BC Buddy

Business Central, easier to work in ✨

BC Buddy is a free extension for Chrome and Edge. It makes the Business Central web client easier to work in, and gives every environment its own colour, so you never post in production by mistake.

• An easier web client, straight away: copy any value with one click, wide pages, bigger dropdowns, week numbers in the date picker and more.
• A colour for every environment: production green, sandbox red, or whatever suits you.
• Report a problem to your helpdesk in a few clicks, with a screenshot of every step.

Full documentation: https://fvet.github.io/bcbuddy/ · What's new in each version: CHANGELOG.md

📥 Installing

Install it from the Chrome Web Store and click Add to Chrome. Edge first asks whether to allow extensions from other stores; say yes. You need Chrome or Edge 116 or newer.

🚀 Getting started

1. Install BC Buddy. Its settings page opens by itself. Later, click the BC Buddy icon in the browser toolbar to open it again.
2. Open Business Central, or reload a tab where it was already open. The web client improvements below are already working.
3. Give your environments a colour. On the settings page, go to Environments and turn on the switch in front of Rules. Four sample rules are already there: Production turns green, test environments red. Delete the ones you do not need.

Not sure what your environment is called? Open Environments while a Business Central tab is open: under Test, at the bottom, BC Buddy shows the environment and company of that tab.

🖥️ Web client

No setup needed. Each improvement has its own switch under Web client on the settings page; the switch in front of the Web client heading turns them all off at once.

Improvement	What you get in Business Central	Starts
Copy values	A copy icon on any value in a list or FactBox, and on links on a card	On
Maximize pages	Every page in wide layout, tile pages as a list	On
Pin the action bar	Every page opens with the row of actions under its tabs pinned	On
Dropdown size	The list under a field as wide as its columns need, and taller if you like	On
Resize panes	Drag Help, Copilot, Page Inspection and the Personalization field list wider or narrower	On
Week numbers in the date picker	Business Central's own week numbers in the calendar of a date field; Shift+Home turns them off	On
Highlight the current line	The line you are on in a journal or order stands out	On
Keyboard shortcuts	The BC Buddy icon in the top bar, before the gear, shows the shortcuts for where you are in a side panel	No switch of its own: there while Web client or Help & feedback is on
Striped rows	Every other row in a list a light grey	Off
Hide the FactBox pane	Pages open without the FactBox pane on the right, so the page gets the room	Off
Hide the notifications icon	No bell in the top bar	Off
Turn off animations	Pages, dialogs and FastTabs appear at once instead of sliding in	Off

Reset to defaults, above the list, puts every switch and slider back to how BC Buddy starts out. When your team shares a file, the button reads Reset to your team's defaults and takes the team's choices from that file. Clicked by mistake? Undo sits right next to the message.

Looking for a dark theme or a blue light filter? BC Buddy leaves those to tools that do them well: Dark Reader for dark mode, and Night light in Windows for a warmer screen.

What each one does, in detail: Web client on the website.

🎨 Environment colours

Ten tabs open, one of them is Production, and a test order gets posted in the live company. It happens because a test environment and the real one look exactly alike. BC Buddy colours the bar at the top of Business Central, with your own text, and can add a bar above it, a coloured frame, a banner, a marked tab title and a coloured tab icon.

You set this up under Environments on the settings page. Colours start off: turn on the switch in front of Rules to use them.

• A rule says which environment gets which colour, for example Environment equals Production. The first rule that fits wins.
• A style says what the marking looks like. Full shows every marking, Subtle only colours the bar at the top.

BC Buddy comes with four sample rules: Production green, test environments red, development blue and master data companies yellow. Every rule on the list is used; delete the ones you do not need, and Load samples brings them back. When your team's shared file brings rules, those take the place of the samples you did not change.

More on the website: Rules · Styles.

🆘 Help & feedback

Something does not work? Click the BC Buddy icon in the top bar of Business Central and choose Report a problem. Write what you did, take a screenshot of each step, draw an arrow or blur what is private, and click Email: BC Buddy creates the email to your helpdesk, with the screenshots, the company and the environment already in it. On an error message, click Report a problem next to Share details: the screenshot and the error details are then in the report already.

It starts off. Your IT department switches it on and sets the helpdesk address, or you do it yourself under Help & feedback on the settings page.

More on the website: Help & feedback.

👥 Sharing settings with your team

One person sets up the colours and everyone else gets them automatically.

1. Click Export to file on the settings page. That saves bc-buddy.json, with your rules, styles, Web client and Help & feedback settings.
2. Put it somewhere everyone can open it over https://, such as a repository. Only use an address you control: the file decides what BC Buddy colours.
3. Your colleagues paste that address under Sharing > Shared configuration and click Synchronise. BC Buddy checks for changes every day.

To try it out, use https://fvet.github.io/bcbuddy/examples/bc-buddy.json, the same file as examples/bc-buddy.json.

IT can install BC Buddy on every computer and set the shared file, the helpdesk address and which parts are on for everyone with Intune or Group Policy; the scripts are in examples/intune/.

More on the website: Team file · Install with Intune.

🛟 Troubleshooting

Nothing changed after installing. Reload the Business Central tab (F5). On the settings page, the dot next to Web client, Environments and Help & feedback in the menu shows whether that part is on.

A page stays narrow, in tiles or with the action bar unpinned. BC Buddy only changes a page nobody set yet. Business Central remembers your own choice per page, and BC Buddy leaves it.

Nothing is coloured. Check that the switch in front of Rules under Environments is on. Then look at your rules with your Business Central tab still open: the rule that tab gets has a border all round in its colour; no such border means none of your rules fits it.

Something stopped working after a Business Central update. Please open an issue.

More on the website: Troubleshooting.

🌍 Languages

BC Buddy is in English, Dutch and French, and follows the language of your browser. To use another one, pick it in the language list at the top right of the BC Buddy settings. Business Central keeps its own language. The texts you type yourself in a rule or style appear exactly as you type them. Would you like it in your own language? See TRANSLATING.md.

🔒 Privacy

Everything stays on your own computer. No server, no account, no tracking. The only thing BC Buddy ever downloads is your team's shared file, from the address you enter yourself. Full text in PRIVACY.md.

🛠️ For developers

Working on the extension itself is covered in DEVELOPMENT.md. To run it from source: open chrome://extensions (or edge://extensions), turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked and pick a clone of this repository or an unpacked bcbuddy-*.zip from the releases page.

📄 Licence

MIT — the full text is in LICENSE. Use it, change it and pass it on, inside a company as well; the copyright notice and the licence text have to travel with it.

⚖️ Disclaimer

BC Buddy is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Microsoft. Microsoft, Dynamics 365 and Business Central are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

BC Buddy is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, and its authors are not liable for any damage that comes from using it. The full terms are in LICENSE.