How to add fields in Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a powerful enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that can be customized to meet your specific business needs. One of the most common ways to customize it is by adding fields. Custom fields allow organizations to track the information that matters most to their business, without relying on workarounds or separate spreadsheets. There are several ways to add fields to your Business Central environment:

1. Personalization – with personalization, you can add already existing fields to your personal view
2. Development – if you have software development or coding skills, you can add new and custom fields not included in Business Central’s native fields using extensions
3. Easy Custom Field Extender  – you can purchase an add-on to Business Central to be able to easily add new or custom fields, with no development skills required

In this post, we will walk through each method, what it can do, and when it makes the most sense to use it.

Personalization

Business Central allows users to customize their workspace to suit their unique work and preferences. Users are able to personalize all types of pages and make various changes including adding new fields. When you personalize a card page the changes will take effect on all records of that type. For example, if you personalize a specific customer card by adding a new field, that new field will be visible on all other customer cards.

To add fields to Business Central using personalization, follow the steps below:

1. Open any page that you want to personalize
2. Select the Settings icon >> Personalize
3. Select + Field
4. From the Add Field to Page pane, drag the desired field from the list to a position on the page

Business Central’s native personalization is a great starting point, but it has real limitations. Any changes you make only affect your own view, not what other users see. If you want everyone in your organization to see a specific field, each user has to complete those steps individually. Personalization also does not support creating new fields. You can only surface fields that already exist but are hidden by default. To create truly custom fields, you will need either custom development or the Easy Custom Field Extender.

Development

It is possible to add new fields to Business Central using custom development and coding. To accomplish this task, developers will need to leverage table extension and page extension object types. Most tables in Business Central cannot be directly modified by developers. To add fields to a table, developers must create a new type of object called a table extension.

To create a table extension, open Visual Studio Code and follow the steps below:

1. Create a new file for the table extension
2. Create the table extension using ttableext snippet
   Typing the shortcut ttableext will create a basic layout for a table extension object
3. Add the extension name, id, and table name to extend
4. Add a new field to the table using the tfield snippet
5. Enter the field id, field name, and data type

In our example, we created a table extension for the Customer table and added the RewardPoints field. Once the new field is created, you will need to create a page extension and place the field on the page. In our example, we will create a page extension object to extend the Customer Card page by adding the RewardLevel and RewardPoints field controls after the Name field control on the page.

To create a page extension object follow the steps below in Visual Studio Code:

1. Create a new page extension file
2. Create the page extension using tpageext snippet
   Typing the shortcut tpageext will create a basic layout for a page extension object
3. Enter the id, name of extension, and table name
4. Design the layout portion to choose where the new field will be added
   Keywords are used to place and move fields on the page extensions. A list of these keywords may be found here.
5. Publish your changes by selecting AL:Publish or by pressing F5

Custom development gives you a lot of flexibility, but it comes with ongoing costs. If you want a new custom field to flow automatically to another table, additional code will need to be written. Microsoft also releases two major updates to Business Central each year, which means any custom code will need to be retested after each update to make sure it still works correctly. For many organizations, this maintenance burden is a key reason they look for a no-code alternative.

Easy Custom Field Extender

Rand Group developed the Easy Custom Field Extender app specifically for organizations that need more flexibility than Business Central’s native personalization provides, but want to avoid the complexity and ongoing maintenance of custom development. The app allows you to add up to 3 custom fields per entity with no coding required.

The following entities are supported:

• Customer
• Vendor
• Item
• Sales Header (Sales Quote, Sales Order, Sales Invoice, and Sales Credit Memo)
• Purchase Header (Purchase Order, Purchase Invoice, and Purchase Credit Memo)

For each custom field, you can choose from three data types:

• Text – for alphanumeric input
• Date – for date values
• Decimal – for numeric values with decimal places

How to set up custom fields with the Easy Custom Field Extender app

To get started, search for “Easy Custom Field Extender” in the Business Central universal search bar. No formal setup is required before you begin.

When setting up each custom field, you can configure the following properties:

1. Label – the name of the field as it will appear in Business Central. Labels must be unique per entity and can be customized to match your terminology.
2. Type – the data type of the field (Text, Date, or Decimal). If you change the type after data has already been entered, all existing data in that field will be erased.
3. Enabled – checking this box makes the field visible in the related entity. Unchecking it will unlink any existing default values unless you choose to keep them.
4. Required – when checked, a red asterisk will appear next to the field when it is empty. For entities that support posting, the system will block posting until the required field is filled in.
5. Default From – this creates a one-way connection from a customer or vendor custom field to a matching sales or purchase custom field of the same data type. When a document is created for that customer or vendor, the value from the master record copies automatically to the document. To set this up, click the ellipsis in the Default From column and select the field from the lookup. Note that typing directly in the box will return an error; the lookup must be used.

Once your fields are enabled, they will appear on all pages related to that entity and are ready to use right away.

Which method should you use to add fields in Business Central?

There are several ways to add fields in Business Central, but the right option depends on what you need the field to do, who needs to see it, and whether you have access to development resources.

For simple personal changes, Business Central’s personalization tools may be enough. For complex scenarios that require advanced logic, custom development may be the better option. However, if your team needs a practical way to add business-specific fields without writing code, Easy Custom Field Extender provides a no-code option that helps fill the gap between personalization and full development.

Frequently asked questions

Next steps

Adding new fields to Business Central is one of the most effective ways to tailor the system to how your business actually works. Personalization covers basic layout changes, and custom development can handle complex scenarios, but many organizations need something in between. That is where the Easy Custom Field Extender comes in. It gives your team the ability to create and manage custom fields without writing a single line of code. To learn more or to get started, contact Rand Group today.