Is Business Central behind Sage, Xero and QuickBooks?

“As I explained the struggles of manual payment management to an accounting specialist from the UK, she just started laughing. She couldn’t imagine any accountant who would waste time by exporting bank statements from banks, importing them to an accounting system, and manually matching payments to invoices. Nobody does that because the default is having this process automated in the UK’s most popular ERPs such as Sage, Xero and QuickBooks”, remembers Aiste, the Head of Marketing at Bankfeed.

Does that mean the companies using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are at a disadvantage? Are they losing valuable time, enabling mistakes, and inconveniencing their team by not having automated payment management as a built-in feature of the ERP? Let‘s explore this in more detail.

Sage, Xero, and QuickBooks each offer bank feed solutions designed to streamline financial processes. Sage provides robust automation capabilities for reconciling bank statements with accounting records, supporting a wide range of banks, and reducing errors from manual data entry. Xero, which emphasises cloud-based technology, offers seamless transaction imports and real-time data access for a global array of financial institutions, enhancing timely decision-making. QuickBooks simplifies statement import and reconciliation through an intuitive, user-friendly interface that features automated matching, making it ideal for small to medium-sized businesses with its extensive bank network support.

While automatic bank statement import is not a default feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there are solutions built inside this ERP that add this functionality and more. Bankfeed is one of them. It supports automatic and seamless import of bank statements from more than 12 300 banks and payment platforms in the UK, EU countries, USA, and Canada. In addition, it accurately recognises and matches payments to issued invoices. All of that eliminates manual transaction entry and minimises errors. In addition, Bankfeed users enjoy its quick, hassle-free setup and compatibility with the PSD2 open banking standards, ensuring high security and up-to-date compliance.

Greta Velickaite, a financial controller at RoyaltyRange, operating in the UK and the USA shared that before using Bankfeed she spent countless hours manually inputting every bank transaction into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Naturally, this sometimes led to human errors. Looking for a smarter, more automated way of managing payments, she came across Bankfeed.

Greta shares that connecting bank accounts (Swedbank, Luminor, Stripe, PayPal, HSBC Business, SEB) to Bankfeed was a breeze because of the user-friendly interface and intuitive setup process, which allowed her to effortlessly link bank accounts, eliminating any unnecessary complexity or frustration typically associated with such tasks.

Bankfeed, integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, has significantly improved RoyaltyRange’s financial operations, allowing seamless automation of bank statement imports and payment reconciliations across multiple countries. This solution not only reduced manual data entry and human errors but also freed up valuable time for strategic tasks, enhancing operational efficiency and financial accuracy.

While the bank feeds are not part of the initial Business Central package, Microsoft has the advantage of utilising a wide partner network and including its trusted solutions in the ERP. Adding Bankfeed to their add-on portfolio allows Microsoft partners in the UK and other countries to compete with those ERPs where the bank integrations are already present.  As a result, Business Central users can enjoy the same automated payment management processes as the users of other accounting systems.