Make the Most of Team Member Licenses in Business Central and Improve your Procurement Processes

Team Member Licenses

Did you know that you can use Team Member licenses in Business Central to streamline your business processes and save your business money?

A frequent conversation we have with our clients is around the pros and cons of team member licenses in Business Central. We recommend their use in situations where clients have purchase requests and workflows that are handled outside of Business Central, for example when other departments raise purchase requests via email.

If your purchasing team is overwhelmed and spending a lot of their time re-entering info into Business Central then Team Member Licenses could be the answer.

What is a team member license, and when should they be used?

Team member licenses are a very stripped back version of the Business Central Essentials License. They are much cheaper (£6 per month vs £52.80 per month for an Essentials license) and they are designed for less frequent system users, such as Project Managers or Warehouse staff.

Team members can see everything but do less than users with an Essentials license. Team member licenses allow users to view BC, access reports and modify existing records. However, there are significant restrictions with a team member license: a team member cannot, for example, create new customers, post journals or create a sales invoice.

How can team member licenses help your business?

Team member licenses make Business Central as easy as possible for infrequent users to do what they need (e.g., raise a purchase quote) without being overwhelmed by (or breaking) the whole system.

Using them can create significant time savings and process optimisations for your finance and purchasing teams. Using Team Member Licenses can help keep all your processes in one system and enable users to complete their actions on any device, e.g., warehouse staff can raise a PO on a handheld device rather than going to a workstation every time.

Business Central also makes it possible to restrict or strip back the fields that your team member licensees have access to, helping make it as easy as possible for users to complete their particular system tasks.

Bam Boom Cloud have created an app to support team member purchasing

While Team member licenses have several benefits, experience has shown us that they can also create a bottleneck for purchasing, because while Team Member Licensees can make and approve a purchase request, only full Essentials Licence users can convert that purchase request into an open PO.

Bam Boom Cloud’s developers have created an app to address this problem, that auto-converts approved purchase requests into orders (open or released) automatically in the background – with no need for someone in the purchasing or finance team to convert them manually.

This cool piece of development offloads a lot of work from finance and purchasing onto the teams raising the orders.

Other things to consider

There are a few additional considerations to make regarding using team member licenses in Business Central. Read more below:

• Permissions and roles: Remember that with the default settings, Team Members can see everything, and you might not want these users to see things like your customer lists or bank account balances. But this is easily fixed with changes to permissions. You just need to make sure that the right permissions are in place when a new team member is added.
• Training: Team Members will generally be completely new to Business Central, and in some cases may have never used any sort of finance system before, so they will most likely need some hand holding and basic training.
• Setup: Getting the most out of Team Member licenses means spending time really thinking about the setup, and what actions you want your Team Members to perform. You can create specific service items to help users select the right codes (e.g., a user on the marketing team can only select GL codes relevant to their department). You can also set up recurring lines and logic-based auto-prompts for common items (e.g., when the Supplier is ‘Dave’s Window Cleaning’, the service auto-fills to ‘Cleaning’). You can also add extended text options to fields where the finance team commonly require further information.
• Hierarchies: As you add team members to your system you need to standardise the hierarchies and logic around business approvals. When this process is handled by email, you have full flexibility over who approves what, but you need to the routing is correct when integrating these approvals with your finance system.

When set up properly, Team Member Licenses in Business Central are a great way of optimising the purchase process and increasing the output of your purchasing and finance teams. Bam Boom Cloud’s consultants have years of experience helping small businesses like yours grow with Business Central.

Talk to us if you want to know more about team member licenses and to see if there is potential to optimise your current system processes.

*Team Member License Pricing