Change Tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central helps tackle the challenge of maintaining accuracy and keeping data up-to-date, especially when it’s constantly changing. Whether it’s your customer address updates or pricing adjustments, you need a way to track changes across all areas of your organization.
With SmartConnect Change Tracking, you can easily overcome these hurdles. Change tracking ensures that data changes are recognized and synchronized across your systems, even though Dynamics 365 Business Central doesn’t natively support change-based integrations on all standard and custom tables.
Before we explore the full benefits of change tracking and its ideal users, let’s take a look at its overall functionality.
What is Change Tracking?
Changing tracking, at its core, is a way to monitor and log changes made to records in your system, similar to a job queue. Whenever a record is modified, a trigger fires to track that change, and the tracked records are later integrated on a schedule. This process ensures that any modified data is captured in real-time, allowing your integrations to only integrate relevant data rather than the full table. An added benefit to this approach is a clear audit trail, making it easier to monitor updates without manually checking every record.
From a technical perspective, one of the key advantages of change tracking is that it supports both standard and custom tables and fields, eliminating the need for custom development and saving time and money. This is especially valuable, as it simplifies the integration process. Best practices suggest focusing on tracking by the table, particularly when dealing with master data (such as customers, vendors, and items).
How does Change Tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central Work?
Change Tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central offers a simple, efficient, and flexible way to monitor changes in data. It can be customized to fit your company’s specific needs, reduce the chance of errors, and make integration easier. This makes it a stronger and more reliable option compared to other integration tools that might need custom development or don’t offer the same level of automation and error protection. Here’s how it works:
| Change Tracking Via an Extension | Dynamics 365 Business Central doesn’t have built-in change tracking for all tables, the SmartConnect Extension enables this functionality. |
| SmartConnect Enables Remote Triggering | SmartConnect can hook in Dynamics 365 Business Central’s event-driven architecture, allowing external systems to listen for changes in any table. |
| Tracking Created, Updated, or Deleted Records | When tracking is enabled, any created, modified, or deleted records are logged for later processing. |
| Snapshot & Logging for Integration | SmartConnect saves a snapshot of the record into a dedicated log table, and changes can be processed on a schedule |
| Captured Standard & Custom Fields Without Extra Development | The snapshot includes all relevant standard or custom fields without requiring extra development. |
| Dynamics 365 Business Central Runs Smoothly | Change tracking works without disruption or performance impact. |
| Automatic Cleanup After Integration | Once integration is successful, the tracked record is removed from the change log to prevent duplicate processing and minimize your Business Central storage. |
| Error Management | The process is designed to handle errors and ensure data consistency. |
| Failsafe Mechanism | The change log is only cleared when integration succeeds, ensuring data is not lost. |
The Key Benefits of Change Tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Efficient integrations start with smart data movement, and that’s exactly what change tracking delivers. By only transferring modified records, it simplifies the data flow and eliminates unnecessary processing.
- Change tracking ensures only modified records are processed. Prevent
sunnecessary transfer of unchanged data, reducing the volume of data being moved, cutting down on processing time, system load, and integration costs.
- Change tracking ensures no record is lost and is resistant to errors. Instead of manually troubleshooting and reprocessing data, the system keeps attempting to sync failed records, minimizing disruptions and ensuring data integrity.
- Change tracking is flexible, simple, and removes custom development.
Change Tracking is a Must-Have for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Change tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central isn’t just a want—it’s a need; a game-changer for efficient, reliable integrations. Moving only modified data keeps performance high and costs low. Built-in error resilience ensures that failed imports don’t slip through the cracks, automatically retrying until they succeed. Its flexibility across all tables and fields, without custom development, makes it fit into any Dynamics 365 Business Central setup. Whether you’re managing complex integrations or just looking for a smarter way to handle data, change tracking is the key to keeping everything running smoothly.
To learn more about change tracking in Dynamics 365 Business Central, sign up for next week’s Powerful Change Tracking for D365 Business Central webinar, where you’ll get an even deeper dive into this essential feature.
Ready to talk to a consultant about implementing Change Tracking in your environment? Contact us to learn more.
