You already know your Dynamics NAV version has an expiry date and that Business Central is the natural way forward. The question that comes next is more practical: what does the process actually look like, step by step? Here it is, in the same order we follow on our own projects, so you know what to expect before you start.
Phase 1: Assessment
Before touching anything, we take stock of three things: what customisations your NAV has, what integrations are running (online store, banking, EDI…) and how much historical data you want to keep. That gives us a fixed scope and timeline, not a guess.
Phase 2: Test environment
A Business Central cloud environment is set up as a working copy, not the live system. This is where data is migrated for the first time and where the extensions that replace your custom development start to be built.
Your team keeps working on your usual NAV throughout this phase: nothing done here affects your day to day.
Phase 3: Data migration
Master data (customers, vendors, items), balances and, depending on what was decided during the assessment, historical documents are transferred. Every batch of data is validated against the source before it's signed off: balance reconciliations, document totals, cross-checks.
Phase 4: Testing with your team
The people who use the ERP day to day test the new environment with their own processes: placing an order, issuing an invoice, closing a month. This is the phase where most fine-tuning gets spotted — a missing report, a permission set up wrong — and resolved before it ever reaches production.
Phase 5: Training
Business Central keeps the same business logic as Navision, so the learning curve is shorter than most people expect. Even so, the interface changes, and role-specific training pays off: what someone who invoices needs to know isn't the same as what someone in accounting needs.
Phase 6: Go-live in production
The switch is planned for the quietest point in your calendar, usually around a close. One final data migration runs (to capture everything that's moved since the previous one), and from then on you work in Business Central. The old NAV stays accessible in read-only mode for a while, in case you need to check anything historical.
Phase 7: Post-go-live support
The first few weeks always throw up day-to-day questions. A good migration project includes reinforced support during that period, not just delivery and goodbye.
Frequently asked questions
How long does the whole process take?
It depends directly on the volume of customisations and integrations that come out of the initial assessment, so we don't give a generic figure without knowing your case. As a rough guide: a contained project, with a lightly modified NAV and no complex integrations, can be completed in a few weeks from assessment to go-live. A project with years of custom development, several integrations with external systems and a large amount of history to migrate needs more testing phases, and so more time overall. What matters is that the timeline we give you always comes from your specific assessment — your real customisations, integrations and history — not from a generic estimate that ignores your company's particulars.
Can I keep working while the migration is under way?
Yes, with no interruption at all until go-live day. All the migration work — setting up the test environment, migrating data for the first time, building the extensions that replace your custom development, running tests with your team — happens in a Business Central environment completely separate from the NAV you use every day. Your team keeps invoicing, managing orders and running the books in the real system throughout that time, without noticing any change. Only on go-live day itself, planned with you for the quietest point in your calendar — usually around a close — does the real switch happen, and from then on you work in the new system.
What if testing reveals something's missing?
That's exactly what the testing phase in the process is for: catching any gap before go-live — a missing report, a permission set up wrong, a use case the initial assessment didn't cover — and fixing it calmly, without the pressure of the system already being live. Fixing a gap found in testing usually takes hours of work; fixing the same gap after go-live, with the system already running and the team depending on it, costs far more and creates real friction in day-to-day work. That's why this phase is never shortened or skipped, even under pressure to finish sooner.
In summary
Migrating from NAV to Business Central isn't a data dump done overnight: it's a phased process, validated at every step, where your daily operations aren't affected until the exact go-live moment, which is chosen with you.
If you'd like to know what your own project would look like, check out our Navision to Business Central migration service or tell us your situation and we'll start with the assessment, no strings attached.