How MSPs can add Business Central to their offering without hiring BC consultants

Most MSPs look at Business Central and see a capability gap. The clients are there: manufacturers, distributors, and product businesses sitting on Xero or Sage that are starting to show the signs. Multi-entity headaches. Month-end taking longer than it should. Stock management held together with spreadsheets. The need is obvious. The path to serving it is less so.

The assumption most MSPs make is that offering Business Central means building a BC practice. Hiring consultants. Going through Microsoft's partner certification process. Taking on implementation risk for something your team hasn't done before. For most MSPs, that's enough to shelve the idea.

It doesn't have to work that way.

The opportunity MSPs are sitting on

If you manage Microsoft 365 for a client base of SMEs, you already have something BC partners spend years building: the relationship and the trust. Your clients think of you when something needs fixing. They ask your opinion before buying software. That position - trusted IT advisor - is exactly where a Business Central conversation starts.

Microsoft's own data bears this out. Partners who add Business Central to their offering report a 95% customer retention rate for Dynamics 365-related services. The stickiness makes sense. Once a client's ERP sits alongside their Microsoft 365 stack, and both are managed through the same relationship, the switching cost becomes significant.

The question isn't whether MSPs should be offering Business Central. It's how to do it without the overhead of building a BC practice.

Why the traditional path puts most MSPs off

The conventional route to offering Business Central involves becoming a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications, building internal implementation expertise, and taking on full delivery responsibility for ERP projects. That's a reasonable route for an organisation that wants to build a BC practice as a core offering. For an MSP whose primary business is managed IT, it's a significant investment for an uncertain return.

Implementation projects run long. Data migration - moving a client's financial history from Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage into Business Central - is the part that eats consultant hours, creates the most risk, and is the least predictable to scope. Most MSPs who have looked into this have seen enough complexity in that conversation to step back.

The other problem is ongoing support. After go-live, clients need a place to raise tickets, log change requests, and get help with Business Central questions. If that lands in your generic helpdesk, your team is fielding ERP queries they are not equipped to answer. If it goes to an external BC consultant, the client relationship fragments.

Neither outcome is good for an MSP whose value is owning the end-to-end client relationship.

A different model: platform-backed delivery

What's changed is the availability of platforms built specifically to handle the delivery work that previously required in-house BC expertise.

The way this works in practice: the MSP introduces Business Central to the client and manages the commercial relationship. The onboarding and migration runs through a platform that automates the data extraction, mapping, and submission, connecting directly to the client's Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage instance and moving the data into Business Central without manual spreadsheet work.

The MSP stays involved at the level that makes sense for them. In some cases that means running the onboarding themselves through the platform. In others, the delivery happens on their behalf, or the client works through it directly with guidance. Post-go-live support follows the same logic. Tickets, change requests, and client feedback live in a structured system that sits natively inside Business Central, not bolted on via a generic helpdesk. The MSP retains visibility. The client relationship stays intact.

What this means commercially

Business Central licensing sits within the Microsoft CSP programme, which most MSPs already operate. Adding BC licences to an existing CSP relationship is not a significant operational change.

The implementation and support layer is where platform-backed delivery changes the economics. Instead of absorbing the cost and risk of building internal BC capability, the MSP works with a platform that handles the delivery work. The margin on the client relationship remains with the MSP. The overhead of implementation does not.

For an MSP with twenty or thirty Microsoft 365 clients in the SME segment, a proportion of that base will be approaching the limits of their current accounting software. Those conversations are already happening: clients asking what comes next, what to do when Xero stops scaling. The MSP who can answer that question, and deliver on it, is in a materially different position than one who refers the client elsewhere.

The client relationship stays with you

The part that matters most for MSPs thinking about this is ownership of the client relationship. The concern with introducing any new technology partner into a client account is that the relationship follows the expertise. If a specialist comes in to deliver the ERP project, the client starts calling them when something goes wrong.

Platform-backed delivery is specifically designed to avoid this. The MSP stays the primary point of contact. The platform handles the structured, repeatable parts of the implementation, the parts that don't require specialist knowledge to oversee. The client doesn't see the infrastructure behind it. They see their IT partner delivering something new.

For existing clients approaching the point where Xero or Sage is holding them back, that conversation is much easier to have when you can offer a route forward rather than a referral out.

Getting started

The starting point for any MSP considering this is a review of the existing client base. Which clients are showing signs of outgrowing their current accounting software? Multi-entity structures, growing transaction volumes, manual workarounds in finance: these are the indicators. For most MSPs with a broad SME client base, there will be several.

The next step is understanding what the delivery model looks like before having the conversation with a client. That means understanding how the onboarding process works, what data the platform handles, and what the support structure looks like after go-live.

Business Central is a significant opportunity for MSPs who manage Microsoft-stack clients. The barrier was always delivery. That barrier is lower than it used to be.

Qwyk is a Business Central onboarding and support platform for Microsoft Partners. If you manage Microsoft 365 clients and want to explore adding Business Central to your offering, get in touch.