App for Business Central
Quote requests from your website arrive in Business Central with their lines and become a sales quote in one action. Customers sign in to a portal to see their quotes, orders and documents, and accept a quote online.
Without a connection, a quote request from the website is an e-mail that someone types over into Business Central, and a customer who needs a copy of an invoice calls inside sales for it. CustomerGate 365 is the Business Central side of that connection. What visitors and customers do on your website arrives in Business Central as a request inside sales can work with, and what customers need to see comes straight from Business Central, without anyone copying data by hand.
Everything works from standard Business Central: your customers, your reports, your e-mail accounts and your job queue.
Requests from the website arrive with their lines in the Web Requests list. Inside sales reviews them and turns each one into a sales quote in one action, or into a sales order for a staff order entered for a customer who is present. Requests from signed-in customers are linked to their customer, and ship-to codes are checked. A request can name its project, and per line an inspection certificate and the processing, and they end up on the quote.
Assign to Me and Assign To… record who picked a request up. Reject, assign and mark as spam also work over a selection. Every incoming request is screened for duplicates and spam signals: that sorts and flags, it never refuses. Create Customer turns a requester into a customer through the standard customer templates.
Visitors ask for a portal account. Inside sales approves the request, linking it to a customer and a role (Buyer or Viewer), or rejects it with a reason.
Customers sign in with a one-time code sent by e-mail, so there are no passwords. They see their requests, quotes, orders, shipments and document lines, download PDFs and accept a released quote online. The acceptance is recorded in Business Central for inside sales.
Submit an earlier request again, or order a line of an earlier quote or order again. Pass their own purchase order number and requested delivery date with an acceptance. Decline a quote with a reason. See per order line what has shipped, and follow a shipment through the carrier's own link. Choose what they are notified about. Switch between two customers when they buy for two companies, and invite a colleague.
The website sends a drawing, a DXF, a photo or a cutting list along. The customer sees their own files back in the portal, inside sales sees them on the request and adds their own, and at conversion they travel to the sales document as attachments. Every file is checked on type, first bytes, number and size.
The PDFs come from the reports Business Central already uses, following the report selections and the document layouts per customer, for quotes, orders, shipments, invoices and credit memos.
Business Central decides which items go on the website, not the website: per item, per item category, with numbered publication rules and one policy. Items that cannot be ordered online stay in it as price on request. Item pictures travel along, and whatever leaves the catalog is picked up by the website through a service of its own.
Business Central calls your website itself when something happens: a quote released or accepted, an order created, a shipment or an invoice posted, an account approved, a request converted. Per subscription an https address with its own secret and a signature. They stay off until somebody creates one.
Confirmations to requesters and notifications to inside sales go out through the standard Business Central e-mail accounts, sent by a job queue entry in the requester's language. A failed e-mail is retried and shown on the request.
A retention period with an automatic cleanup job that anonymizes old requests, and per e-mail address an action to export all personal data as one JSON file or to erase it. Notifications to portal users are opt-in.
An assisted setup guide, a setup page with status lines and Repair Permissions. Diagnostics puts the whole installation on one screen, with Test Connection and Permission Gaps beside it. Demo mode sends every message in a training company to one address, and the copy guard stops a sandbox copy before it mails your customers.
Switches itself on where iFacto Steel 365 is installed: steel quantities in pieces, meters and kilograms on portal lines, profiles, grades and item types for the website catalog, and the document archive.
Install the app and run the assisted setup guide Set Up CustomerGate 365. It takes you through the Steel 365 module, the connection to the website, the web catalog, e-mail and the customer portal.
Enter the client IDs of the website's two Microsoft Entra applications on the setup page and choose Repair Permissions. The app creates the permission sets the website needs and assigns them.
In the Web Catalog group, choose the policy, set the publication rules and walk Items on the Website once. Business Central decides which items the website may show, not the website itself.
Requests arrive in Web Requests and Account Requests, with cues you can add to any role center. Quote acceptances from the portal show up there as well.
