NAV Served You Well. Business Central Will Serve You Better.

Q: What holding on to NAV is costing you

No new features or AI capability - Business Central evolves every month with new Copilot AI features, automation tools, and platform improvements. NAV receives none of this. The capability gap widens with every release. On‑premise infrastructure overhead - NAV relies on servers that need maintaining, upgrading, backing up, and securing. Business Central removes this burden entirely by running on Microsoft’s enterprise‑grade Azure cloud. Customisation debt that slows you down - Years of NAV code modifications solved real problems at the time, but now make upgrades slow, expensive, and risky. Any version change requires expensive custom code to be tested, rebuilt, or replaced. Limited connection to Microsoft 365 - Business Central integrates deeply with Outlook, Teams, Excel, and Power BI as standard. Replicating this in NAV typically requires significant bespoke development and still falls short of what SaaS delivers out of the box. Increasing security and compliance risk - As Microsoft withdraws support for older NAV versions, security updates become less reliable. Running unsupported software on local infrastructure introduces significant cyber risk.

George Pilling
Apr 16
2 min read

If you’re still on NAV, your business probably runs well but it likely runs on workarounds, manual processes, and customisations that once made sense and now add complexity, cost, and risk.

Microsoft’s investment is firmly in Business Central SaaS. This is where all development effort is focused, whether its cloud infrastructure, AI, Power Platform and M365 integration, security, automation, reporting and continuous updates.

Staying on NAV isn’t simply staying where you are. It’s choosing to stand still while the platform, the technology, and the wider market move forward.

NAV Served You Well. Business Central Will Serve You Better.

What holding on to NAV is costing you

No new features or AI capability - Business Central evolves every month with new Copilot AI features, automation tools, and platform improvements. NAV receives none of this. The capability gap widens with every release.
On‑premise infrastructure overhead - NAV relies on servers that need maintaining, upgrading, backing up, and securing. Business Central removes this burden entirely by running on Microsoft’s enterprise‑grade Azure cloud.
Customisation debt that slows you down - Years of NAV code modifications solved real problems at the time, but now make upgrades slow, expensive, and risky. Any version change requires expensive custom code to be tested, rebuilt, or replaced.
Limited connection to Microsoft 365 - Business Central integrates deeply with Outlook, Teams, Excel, and Power BI as standard. Replicating this in NAV typically requires significant bespoke development and still falls short of what SaaS delivers out of the box.
Increasing security and compliance risk - As Microsoft withdraws support for older NAV versions, security updates become less reliable. Running unsupported software on local infrastructure introduces significant cyber risk.

Business Central: everything NAV did, and everything it couldn't

Business Central is the next step in NAV’s evolution. The core concepts your team already knows are all still there, what has changed is the environment around them - cloud‑native, browser‑based, AI‑enabled, and automatic updates.

For wholesale and distribution businesses, the uplift is significant. Financial reporting becomes real‑time, warehouse processes become smarter and faster, and supply chain automation moves from ‘nice to have’ to standard. It’s NAV’s familiar logic, delivered on a modern platform built for the pace of today’s operations.

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