By the time most organisations are choosing a Business Central partner they are holding two or three quotes with different numbers, different scope, and no way to compare them. One is $9,500, one is $22,000, one says “from” and leaves it there. The instinct is to compare the prices, which is exactly what cannot be done.
There is a better way in, and it costs nothing. Microsoft publishes what comes with a Business Central subscription, and it publishes what it does not provide at all. Between those two documents you can read any quote and see what you are actually being charged for. This article is that reading.
What the subscription already includes
Start here, because several things partners bill for are already yours.
Every Business Central Essentials or Premium subscription includes one production environment and three sandbox environments at no extra charge. Not one sandbox. Three. They are created from the administration centre in a few minutes.
Database storage is 80 GB by default, plus a per-licence allowance: 3 GB for each Premium licence, 2 GB for each Essentials licence, 1 GB for each Device licence. Team Members licences carry no storage allowance, so a large Team Members population does not increase your capacity.
If the business needs a second production environment, that is a CSP licence add-on rather than professional services, and each additional production environment brings three further sandboxes and 4 GB of tenant-wide capacity with it.
So a quote with line items for environment provisioning, sandbox creation or tenant setup is charging you to fill in a form. That is not automatically dishonest, but it should be a small number, and it should not be described as though it were engineering. What a fair quote charges for instead is the decision: how many environments this business actually needs, what each is for, and who is allowed to refresh them.
The storage question worth asking
Two details about that 80 GB catch people out, and both are worth raising with a prospective partner because the answers tell you how well they know the platform.
It is tenant-wide, not per environment. The sum of capacity used across every environment must stay under the limit. Four environments do not get 80 GB each.
Running out does not stop you trading. Microsoft is explicit that exceeding the paid database storage limit does not interrupt transaction processing in existing environments. What it blocks is creating new environments, and copying or restoring existing ones. In other words, hitting the limit does not take the business down, it takes your recovery options away, which is worse in a quiet sort of way and exactly the kind of thing nobody discovers until they need a restore.
Extra capacity is sold as add-ons, and Microsoft does not publish their prices. Ask the partner what they cost through their CSP, and ask what happens to storage when an extension is uninstalled, because data left behind by a removed app is a common source of creeping usage.
What Microsoft does not provide, whatever the quote implies
This is the half that surprises buyers.
There is no Microsoft sign-off on your implementation. Business Central is not on Microsoft’s list of FastTrack-eligible Dynamics 365 applications, which covers Finance, Supply Chain Management, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations and others. So there is no Microsoft-run solution blueprint review and no independent go-live readiness review. Any assurance in your project comes from your partner, or from you.
There is no Business Central methodology from Microsoft either. The Dynamics 365 implementation guide exists, and it is built on Success by Design in five stages, but Microsoft states it is relevant for medium-sized and larger organisations, and tells smaller businesses to go and explore Business Central instead. If a partner cites Success by Design workshops to justify substantial governance overhead on a twenty-user financials rollout, they are applying an enterprise governance apparatus to a product Microsoft points smaller businesses towards precisely because it deploys from templates. Ask what each workshop produces and who reads it.
The go-live checklist is advisory. Microsoft publishes one, and it is genuinely useful: eleven named areas covering go-live readiness, cutover, scope and solution acceptance review, user acceptance testing, performance testing, system integration testing, data migration readiness and validation, external dependencies, change management and operational support readiness. Nothing in it is signed off by anyone. Read it as a list of questions to ask a partner. If a quote does not mention several of those eleven areas, they are either included and unstated, or they are yours.
Four line items worth questioning
These appear often enough to name, because Microsoft already provides the thing being billed for.
Backups and disaster recovery. Business Central online runs on Azure SQL Database, which backs up every production and sandbox environment automatically and keeps 28 days of them. Microsoft states that administrators “can’t directly access or manage these backups”. There is no retention to set, no backup job to schedule, and no regional failover to design, because recovery into another region is Microsoft’s own automated procedure. What is real sits on the restore side: someone has to hold the D365 BACKUP/RESTORE permission set, a restore arrives as a new environment rather than a rollback, integrations come back deliberately disabled and have to be reconnected, and nothing is kept past 28 days, so an archive means exporting the database to your own Azure storage. Pay for the runbook and the rehearsal. Do not pay to configure backups.
Tenant and hosting setup. The first production environment is not built by hand. Microsoft provisions it with the subscription, and it appears the first time someone signs in. What a partner legitimately earns here is the decision rather than the deployment: the country and localisation, which also fix the Azure region and cannot be changed afterwards, and which of your three included sandboxes are actually for what.
Applying monthly updates. Microsoft manages updates for the application and the platform, ships minor updates every month except April and October, and patches the underlying service invisibly at low-traffic hours. Nobody at your partner applies anything. Managing the calendar is real work, as we set out in Business Central support after go-live, but it is not patching, and a recurring line described that way is billing for work no human performs.
