Why you should integrate Dynamics 365 Business Central with Payhawk

You already trust Business Central for reporting, consolidation, and compliance, but it doesn’t surface spend the moment it happens. Purchases, approvals, receipts, and supplier payments still sit outside the ERP, which fragments processes and slows teams down as you scale. Integrating your finance techstack can fix this, meaning real-time data flows cleanly into Business Central, and you get a connected operation across every entity without relying on manual work or delayed updates.

That’s why so many teams turn to a dedicated spend platform like Payhawk to get the real-time spend control that Business Central can’t provide on its own. Business Central Copilot helps with vital ERP tasks like data entry and cash flow analysis, but Payhawk handles the full source-to-pay cycle. It issues corporate cards, captures receipts instantly, automates AP, applies spend policies before money leaves the business, and syncs everything back to Business Central with mapped dimensions and clean coding. Business Central stays your financial system of record, and Payhawk becomes the operational front end that keeps spend controlled, visible, and accurate in real time.

Why spend management integration matters for Business Central users

While Business Central excels at financial reporting and consolidation, spend management integration further extends its reach and sucess to operational control and audit readiness.

Once you pull live spend into Business Central, you gain end-to-end traceability, instant policy enforcement, and automated reconciliation across every entity.

In a nutshell, for enterprise finance departments, this means:

• Transaction-level traceability across entities and jurisdictions
• Automated compliance enforcement aligned with corporate policy
• Elimination of manual reconciliation that slows close cycles and increases audit risk

Six challenges without spend visibility at source

1. Manual data entry consumes enterprise finance capacity

There are lots of better ways to spend finance team time that don’t include entering and re-entering data into Business Central. Other pressing matters include forecasting, analysing, and process improvement. But your team can’t do any of that until they record all financial transactions accurately.

2. Chasing missing documentation across global entities creates compliance risk

Chasing receipts is another task adding unnecessary complexity to your expense management processes. It’s already tedious for a small team, but as you scale and you have staff across multiple entities, it becomes so challenging and very easy to lose track of receipts. Which means many, many lost opportunities for VAT reclaims.

3. Lack of real-time visibility leads to delayed decisions and reactive cash control

Although you can see a trail of historic spending in Business Central, what you can’t see is the laptop purchase a team member made just this morning, or the marketing tool subscription that just renewed. Real-time visibility matters: it helps you make informed business decisions as and when spending happens. Helping you adjust budgets in real-time, and analyse spending patterns now, not in weeks when overspend has already happened.

4. Global entity management increases reconciliation complexity and VAT risk

You add on a French entity, it’s great, you’re scaling. But now, that entity has different VAT registrations to consider, you need to manually code each transaction, reconciliation takes ages, and cost centre tagging can easily become inconsistent with misclassifications or a lack of standardisation.

5. Financial dimensional accuracy suffers across multi-currency, multi-entity operations

Dimensional accounting in Business Central is useful, but only if you code data correctly in the first place. Unfortunately, manually processing your data leads to inconsistencies, duplicates, and easy errors. This can mean you charge expenses to the wrong project, or you tag the invoice to the wrong customer dimension. All of this means project profitability can be difficult to track.

6. Without integration, auditability and compliance traceability weaken significantly

With spend remaining siloed with integration, it prevents auditors tracing records from end-to-end, i.e. from transaction to general ledger. That can leave your data inconsistent and inaccurate for compliance check purposes.

What Business Central does well (and where it falls short)

Business Central strengths:

• Financial reporting, recording, and compliance
• Consolidation
• Audit trails
• Dimensional analysis
• Statutory reporting

Business Central gaps:

• Integrated corporate cards
• Real-time spending and visibility control
• Automated receipt capture and matching
• Custom approval workflows
• Supplier payment automation with compliance built in

The strategic advantages of integrating Business Central with Payhawk

For enterprise finance and systems leaders, integration is not just about convenience — it’s about governance, scalability, and strategic control. The right spend management solution, with the right integration approach, will give you a single source of spend truth across entities, currencies, and categories; becoming the orchestration layer that feeds Business Central everything it needs to operate cleanly, accurately, and in real time.

By connecting Payhawk (for spend management) and Business Central, you can standardise spend data capture, automate reconciliation, and ensure every transaction is auditable, compliant, and visible in real time across the group.

Still wondering about the biggest strategic advantages? Here are the top four:

Real-time spend visibility and rigorous financial control. Integrating means you effortlessly capture every transaction in real-time. No delays in card payments, expenses, or supplier invoices. So, if you could access this kind of data and maintain complete audit trails in your Business Central ERP, it’s a win, right?

Automation that eliminates data entry bottlenecks. Cut the unnecessary bottlenecks with the help of automatic transaction flow from Payhawk to Business Central. No coding needed, and receipts already attached. Stop limiting your finance team to just data entry tasks and enable them to become strategic partners.

Push all transactions — including receipts, invoices, and VAT information — directly into Business Central using mapped dimensions and categories.

Multi-entity operations become possible. You can automatically route transactions to the correct entity, while applying the appropriate VAT treatment, and maintain separate card programmes. And guess what? All this syncs perfectly with your Business Central system.

No more errors in your dimensional mapping. Imagine a world with accurate project profitability. When integrating Payhawk and Business Central, that’s what you get. Removing any month-end surprises is critical, so the less manual intervention needed, the fewer coding errors. So, let employees tag spending to specific projects as soon as they make a purchase through our mobile app, and watch it flow into your Business Central dimensions.

