Talking ´bout localizations

This time I’m gonna talk about a serious limitation in Business Central at this moment, Localizations.

Business Central, as we knew in these dates, has some “localizations” besides the country version, as an example, the old NorthAmerican Version has US (US is a Sales Tax control and you need Avalara to calculate your taxes by state), Canada and Mexico (the Microsoft Mexican Localization is a total joke).

For LatinAmerican market, Microsoft ships W1 version (WorldWide or base version) only marked as country but without any localization code. As an example, Colombian version is a plain W1 version, you need to add the language (with some errors like G/L Account type).

So, if you purchase Business Central in Latam, you need to purchase a Partner developed localization and add that localization to your tenant.

I see a lot of localizations for many countries, even Europe; some localizations may work in a wonderful way and other maybe lack of... let’s say it, functionality.

In this scenario, we can realize that if we need a multi-country deployment, we are stuck. In the good old NAV days, almost every partner with offices in various countries, has its own multi-country localization. They install the code and then “activate” the localization functions based maybe in company information option field or maybe the Country code.

What´s really happened with Business Central?

Well, thanks to the initial on-premises availability and the old developer client and language support, the partners felt safe, and no one starts to develop the localization in the “new way”.

When version 15 came with changes, they stuck to the initial idea, nobody moves. Some partners make alliances with others to distribute code without investing in development without seeing that this dependency was not good for their business or the product.

The worst thing was the Microsoft rule of “Only One Production environment for each tenant”.

What we obtain from this primary approach was a lot of “single country” localization, some free to use in any country and some others tied to the country availability. Yes, some partners tied their code to BC launch by country by Microsoft.

In the shorted foresight of this, many customers couldn't buy Business Central in their countries because Microsoft local offices says, “Business Central is not released for (type your country here)”. When some people want to sell or buy in not released countries, they (we) receive the answer, Microsoft doesn’t sell BC in that country so, I don’t sell my localization in that country too.

Now, everything changed, the customers are interested in Business Central because its functionality, easy of use and learn, integration with other MS tools and the business model (Full Saas not like the others with cloud machines, remote desktops, and other things like that).

And…. What we have in this moment?

We have pretty much the same problem, shortsighted partners with “local” localization that cannot be mixed with other´s partner code, different legal and tax requirements by country.

Maybe we need something like a multi-country localization for ONE Tenant to avoid the One Production Environment for each tenant and allow Latam companies to be truly multinational, to make purchase orders from Colombia to Ecuador using intercompany, to transfer their business model from one country to another according to the growth of the company.

If we want to support the Latam region growth with Business Central, to give those companies a phenomenal tool that allows them to cover several countries, various types of legislation, we need that someone thinks more globally instead of locally. in my work, we are selling more Business Central projects every month and we want to sell even more.  

Somebody Please Make a Multi-Country Localization!!!