CustomerGate 365 is the Business Central half of the connection. The forms and the portal your customers see are part of your website, which has to call the app's web services: without such a website the app has nothing to receive. Four job queue entries hang off the app as well: the mail round, the cleanup of personal data, the delivery of webhooks and the nightly recompute of the web catalog. All four arrive on hold, so that installing the app sends nothing and erases nothing, and the setup page shows the status of each.
An assisted setup guide takes you through the setup, and the setup page shows with status lines what is ready and what is not: the web service, the e-mail account, the job queue and the permissions.
Per production environment, not per user: a hundred buyers in the portal cost the same as one. A sandbox is free, and so is a company in demo mode. You get prices in a conversation, not from a table.
Requests and the catalog
Everything in Requests, plus the customer portal
Everything, for every company
Without a valid licence only the web services stop, after thirty days. Business Central itself, inside sales and the privacy tools keep working. How the licence works
The app handles personal data of your website visitors and customers. That data stays in your own Business Central environment, and the app is built to keep it to what is needed.
The website connects through Microsoft Entra application registrations with narrow permission sets: execute-only where possible, and no D365 BASIC.
Sign-in codes and session tokens are stored only as hashes. IP addresses are stored only as a pseudonymized hash, made by the website.
Portal sessions expire when unused and have a maximum age. Revoking a portal user's access works immediately.
Each webhook subscription has its own secret, shown once and never readable afterwards: not on the screen, not in an export and not in a database copy. Every call carries a signature over timestamp and body, and that body holds numbers, states and amounts, not personal data.
A retention period with a cleanup job, export (GDPR articles 15 and 20) and erasure per e-mail address, and a data classification on every field. In a demo or test company, demo mode keeps every message in: it goes to one address instead of to the customer whose data was copied.
Not necessarily. Your website does need to use the CustomerGate 365 web services, because the app is the Business Central side of the connection. Van Oosten Software can build that part, and another developer can do it just as well.
That depends on the plan, Requests, Portal or Complete: per production environment per month, not per user, plus a one-off setup. A sandbox and demo mode are free. We give prices in a conversation, not in a table: ask through the contact form.
Thirty days before the end date the administrator sees a warning, and after the end date there is a grace period of thirty days. Only then do the web services stop: the website no longer takes requests and the portal and the catalog do not answer. Everything in Business Central keeps working, including erasing and exporting personal data. Your data is never held hostage.
No. The Steel 365 module switches itself on only where Steel 365 is installed. Without it the app works with standard Business Central quantities.
No, Business Central does. Per item, per item category, with numbered publication rules and one policy, and with a reason on the item for why it is on the site or not. The catalog services hand over published records only, so a mistake on the website cannot conjure up extras.
No. Confirmations of what a customer does themselves always go out. Notifications about quotes, orders, shipments and invoices are switched on by each portal user, and the company's master switch is off after a fresh installation and after every update. Every message says why it was sent and where to switch it off.
Yes, with webhooks: a quote released or accepted, an order created, a shipment or an invoice posted, an account approved, a request converted. They stay off until somebody creates a subscription in Business Central, with its own address and its own secret.
PDFs of quotes, orders, shipments, invoices and credit memos, printed with the reports Business Central already uses, including the document layouts per customer. Where iFacto DXSteel Doc Archive is installed, the portal uses the archive instead, limited to the archive categories you choose.
No. Process Request creates the sales quote, or a sales order for a staff order, and opens it. Inside sales checks it and releases it; a customer can accept a quote in the portal only once it is released.
No personal data. Once telemetry is enabled, Van Oosten Software receives technical telemetry: which feature ran and with what outcome, with counts and kinds only. The privacy statement for the app lists what it contains and what it never contains.
The manual, the setup guide and the web service reference are on this site, in Dutch and English. They describe the version of the app that is current today.
Help per screen, from web requests and the customer portal to the settings, the diagnostics and the web catalog.
From installing the app to a first request, and on: the job queue entries, the web catalog, webhooks and the diagnostics screen.
The services, procedures and JSON keys a website calls.
What is in each version of the app.
How to ask for help, and what to send along.
These three are about the app and not about this website, so they are kept separate. The privacy statement and terms for van-oosten.nl itself are at the bottom of every page.
Not sure whether this fits your website or your Business Central setup? Ask, and you will usually have an answer within one working day.