Business Central

Integrating Business Central: API, OData, EDI and PEPPOL

Orders arrive through a web shop or customer portal, invoices have to reach your customers' networks, and stock levels must match the warehouse system. It only works when nobody retypes data, and when you can see a message has not arrived before the customer calls.

Business Central offers good interfaces: the standard APIs, custom API pages, OData web services and webhooks that report a change. What makes an integration reliable is everything around it: agreements about the data, error handling and monitoring. In Business Central online, the per-environment operation limits and authentication through Microsoft Entra ID come on top of that.

When this fits

Orders, customers or items are copied by hand between Business Central and another system.
Customers ask for e-invoices over PEPPOL, or for EDI messages.
An existing integration still uses outdated authentication or SOAP web services.
You want a customer portal or web shop that puts quotes or orders straight into Business Central.

What the engagement covers

Choosing the interface: standard API, custom API page, OData or a file flow, with the reasoning.
The data definition: which system leads for customers, items, prices and stock.
Authentication through Microsoft Entra ID, with its own app registration and no more permissions than needed.
Error handling: retries, respecting limits, and no duplicate orders when a message is delivered twice.
E-invoicing and EDI: connecting to PEPPOL and translating messages through a provider of your choice.
Monitoring, with an alert to a person when things go quiet.

What you get

An integration that keeps running once I am no longer involved.

The integration in your own environment, with source code and configuration held by you.
An interface document for each data flow.
Monitoring you can check yourself.
A troubleshooting guide for your administrators.

What it is not

Not an integration that imitates screens or writes straight into the database.
Not an EDI network or PEPPOL access point of my own. You buy that service from a provider; I handle the connection.
Not a reporting or data warehouse project.

Frequently asked questions

API or OData web service: what is the difference?

Both run over OData. Microsoft's standard APIs are designed for integrations, have a fixed structure and stay stable between updates. A page published as a web service is quicker to set up, but follows the screen layout and can therefore change. For an integration that has to run for years I choose an API, a custom API page in an extension if needed.

Do we need to support PEPPOL?

More and more customers, public bodies among them, ask for e-invoices over PEPPOL. Business Central can produce the message format; to send it, you need a connection to the network through an access point. I help you choose that provider and set it up.

Our integration still uses a web service access key. Is that a problem?

In Business Central online, yes: only OAuth through Microsoft Entra ID works there. On-premises it still works, but a move to SaaS means the integration has to change anyway. That is a good moment to review the error handling too.

What happens during an outage?

Messages wait rather than disappear. Retries follow at increasing intervals, and after an agreed number of attempts someone gets an alert. Delivering the same message twice does not create a second order.

More within this service

Integrating Business Central?

Name the systems, and what currently goes back and forth by hand. In a first conversation you hear which interface fits and where the risks are.

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