Tracking User Actions in Business Central: Take Control of Your Data

Are you truly in control of your data in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC)? Every day, users across your organization make changes to critical business data—often with the best intentions. Customer records are updated, sales orders are amended, prices are adjusted, and system settings are refined. But without clear visibility into what changed, when it happened, and who made the change, even small updates can introduce significant risk.

Standard Business Central was not designed to provide deep, contextual insight into user actions. As a result, organizations often discover issues only after financial discrepancies appear, audits raise red flags, or operational processes break down. In fast-moving environments, unnoticed changes can quietly compound until they become costly problems—impacting reporting accuracy, compliance, and trust in the system itself.

This is why tracking user actions in Business Central is no longer optional. It is essential for maintaining data integrity, accountability, and confidence in decision-making.

Why Tracking Changes in Business Central Matters

Business Central supports a wide range of daily operational activities. On any given day, users may update:

• Customer and vendor master data
• Sales order headers and lines
• Purchase invoices and credit notes
• Items and Bills of Materials (BOMs)
• Price lists and discount structures
• Chart of accounts
• System configurations and setups

Each of these changes can have a ripple effect across finance, operations, and reporting. When another user later asks, “What happened here?”, the answer should be immediate and clear. If it isn’t, your organization is exposed to unnecessary risk.

Untracked changes often result in time-consuming investigations, strained internal trust, and delayed decisions. Finance teams may struggle to reconcile balances, auditors may question data reliability, and managers may find themselves relying on assumptions rather than facts. Effective change tracking turns uncertainty into clarity—and clarity into control.

The Limitations of Standard Business Central

While Business Central offers strong functionality for operations, workflows, and reporting, its native change tracking is limited in scope and usability. Organizations frequently struggle to answer fundamental questions such as:

• What exactly changed on this record or page?
• When was the change made?
• Who made the change?

Even more importantly, standard BC provides little insight into the context behind the change:

• Why was the change necessary?
• Why did this user have permission to make it?
• Why wasn’t anyone notified when it happened?

Without these answers, sensitive data can be altered without oversight, errors can remain hidden, and accountability becomes blurred. For leaders responsible for governance, compliance, and risk management, this lack of visibility is a serious concern.

The Solution: BC X-Ray – Instant, Meaningful Change Insight

BC X-Ray, developed by Tools4BC, is designed to close these gaps. It extends Business Central with powerful, user-friendly tools that provide full transparency into data changes—without disrupting existing processes.

Instead of relying on fragmented logs or manual investigations, BC X-Ray delivers clear, actionable insight directly within Business Central.

What BC X-Ray Delivers:

• Instant Change Log Access
  View all changes made to every field on the current page, instantly. Each modification is recorded in real time, eliminating guesswork during audits, reviews, or troubleshooting.

• Field-Level Security
  Protect critical fields by restricting who can change them. Users can still view important values, but only authorized individuals or groups can edit them—reducing both accidental and unauthorized changes.

• Targeted Email Notifications
  Stay informed without being overwhelmed. BC X-Ray sends notifications only when predefined, meaningful changes occur, ensuring the right people are alerted at the right time.

• Reason Tracking
  Every change includes a reason. This added context explains why a modification was made and supports internal approvals, compliance reviews, and audit documentation.

• Smart Search
  Quickly search through historical change data to find specific updates, patterns, or anomalies—saving hours of manual investigation.

System-Wide Control, Minimal Effort

BC X-Ray works across more than 2,000 standard Business Central pages, all accessible with a single click. Whether users are working in finance, sales, purchasing, or operations, the same level of transparency applies everywhere.

Implementation is refreshingly simple. In just five minutes, organizations can activate BC X-Ray and begin tracking critical fields and tables across the system.

Getting Started Is Easy:

1. Install the BC X-Ray extension from Microsoft AppSource.
2. Run the Assisted Setup, which applies best-practice tracking for tables and fields and connects securely via API.
3. Start monitoring user actions with full visibility and confidence.

No complex configuration. No disruption to existing workflows.

Bonus: Cloud Integration with Azure Cosmos DB

BC X-Ray also supports integration with Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, allowing organizations to offload all or selected change log records to the cloud.

This delivers several tangible benefits:

• Reduced storage usage within Business Central
• Improved system performance
• Faster copying of environments and companies
• Secure, scalable storage for audit and compliance data

By moving historical logs out of the core system, organizations gain both performance improvements and long-term data accessibility—ideal for advanced reporting and analytics.

Advanced Monitoring and Intelligence

BC X-Ray goes beyond traditional change tracking by offering deeper insight into how Business Central is actually used:

• Page Access Monitoring – See which users accessed which pages and when
• Value-Based Alerts – Trigger notifications when values increase or decrease beyond defined thresholds
• Table-Level Tracking – Monitor changes across entire tables, not just individual fields
• Selective Cloud Sync – Choose which tables are stored in Cosmos DB for analysis

These capabilities help organizations proactively identify risks, inefficiencies, and unusual activity before they escalate.

What’s Coming Next

Upcoming releases will extend BC X-Ray’s intelligence even further:

• Page usage analysis to identify adoption gaps
• User-level visibility into page and data access
• Activity metrics to highlight training or process improvement needs

The BC X-Ray Agent will add another layer of insight by detecting unusual behavior, recommending training opportunities, and highlighting optimization potential across teams.

Why BC X-Ray Is a Must-Have for Business Central

With BC X-Ray, organizations gain:

• Complete visibility into every data change
• Stronger security and compliance controls
• Clear, reliable audit trails
• Actionable insight for continuous improvement
• Faster, more confident decision-making

Imagine never having to ask, “Who changed this—and why?” again. With BC X-Ray, the answer is always one click away.

Get Started Today

Taking control of your Business Central environment doesn’t require a major project. Within minutes, you can:

• Track user actions across critical fields and tables
• Enforce proper authorization and accountability
• Monitor system usage and changes
• Maintain a clean, reliable audit trail

Your data is one of your most valuable assets. With BC X-Ray, you finally have the visibility and control it deserves.

Contact us today at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and unlock the full potential of BC X-Ray.