Power BI connection. Business Central online is, in Microsoft’s words, “already set up to integrate with Power BI”. The built-in APIs need no setup at all, role centres already carry Power BI parts, and connecting once uploads a set of default reports into your workspace. So “enabling the connector” is not a task. Where it stops being free is worth knowing, because it is a licence cost rather than a services one: Microsoft’s Power BI apps for Business Central come as a preinstalled connector plus a template app that has to be installed, connected and refreshed, and a free Power BI licence cannot be used for them. The person who installs, the person whose credentials refresh the data, and every person who views the reports each needs Power BI Pro or a Fabric capacity, on top of a Business Central licence. Building your own reports on top is genuine consulting work. Turning the connection on is not.
Where data migration effort actually lands
If you are coming from an older system, the migration tooling does less than its name suggests. Only tables that exist in both systems come across. Customisations have to be converted to extensions and installed on both sides, or mapped field by field. Users and permissions do not replicate at all. Microsoft’s own advice is to move less rather than more.
That reframes the question you should be asking. Not “does your fixed fee include data migration”, which every partner answers yes to, but “how many years of history are in this price, and what happens to the rest”. Opening balances, open receivables and payables, and inventory on hand are a different job from ten years of posted transactions, and the second one is where fixed fees quietly become time and materials. We cover the one-way decisions in more detail in our piece on GP to Business Central migration.
What is separate, always
Three things sit outside any implementation fee and should be named in the quote rather than discovered later.
- Licences. Business Central licences can only be bought through CSP, so they come through a partner, monthly, per user, forever. They are not part of an implementation price and should never be bundled into one without being shown separately.
- AppSource apps. A third-party app carries its own per-user subscription, defined and priced by its publisher, provisioned into your own admin centre. Your implementation partner does not control that price and cannot include it in a fixed fee beyond the first term.
- Storage above your entitlement, per the add-ons above.
Our position: the out-of-scope list is the quote
In our view a fixed fee means nothing without a named out-of-scope list, and the quality of that list is the single best signal of how an implementation will go.
A price with no boundary is not a fixed fee, it is an opening position, and the difference gets settled later as a change order. We are not suggesting bad faith. Scoping is genuinely hard, and plenty of partners are simply optimistic. But the effect on the buyer is the same either way: where an all-inclusive fee meets work that nobody scoped, one of three things happens. The partner absorbs it, you are asked to sign a change order, or something elastic gives. The elastic items are almost always testing and training, because they sit at the end of the plan.
The same logic runs through what happens after go-live, which is the other half of the commitment and the part that is almost never in the quote at all. We set out what a support arrangement has to cover in Business Central support after go-live, and what the full first-year picture looks like in our Business Central implementation cost breakdown.
Questions to ask before you sign
Six, in order, and each one has a checkable answer:
- Which of the eleven go-live checklist areas are in this price, and which are ours?
- How many years of history does this include, and what is the cost if we want more?
- What is explicitly out of scope? Ask for it in writing.
- Which AppSource apps does this depend on, what do they cost per user per month, and who renews them?
- How many environments are we getting, and are any of them being charged for as services?
- Who is our first line of support the day after go-live, and are they set up with delegated admin access before we need them?
Veratas implements Business Central on a fixed-fee basis, and the scope, the exclusions and what happens after go-live are written down before anyone signs. If you are comparing quotes and want a second read on what they actually cover, talk to our team. If the system in question is CRM rather than ERP, the same questions apply with different numbers, and we set those out in what moves the price of a Dynamics CRM implementation.
Frequently asked questions
How many environments come with a Business Central subscription? One production environment and three sandboxes, at no extra charge, with every Essentials or Premium subscription. Additional production environments are bought as a CSP add-on, and each one includes three further sandboxes and 4 GB of extra tenant storage.
How much data storage do we get? 80 GB by default, plus 3 GB per Premium licence, 2 GB per Essentials licence and 1 GB per Device licence. It is shared across every environment in the tenant rather than allocated per environment, and Team Members licences do not add to it.
What happens if we run out of storage? Transactions keep processing. What stops is creating, copying or restoring environments, until you free space or buy an add-on. That makes it a recovery problem rather than an availability one.
Does Microsoft review or approve a Business Central implementation? No. Business Central is not covered by FastTrack, so there is no Microsoft solution blueprint review or go-live readiness review. Microsoft publishes an advisory go-live checklist of eleven areas, and that is the extent of it.
Are licences included in a fixed-fee implementation? They should never be. Business Central licences are sold only through CSP, per user per month, and they continue after the project ends. A quote should show implementation services and licences as separate lines.
What should we ask a Business Central partner first? What is out of scope. Choosing a Business Central partner on price alone compares numbers that describe different amounts of work, and the exclusions list is the only part of a quote that makes two prices comparable.
Senior Business Intelligence Architect with 22 years of experience designing enterprise analytics and data platforms. Focus areas include Power BI, real-time analytics, and large-scale BI architecture across the Microsoft data stack.