If you run a wholesale or distribution business, you’ll know the feeling. Orders arrive by email at all hours, supplier invoices pile up at month end, stock is moving between sites faster than anyone can update a spreadsheet, and your customers expect fast, accurate service every time.
Microsoft’s Business Central 2026 release wave 2, which starts with update 29.0, is now available, and a good deal of it speaks directly to those everyday pressures. There are improvements to the AI agents in Business Central, a new way to see everything those agents are doing, EDI support in preview, Shopify B2B enhancements and more flexible stock transfers.
Microsoft’s release notes are long and technical, so in this article I’ll pick out the updates most relevant to you if you’re running Dynamics 365 Business Central in a wholesale and distribution environment, and explain what they could mean for your team.
Distribution businesses depend on moving high volumes of orders accurately, so every manual touchpoint carries a cost: a mistyped item code, a delayed order confirmation, an invoice matched to the wrong purchase order line.
Often the challenge isn’t a lack of data, but a lack of time to act on it. Sales administrators re-key orders from emails and PDFs. Finance teams chase mismatches between invoices and orders. Warehouse teams work around system settings that don’t quite fit how stock actually moves.
The common thread in this release is reducing that friction, either by letting AI agents prepare routine work for a person to check, or by making core processes more flexible so your system fits your operation rather than the other way round. You can read more about how we support the sector on our wholesale and distribution page.
Microsoft has introduced several agents into Business Central, including the Sales Order Agent and the Payables Agent. As you start to use more than one, a practical question appears: how does your team keep track of what each agent is doing?
Wave 2 answers that with a dedicated agent task pane. It can be opened from anywhere in Business Central and brings together the tasks your agents generate, including suggestions, validations, follow-ups and access to draft documents. Your team can review the details, go straight to the affected record, complete a task or dismiss it, without relying on notifications scattered across different pages.
There are also some smaller changes that help with trust and traceability:
For a distributor, that visibility matters. When an agent has prepared a batch of sales quotes, your team needs a clear, controlled way to check them before anything reaches a customer. You stay in control and your people keep their judgement; the agent simply takes on more of the preparation. If you’re exploring what agents could do for you, take a look at Copilot and agents in Business Central.
We’ve written before about how the Sales Order Agent can take the pressure off order processing. It analyses customer requests received by email, locates the customer in Business Central, checks item availability and prepares a sales quote, which can then become a sales order, depending on how you configure it. Where details are missing, it can ask the customer for clarification by email, and your team can inspect its steps and the documents it creates.
Just ahead of wave 2, in update 28.3, Microsoft made it possible to run multiple Sales Order Agent instances in the same company, alongside smarter item matching. Each instance has its own mailbox or folder, processing rules and email signature, and tracks its own performance metrics.
That’s a practical change for wholesale. Microsoft’s own example is a useful one: one agent monitors a shared sales inbox with every review step switched on and quotes sent to customers for confirmation, while another works from a folder in a salesperson’s mailbox for trusted customers, converting quotes directly into orders and using that salesperson’s signature. You could apply the same idea to separate teams, product lines or customer segments.
If supplier invoices are a monthly headache, the Payables Agent is worth a closer look. In wave 2, Microsoft has improved its purchase order matching. The agent now uses the line amount and expected receipt date when matching invoices to purchase order lines, rather than relying only on the description and quantity.
That might sound minor, but if you buy similar items from the same supplier across several open orders, those extra fields help the agent tell similar-looking lines apart and improve the accuracy of first-pass matches. The agent also now respects the “Never block draft finalisation” option in the Receipt on Invoice setting on purchase orders, so a draft isn’t held up simply because a matched line hasn’t yet been marked as received. Whether goods have been received remains a control applied at posting.
The aim is less time spent untangling mismatches and more confidence in your payables process. It works hand in hand with the wider purchasing capabilities in Business Central.
For many distributors, EDI is something larger customers and suppliers expect, and it has often relied on separate tools or connectors sitting alongside the ERP system.
Wave 2 extends Business Central’s E-Documents framework to support EDI, currently in public preview. According to Microsoft, it supports document exchange using Peppol BIS 3, covers order exchange and sending remittance advices, and is open to additional formats and document types.
This is particularly relevant in the UK. The government has announced that VAT invoices will need to be issued as e-invoices from April 2029, and HMRC has published an implementation roadmap, with Peppol announced as the core interoperability framework for UK e-invoicing. If you haven’t started planning yet, our article on why UK businesses can’t ignore e-invoicing is a good place to begin.
As this is a preview feature, now is a good time to explore it in a sandbox environment and understand how it could fit your trading relationships, rather than relying on it in your live environment.
If you sell to trade customers online, the Shopify connector continues to improve. Shopify has made its core B2B capabilities available on all plans, and the Business Central connector supports company synchronisation, B2B order processing and market catalogues across those plans. When a B2B order arrives, the connector identifies the company and resolves the correct bill-to and ship-to customer based on the company location. Wave 2 makes tax identifiers, company records and catalogue pricing easier to configure, and improves how order changes, exchanges and refunds are processed. You can find out more on our ecommerce page.
In the warehouse, you can now post direct transfer orders from locations that require outbound warehouse handling, while keeping the picking and shipment controls configured for that location. You can also choose a posting method for each transfer route instead of relying on a single company-wide setting. If you move stock between a main warehouse and smaller sites, that could mean fewer workarounds. These changes build on Business Central’s warehouse and inventory management features.
A few other updates are worth having on your radar:
If you’re on Business Central online, Microsoft notifies existing customers when update 29.0 is available, and your administrator can schedule it for any date within the update period, which ends in February 2027. To get the most from it, here’s where I’d start:
It’s also worth knowing that, from September 2026, Microsoft stopped publishing traditional release plans for Business Central. New capabilities are now published on its AI at Work roadmap.
If you’d like a structured way to work out where AI fits, our AI offerings are designed to help you move from ideas to practical, responsible adoption.
Business Central 2026 release wave 2 isn’t about one headline feature. It’s a collection of practical improvements that, together, can take routine work off your team’s plate: better invoice matching from the Payables Agent, a single place to supervise your agents, EDI in preview within the core product and more flexible handling of stock transfers and online trade orders.
For wholesale and distribution businesses, that could mean less manual re-keying, fewer mismatches and more time for the conversations that grow your customer relationships.
If you’d like to talk through what this release could mean for your business, contact Cloud9. Or, if you’re considering Business Central for the first time, get a quote with our Clarity Tool.
