How Zentriq Agent Turns Business Central Into a Conversational ERP

Business Central is powerful. But let's be honest: navigating menus, applying filters, remembering which page holds which data — it takes time. Even experienced users spend minutes on tasks that should take seconds.

What if you could just ask? “What are my top 5 customers this quarter?” “Create a PO for 500 units of item 1001 to vendor 10000.” “Show me a P&L for January.”

That's what Zentriq Agent does. It's an AI agent that lives inside Business Central and understands your data. Not a chatbot that sends you to documentation — an agent that reads, writes, and analyzes your actual BC environment.

Three things the Agent does

Most AI tools for ERPs focus on one thing: answering questions. Zentriq Agent goes further. It covers three modes of interaction with Business Central:

1. Read — query anything in natural language

Ask the Agent about any data in your Business Central: customers, vendors, items, invoices, ledger entries, sales orders, purchase orders. It translates your question into the right API calls and returns a clean, formatted answer.

• “Show me all open purchase invoices for vendor Fabrikam.”
• “What's the current stock for item 1928-S?”
• “List all customers with an overdue balance.”
• “What's the payment terms for vendor 30000?”

No filters, no page navigation, no “which list page was it again?”. Just ask.

2. Write — create and modify records

The Agent doesn't just read. It can create purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, journal entries, customers, vendors — anything you can do in BC. The key difference: every write action requires your approval. The Agent shows you exactly what it will create, and you confirm before it executes.

• “Create a purchase order for 200 units of item 1896-S to vendor 10000, delivery next Friday.”
• “Post all open purchase invoices for vendor Fabrikam.”
• “Create a new customer from the domestic template: ABC Corp, Zurich.”

One sentence replaces 15 clicks, 3 page navigations, and 10 fields to fill manually.

3. Analyze — dashboards, charts, and financial reports

This is where the Agent really shines. Ask for analytics and it generates visual dashboards with KPI cards, bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and formatted tables — directly in the chat.

Analytics in action

Here are real examples of what the Agent produces when you ask analytical questions:

Financial dashboard

Ask “Show me a financial dashboard for Q1” and the Agent returns:

• KPI cards — Total revenue, total expenses, net income, accounts receivable — each with a value and a trend indicator.
• Monthly breakdown — A table or chart showing revenue and expenses per month.
• Top customers — Who brought in the most revenue this quarter.
• Outstanding receivables — Aging breakdown by 30/60/90+ days.

Customer and vendor profiles

Ask “Tell me about customer 10000” and you get a full profile:

• Contact info, payment terms, balance
• Year-to-date sales amount
• Number of open invoices
• List of open sales orders

Same for vendors — YTD purchases, open invoices, open POs, all in one view. No need to navigate between 4 different BC pages.

Sales and purchase analysis

“Compare my sales Q1 vs Q4 last year.” “Show me purchasing trends for the last 6 months.” “Who are my top 10 vendors by purchase volume?”

The Agent generates bar charts for comparisons, line charts for trends, and ranked tables for top-N analysis. All computed from your actual BC ledger entries.

Financial reports

The Agent can generate a Profit & Loss statement, a Balance Sheet, or a Trial Balance. Just ask: “Show me the P&L for February.” It pulls data from your general ledger, groups by account category, and formats it as a clean financial report.

Nine domains, one agent

The Agent isn't limited to finance. It covers nine domains of Business Central:

1. Purchasing — POs, invoices, credit memos, quotes, goods receipt, posting
2. Sales — Sales orders, invoices, credit memos, quotes, shipments, posting
3. Finance — Journals, customer/vendor payments, GL entries, ledger entries, bank reconciliation
4. CRM — Customers, vendors, contacts, employees, opportunities, interactions
5. Inventory — Items, stock, movements, categories, value entries, reorder alerts
6. Reporting & Analytics — P&L, balance sheet, trial balance, aging, cash flow, sales/purchase analysis
7. Documents — Invoice capture from PDF or image, AI extraction, purchase invoice creation
8. Templates — Customer/vendor creation from templates with posting groups pre-filled
9. Dashboards — KPI cards, charts, monthly trends, period comparisons, customer/vendor profiles, margins

All included from day one. No modules to activate, no configuration to set up.

How it works under the hood

When you type a question, the Agent:

1. Understands your intent — Uses AI to determine what you're asking for (a query, a report, a write action).
2. Plans the execution — Selects the right BC API endpoints, filters, and parameters.
3. Calls your BC environment — Makes authenticated API calls using your Microsoft credentials. It can only access data you have permission to see.
4. Formats the result — Presents the data as text, tables, KPI cards, or charts — whichever fits best.

For write actions, there's an extra step: the Agent shows you a preview of what it will create, and waits for your explicit approval before executing.

Works everywhere

The Agent isn't locked to your desktop. You can use it:

• Inside Business Central — As a sidebar panel, right next to your BC pages.
• On the web — From zentriqsoftware.com/chat, on any browser.
• On mobile — Same web chat, fully responsive. Check your numbers from anywhere.

What about Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft is building Copilot features into Business Central. So why use Zentriq Agent?

• Available now — Zentriq Agent is live today. Copilot for BC is still rolling out features gradually.
• Write actions — Zentriq Agent can create POs, invoices, journal entries. Copilot is mostly read-only for now.
• Visual analytics — KPI cards, charts, financial dashboards. Copilot doesn't generate visual reports.
• Document capture — Upload an invoice PDF and create a purchase invoice. Not available in Copilot.
• Deeper coverage — 9 domains, 30+ workflows. Copilot covers a narrower set of scenarios.

They're complementary: Copilot helps with in-page suggestions, Zentriq Agent handles cross-domain queries, analytics, and write actions.

Getting started

Zentriq Agent is available with a free plan (20 credits/month). No credit card required.

1. Install the Zentriq extension from AppSource
2. Sign in with your Microsoft account
3. Open the Agent sidebar and start asking

That's it. No setup, no configuration, no IT project. Your BC data, accessible in plain language.