate table. With Update 29.0, all fields of an AL table — base table and extensions alike — land in the same database table. The result: noticeably faster database operations on anything involving table extensions, and that’s practically every BC environment with third-party apps or custom PTEs.
AI-agent-assisted development workflows. Debugging via recorded session snapshots, CPU/memory profiling run by an agent, and automatic assignment of free AL object IDs. On top of that, the AL MCP Server (not to be confused with the BC data server above) gets dynamic workspace configuration without a predefined project, file-based diagnostic logging, and headless operation without auth prompts — relevant for CI/CD pipelines and agent-driven builds.
Reporting Gets Its Biggest Overhaul: Composable Layouts
Reporting is the second-largest block, 13 entries, and the headline is composable layouts: report themes and headers/footers become reusable building blocks you configure at four levels — global, company, report, and layout. That’s a real answer to the “every report looks slightly different” problem without touching each layout by hand.
Alongside that: a reworked Word add-in with conditional visibility logic (HideIf) and its own header/footer controls, plus Report Packs, which bundle several financial reports into a single PDF output — useful if you’re the one assembling month-end packages by hand right now.
Everything Else, In One Table
The remaining areas are smaller, but relevant depending on the industry you’re working in:
| Area | What’s new |
|---|---|
| Ecommerce/Shopify (5) | B2B companies, catalogs and pricing manageable from BC; new tax-matching agent for Shopify orders; updated Shopify API (July 2026, secure access tokens) |
| Financial Management (5) | Multiple excise taxes per item; withholding tax now for vendors and employee transactions; accelerated depreciation methods for fixed assets |
| Supply Chain Management (7) | Significant subcontracting expansion — guided setup, Contoso demo data, put-aways/picks for subcontracting, Italian legacy data migration |
| Sustainability Management (7) | EUDR certification with item tracking, CO₂ estimation in service management, formula-based emissions calculation on purchase documents |
| Czechia (4) | Email delivery for cash documents and compensations, reworked proforma invoice layout, new automatic-dimensions framework |
The Real News: Release Plans Are Retiring
The most consequential sentence in this entire preview isn’t in the feature table — it’s the line I quoted at the top. Starting September 2026, Microsoft is shutting down the classic release plan publication for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Dataverse entirely. New capabilities will show up through the AI at Work Roadmap (aka.ms/AIatWorkRoadmap) instead, and existing release plans stay online for historical reference only. The old Release Planner itself goes offline by November 15, 2026.
Practically, that means: if you’ve tracked BC changes through the twice-a-year release plan, that rhythm is gone. What replaces it is continuous — no more circling one date on the calendar, more like checking a feed.
One practical note if you want programmatic access instead of a browser tab: there’s now an MRC MCP Server (https://www.microsoft.com/releasecommunications/mcp) that exposes the roadmap and Azure Updates as MCP tools — no auth, no license required. It works cleanly from VS Code and Copilot Chat. If you try to wire it up from Claude Code specifically, don’t be surprised if you hit an HTTP 400 from Microsoft’s edge — that’s a known, reproducible quirk on that one client that Microsoft hasn’t documented yet, not a sign the server is down.
We’re a few weeks out from GA, which is a short runway if any of this touches a live client process. Go poke at it.
Source
Source: What’s New or Changed in Business Central 2026 release wave 2 – Update 29.0 preview, Microsoft Learn, updated September 1, 2026.
Discover more from Lubenheimer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.