Business Central training: how to actually learn the system

Most people asking about Business Central training want one of four different things, and picking the wrong route wastes either money or weeks. A finance manager who needs to close a month does not need a consultant certification, and a developer does not need a walkthrough of the sales order screen.

The four routes compared

The exam fee varies by proctoring location and Microsoft revises it periodically, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude rather than a quote.

Start with Microsoft Learn, because it is free

Microsoft publishes structured learning paths for Business Central covering finance, sales, purchasing, inventory and configuration, with a free sandbox to practise in. It costs nothing and it is the same material the paid courses are built on.

The honest limitation is that it teaches the product, not your business. It will show you how a purchase invoice posts; it will not tell you which posting group your company should use or why your predecessor set it up the way they did. That gap is what the other three routes exist to fill.

The two certifications, and who actually needs them

MB-800 — Functional Consultant Associate

The functional certification. It covers setting up Business Central, configuring financials, configuring sales and purchasing, and running day-to-day operations, weighted roughly towards setup and operations. The exam runs about two and a half hours with a mix of multiple choice, case studies and occasional lab simulations.

Worth taking if you implement or configure the system for others, or if you are the internal owner of Business Central at a company that runs it. Not worth taking if you are an end user who needs to raise sales orders — that is an expensive way to learn a screen.

MB-820 — Developer Associate

Introduced in 2024 for AL development: extensions, AL objects, development tooling and integrations. The single biggest adjustment for anyone arriving from NAV and C/AL is the shift from modifying base objects to extending them through events and subscribers.

MB-800 is not a formal prerequisite, but taking it first makes MB-820 considerably easier, because you cannot extend an application sensibly without knowing how it behaves.

Both certifications renew annually through a free online assessment rather than a re-sit, so the ongoing commitment is modest. When customisation is worth doing at all is a separate question, covered in when AL customisation pays off.

Training the team that will actually use it

This is the route most companies need and the one most often cut from the budget first. Failed ERP projects are rarely failures of software — they are failures of adoption, where the system works correctly and nobody uses it as intended.

What makes team training work is narrowing it. Nobody needs the whole product:

• Finance — chart of accounts, posting groups, bank reconciliation, the period close sequence and VAT reporting.
• Sales and purchasing — quotes to orders to invoices, pricing and discount rules, credit limits and what to do when an order is blocked.
• Warehouse — receiving, put-away, picking and despatch at the process level you have chosen, plus stocktakes.
• Management — reading the numbers rather than entering them: dimensions, financial reports and Power BI.

Timing matters as much as content. Training delivered a month before go-live is largely forgotten by the time the system is live; training delivered in the fortnight around cutover, on your own data rather than a demo company, is what people retain.

UK-specific ground to cover

Two topics that generic training material tends to skip and that a UK finance team will need on day one.

MTD for VAT. Business Central supports Making Tax Digital natively — digital record keeping and submitting the VAT return to HMRC from inside the system. The training question is not whether it works but who runs the submission, what they check before they do, and what happens when a return needs adjusting.

Payroll. There is no built-in UK payroll engine, so payroll either stays with your existing provider and posts across as journals, or runs through a third-party extension. Either way the finance team needs to know which entries arrive automatically and which are their responsibility. The licensing and cost side is set out in Business Central pricing in the UK.

Training with NBCS

We run role-based sessions for the teams we implement for: built around your configuration and your data, not a demo company, and scheduled around cutover rather than ahead of it. Sessions are delivered online in English.

If you are running Business Central already and inherited it from someone else, we also do shorter review sessions — what your predecessor configured, why, and what is safe to change. Tell us the scope and we will propose a plan.

We separately run a twenty-module Business Central programme in Ukrainian, delivered with the ASAB training centre and built around Ukrainian statutory accounting. If that is what you need, the Ukrainian course catalogue has the full syllabus and prices.