Business Central has a mobile app for iOS and Android that shows the same pages as the web client. That is good enough for a director who needs to approve a purchase invoice at the airport. It is rarely good enough for a fitter who needs to register hours in a basement with no signal.
The difference lies in the role. Here is what we see working for the different users — and when the standard app falls short.
Understand the mobile users
Management
- Approvals: purchase invoices, purchase orders and expense claims — with a notification, so they do not sit waiting
- A few key figures in the role centre: liquidity, overdue customers, today's sales
- Power BI reports in the Power BI app rather than in the BC app
- No typing. Managers read and approve on the phone
Sales
- Customer card with balance, credit limit and latest orders
- Items with stock level and the price for the specific customer
- Creating quotes and orders at the customer's site
- The standard app needs a connection. Salespeople without coverage need something else
Warehouse
- Barcode scanning on receipt, picking and counting
- Bin locations and moves
- Large buttons and few fields — it must be usable with gloves on
- For heavy warehouse work, a dedicated scanner solution is often better than the BC app on a phone
Fitters and field staff
- Time registration on a project or service order, straight away — not on Friday afternoon from memory
- Photos and documentation linked directly to the task
- An overview of your own tasks and projects, not everyone else's
- Must work offline: basements, building sites and rural areas do not always have coverage
Organisations that implement role-specific mobile strategies see a 27% increase in user adoption and a 23% improvement in process efficiency compared with generic mobile solutions.
Get more out of the standard app
Personalisation
- Set up the right role centre for each type of user — it is the first thing the user sees
- Let users personalise their own view: hide fields they never use and pin the pages they use every day
- Create profiles, so that all salespeople get the same set-up
- Check your own pages in phone view — pages built for a large screen often become hard to read
Mobile workflows
- Approval flows with notifications instead of emails you have to remember to open
- Take a photo of a receipt and attach it — or use Continia Expense Management for expense claims
- Keep the forms short. Every extra field on mobile is a field that gets skipped
Performance
- Filter lists in advance, so the phone does not fetch 10,000 items
- Avoid heavy calculated fields on the pages used on mobile
- Run heavy jobs in the job queue, not while the user waits
When custom development makes sense
When the standard app falls short, it is typically for one of these reasons:
- Users need to work offline and synchronise later
- The task is so specific that the full BC client is too much — for example only hours and photos on a project
- Users do not have a full BC licence and should not need one
- Integration with specialist equipment such as scanners or scales
Time registration in the field was exactly the problem we ran into ourselves at customers. That is why we built Invice Project Management: an iOS and Android app where employees register time, breaks and photos on their own projects, even without coverage. The hours land on the project in Business Central as soon as the phone is online. The app is on Microsoft AppSource with a 30-day free trial.
Should Business Central be used on the phone?
We set up the standard app for your roles — and when it falls short, we have our own app for time registration in the field.