How Much Does Business Central Cost? Licences, Project and Real Budget

On its pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026, Microsoft lists three licences, in euros excluding VAT per user per month with annual payment: Essentials at €69.30, Premium at €95.30 and Team Members at €6.90. Essentials covers finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, projects and customer relationships. Premium adds manufacturing and service management. Team Members is for people who view, approve or enter data occasionally. These prices include the increase Microsoft announced in May 2025 and has applied since 1 November 2025, to new subscriptions and renewals alike. Each subscription includes one production environment and three test environments, plus 80 GB of storage per tenant, to which each licence adds its share: 3 GB per Essentials licence and 5 GB per Premium licence since that increase.

Not everyone needs a full licence. An accountant, a buyer or a logistics manager who enters and approves documents every day needs Essentials or Premium. A salesperson who checks stock, a manager who approves a purchase request or an employee who records their time can make do with Team Members. Take an SME of twelve people where five use the ERP daily and seven occasionally. Five Essentials licences and seven Team Members cost 5 × €69.30 + 7 × €6.90, which comes to €394.80 excluding VAT per month. Twelve Essentials licences would cost €831.60 excluding VAT per month. Before sizing, list the people involved and what they actually do in the ERP: that is where most of the euros are won or lost.

The project is the partner's work: configuring Business Central, migrating your data, connecting your other software and training your teams. Its cost depends on five things. First, the functional scope: finance alone does not take the same work as finance, purchasing, sales, inventory and manufacturing. Next, the number of companies, especially if there are flows between them. Then data migration: clean customer and item files migrate quickly, duplicates built up over ten years far less so. The interfaces with your e-commerce site, your bank, your payroll software or an industry-specific tool. Finally, training, which determines how the system is actually used. At Helion Cloud, we quote each project individually, after a free audit and a scoping workshop. A price given without knowing these five points is either very cautious or wrong.

Three lines are often missing from comparisons. Extensions from the AppSource marketplace, which add a business function (shipping management, payroll, a specific industry) and are often paid for as a subscription to their publisher. The accredited e-invoicing platform, mandatory for receiving your invoices since September 2026: Business Central connects to it, but the contract is signed with the platform, as we explain in our article on e-invoicing. Finally, Power BI licences, if you share dashboards beyond the people who built them: Power BI Pro is listed at €12.10 excluding VAT per user per month with annual payment on Microsoft's website, according to our check on 6 October 2026. On top of these lines comes your teams' time during the project, which appears on no invoice and counts as much as the rest.

To judge the price of Business Central, compare it with what you already pay: maintenance of your current software, the server that hosts it, re-keying between tools and Excel spreadsheets kept up by hand. We have set out these comparisons in detail for Sage, Cegid and Odoo. To find out whether Business Central fits your business before discussing budget, our 5-minute questionnaire gives an initial answer, and our ERP integrator page explains how we run a project.