Automatic Invoicing in Business Central: Post and Send Invoices for Shipped Orders

🎯 “Shipped Yesterday, Still Not Invoiced”

In most Business Central companies, invoicing is a manual habit rather than a process. The warehouse posts the shipment, and the invoice depends on someone in the office remembering to finish the order. The result looks the same everywhere:

• Shipped but not invoiced: orders sit with shipped quantities that nobody has invoiced yet. Every day they wait is a day later that the customer pays.
• Repetitive clicks: open the order, check the quantities to invoice, post, find the posted invoice, send it by email — for every order, every day.
• Service lines forgotten: lines with nothing to ship, such as services or freight, are easy to miss when the rest of the order is handled from the warehouse.
• Inconsistent timing: some customers get an invoice the same day, others a week later, depending on who is in the office.

None of this needs judgment. “Invoice what has shipped and send it to the customer” is a rule, and a rule can run by itself.

🔍 What Business Central Offers on Its Own

Posting order by order

The standard way is to open each sales order and post it. It is reliable, but it is a person doing it, at the time that person has. The invoice email is another step on top.

Batch posting and scheduled jobs

Business Central can post several sales orders in one batch, and partners can schedule jobs. Someone still has to choose which orders go into the batch, keep the filters right, and make sure the invoices actually reach the customers. Changing a rule — “collect invoices weekly for this group” — usually means asking a partner.

⚙️ How AutoERP Works in Business Central

The dimension BOTS4ME instead of tags

In other ERPs you hand an order to AutoERP with a tag. Business Central has no order tags, so AutoERP reads the dimension BOTS4ME on the sales order header. You create the dimension once, with four values, and set one of them on each order AutoERP may handle:

• FULL — AutoERP processes the whole order.
• PARTIAL — partial deliveries are allowed.
• SMALLOK — the whole order is processed even below your small-order limit.
• PARTIAL-SMALLOK — partial deliveries are allowed, even below your small-order limit.

Orders without the dimension are never touched. Like every dimension, the value also flows into the G/L entries of the posted documents, which makes AutoERP’s invoices easy to find in reports. The values stay FULL, PARTIAL and SMALLOK even if you renamed the tags on your dashboard.

What AutoERP posts

• Shipped, not yet invoiced: on stock lines, AutoERP invoices exactly the quantity that was shipped and not invoiced yet, using Business Central’s own posting.
• Lines with nothing to ship: services and other non-stock lines are shipped and invoiced together, so they are not left behind.
• Immediately or collected: invoice each order right after its shipment, or collect a customer’s orders per day, week or month with a minimum amount. Business Central’s API puts one order on one invoice, so a collection posts one invoice per order at the same time.
• Orders in review (waiting for approval) are left out until they are released by your approval process.

The customer email

Business Central’s send action cannot carry AutoERP’s wording, so BOTS4.me sends the invoice email itself, with Business Central’s invoice PDF attached. If you connect a mailbox to AutoERP, the email goes out from your own address; otherwise it comes from the BOTS4.me system mailbox with replies going to you. Business Central’s API holds no customer language, so the email is written in your account language.

What AutoERP does not do in Business Central today

• Shipping without invoicing: Business Central’s API ships and invoices in one action. AutoERP ships without invoicing only after this is verified with Business Central; until then it leaves the shipment to you, flags it in its report, and invoices the order as soon as you have posted the shipment.
• Prepayment invoices: the API has no prepayment invoice, so orders that need a down payment stay with you.
• Corrections: corrective documents for posted invoices are made by you in Business Central.

Never twice

Before it posts, AutoERP records what it is about to post. If a run is interrupted after Business Central posted the invoice, the next run finds that invoice and does not post another. AutoERP’s own progress marks are kept on the BOTS4.me side, never written into your orders.

🛠️ Step-by-Step Setup

• Step 1 — Start your free Discovery month: sign in at bots4.me/bots, click Start free Discovery month on the AutoERP card and accept the Terms once. No card is needed.
• Step 2 — Connect Business Central: open Settings → AutoERP → Access Manager → Add Source (for AutoERP your ERP is the source), choose the Dynamics 365 Business Central tile and Sign in with Microsoft with a licensed user. Pick the environment and company if you have several. The full walkthrough, including administrator approval, is in Getting Connected.
• Step 3 — Give the user the right permissions: AutoERP needs to edit and post sales orders and to read dimensions. The standard permission set D365 BUS FULL ACCESS covers every BOTS4.me app.
• Step 4 — Create the dimension once: in Business Central open Dimensions → New, code BOTS4ME, with the values FULL, PARTIAL, SMALLOK and PARTIAL-SMALLOK. Dimensions cannot be created through the API, so this one step is yours. If it is missing, AutoERP’s report tells you.
• Step 5 — Mark one order and run in DEMO: set BOTS4ME = FULL on a sales order that is shipped but not yet invoiced. In DEMO, AutoERP reads your orders and writes nothing to Business Central; after the next run its report shows what it would have invoiced, and why anything was held back.
• Step 6 — Go LIVE: when the DEMO reports look right, set Mode to LIVE on the Control tab — it becomes available after the first DEMO report email.

🧭 Try It in Your Free Discovery Month

Check the Control tab

• Invoicing Module and Email Reports are on. For your first test, set Invoice customers to Immediately (no collecting) so you see an invoice right after the shipment; by default, invoices are collected weekly.
• Hours: AutoERP runs only inside the Operating Hours (weekday office hours to start with), and invoicing has its own window. Keep the invoicing window inside the Operating Hours, or no invoice is created.
• Digital Products is for software and services that need no stock.
• Switches with a Discovery tag are included in your free month and start switched off — switch on the ones you want to try.

Week 1 — widen the test, then go LIVE

Mark a few more shipped orders, including one with a service line, and one customer whose orders you want collected weekly. Read each report: what was invoiced, what was skipped and why. The same decisions appear in the Logs tab. When everything matches what you would have done by hand, switch to LIVE.

📅 Day-to-Day: What Changes for Your Team

After go-live, your team’s job is to mark orders and post shipments, as before. Invoices follow on AutoERP’s run schedule, inside your hours, and the customer receives each one by email with the PDF attached. A short report reaches you whenever AutoERP did something or needs you, and Bot Power switches everything off at once.

• Mark at entry: set the BOTS4ME value when the order is created, or let your order intake do it. Orders that Mail2ERP imported from email get the same value from your team.
• Read the “skipped” lines: they tell you which order waits for what — a shipment not posted yet, an order in review, or a window outside your hours.
• API limits: Business Central limits API calls per user. BOTS4.me spreads its calls and waits when Business Central asks it to slow down; the limit is shared with your other integrations that use the same user.

Combined with Mail2ERP for Business Central, the path from a customer’s emailed PO to a sent invoice needs a person only for the shipment.

📚 Related Reading

• Every setting explained: AutoERP guide and the AutoERP product page.
• The step before: How to Turn Emailed Purchase Orders into Business Central Sales Orders.
• Comparing options: Mail2ERP vs Business Central’s Sales Order Agent.
• The same idea in Odoo: How to Automate Order Confirmation, Delivery and Invoicing in Odoo.
• Getting paid: the AutoCASH guide covers payment reminders for the invoices AutoERP posts.

🔗 Sources and Further Reading

Official documentation referenced in this guide. External links open in a new tab.

• Microsoft Learn — Work with dimensions in Business Central
• Microsoft Learn — Invoice sales in Business Central
• Microsoft Learn — Business Central API v2.0