The moment it clicks is when you realise Business Central isn’t missing features, it’s missing the live data layer that makes those features work.

Don’t just take our word for it

Andrei Banea, COO at Big Bang says this of the benefits of his Payhawk and Business Central integration:

The Payhawk integration with Microsoft Dynamics BC is a game-changer for our clients. Master data is synced automatically in real-time, enabling efficient decision-making.

“Importantly, it's easy to deploy, with a setup wizard that takes about 20 minutes. The advanced capabilities of Payhawk, like multi-entity management and customisable dimensions, then give Dynamics users better visibility over their finances."

Specific integration features with Payhawk

• The Payhawk–Business Central integration is built for enterprise-grade control, offering secure, bi-directional data exchange through native APIs (no custom development required).
• Business Central dimensions are mapped inside Payhawk. All BC dimensions are available and fully synchronised with the Payhawk interface. This means you have General Ledger-level accuracy from the start. You can finally say goodbye to chasing missing information or wasting hours reworking expense reports to reflect your accounting structure.
• Empower employees without exposing ERP complexity. It’s easy for users to feel overwhelmed with BC, particularly when all they need to do is submit an expense. With the Payhawk integration, employees just see the details they need. Keeping the interface clean and user-friendly without the need to implement unnecessary ERP training or giving way to data entry errors.
• Mapped GL logic for Journal Entries and Purchase Invoices. No more complex reconfiguration with mapping functionalities that match the accounting logic needs of larger companies.
• Direct export of bank transactions for reconciliation. Payhawk’s direct export functionality ensures that all transactions are sent from Payhawk to BC in a format ready for reconciliation. No more churning the tedious download-upload-format cycle.
• Entity-level tagging and control. As soon as a transaction happens, the Payhawk system attributes the correct legal entity. This removes the possibility of misallocation of transactions and the setting of entity-specific rules and approval workflows, making it effortless.

Four steps to integrating Business Central with Payhawk

It’s easier than you think to connect your Dynamics 365 Business Central system with Payhawk. As Andrei Banea, COO at Big Bang, said in his quote further up, with our setup wizard, it only took them 20 minutes.

Please note: Integrating Business Central with Payhawk doesn’t require any custom API development; it’s all done via native integration and secure APIs.

So, to make sure your team integrates seamlessly, follow these four steps:

1. Start with a good plan. Before you get overwhelmed, our team typically guides this planning phase, helping you understand which of our fields should correspond with your Business Central dimensions, which approval workflows you need to configure, etc. We want to ensure the integration is as straightforward as possible.

2. Clean up your ERP. You want to start your integration on the right foot, with high-quality, accurate data. So now is the time to remove duplicate or outdated records. Perhaps you have some old customer profiles hidden somewhere or inactive vendors.

3. Time to configure your field mapping. Our team needs to understand how you want the systems to communicate with each other. So that means configuring every transaction to code correctly when the systems first sync.

4. Sync, test, and monitor. Now it’s time to check that your setup works. Take time to test multiple sample transactions. Don’t forget to train users on how to tag each expense and why it’s important, and spend time monitoring logs, learning from your tests, and tweaking mappings until they’re perfectly aligned.

Best practices for your Business Central integration

Our tops tips are as follows:

• Review mapping rules quarterly. As your business grows, some details are likely to change. For example, vendor details might differ, or you might alter compliance requirements, or perhaps your business structure changes. Reviewing mapping rules regularly helps you maintain accurate data exchange while preventing preventable errors.
• Use role-based approvals to control spend at the source. By assigning roles to users, i.e. managers and finance leads, you can achieve spending accountability and ensure governance and compliance.
• Train teams to tag correctly at point-of-spend. If your team is unsure how to categorise their expense, it can cause inaccuracies, which hinders spend visibility and impacts real-time financial analysis.
• Leverage audit logs and reconciliation summaries. If you have any queries or discrepancies, you can lean on your audit logs and reconciliation summaries to solve them. Knowing who signed what off and when can help keep all team members accountable, while streamlining the month-end close.
• Deploy change management in phases. Being gung-ho and making company-wide adjustments immediately can be a little overwhelming to manage. Consider rolling out by entity or department.

FAQs from Business Central finance teams

Still got some questions? Here are some of the most common ones:

Can Payhawk sync with all my custom dimensions?
You can sync your dimensions in Payhawk with your custom fields from Business Central.

How does it handle split allocations across projects or cost centres?
You can split any expense into multiple line items within the Payhawk platform. You can assign each line a different category, value, or custom field (i.e. project or cost centre),

What kind of audit logs are available?
You can track expenses in real-time, along with card issues, invoice processing, expense categorisation, and receipt uploads. Any changes users make — and every transaction processed — is fully traceable across platforms.

Can I sync both expense and supplier invoice flows?
Yes. As the Payhawk integration is a direct one, data seamlessly flows between the two platforms. That includes the synchronisation of invoices, supplier data, and more.

Is multi-entity consolidation supported?
Yes, it’s supported in both Payhawk and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Your next steps

Explore how leading enterprises use Payhawk’s native Business Central integration to automate control, governance, and visibility across every entity.

Book a consultation to discuss integration strategies for your Business Central environment.