Easy Archiv Business Central Guide: Your Complete Setup & Usage

Once you've decided to archive documents inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the next question is the practical one: how do you actually set it up and use it day to day? An archiving solution like Easy Archiv sits alongside Business Central, capturing documents, linking them to the right records, and making them retrievable long after the transaction is closed. This guide walks through the setup sequence and then the everyday usage, so you can go from a blank configuration to a working archive that your team relies on without thinking about it.

Want expert help putting this into practice? EasyBusinessReports can guide you through it.

Install and connect the extension

Setup begins with getting the archiving extension into your environment. In a Business Central online tenant, this usually means installing the app from AppSource or having your partner deploy it, then authorizing the connection so the archive can communicate with Business Central through its web services. An administrator with the right permissions has to approve this consent step — it's the handshake that lets the two systems exchange documents securely.

After installation, verify the connection before doing anything else. The extension should appear in your list of installed apps and expose its own setup page inside Business Central. Open it, confirm it reports a healthy connection to the storage repository, and check that any required service account or authentication is in place. A few minutes confirming the plumbing here prevents hours of confusion later when documents mysteriously fail to archive.

Configure document types and capture rules

Related: easybusinessreports - essential steps for effective financial management.

With the connection live, the core of setup is telling the system what to archive and when. You define which Business Central document types are in scope — posted sales invoices, purchase invoices, credit memos, and so on — and the trigger that captures them. The most common trigger is posting: when a document is posted, a copy is automatically sent to the archive and linked to the record it came from.

Configure the capture rules thoughtfully. Decide whether you're archiving the system-generated PDF, the underlying data, or both, and whether inbound documents like supplier invoices attached during entry should be captured too. Set these rules once, per document type, and the system applies them consistently. This consistency is the whole value: instead of relying on people to remember to file documents, the archive captures them automatically as part of the normal posting flow.

Set retention policies and access rights

An archive without a retention policy is just a folder. During setup, define how long each document type is kept, based on the legal and tax requirements for your jurisdiction. Financial documents typically carry multi-year mandatory retention, and the system should calculate the expiry date from the document date automatically, so nothing is deleted early and nothing lingers indefinitely without reason.

Access rights are the other half of this step. Map who can view, retrieve, and delete archived documents, ideally by extending the Business Central role setup so the same permissions govern both live and archived data. A clerk might retrieve invoices they process; only a finance manager might trigger a deletion. Configuring these boundaries during setup, rather than bolting them on later, keeps the archive both usable and defensible if an auditor ever asks who could touch what.

Retrieve documents in daily work

See also: easybusinessreports - tips and strategies for effective business insights.

With setup complete, everyday usage should feel almost invisible. The most common action is retrieval: someone needs to see the invoice behind a posted entry. Because the archive links each document to its source record, the user opens the Business Central record — a posted invoice, a customer ledger entry — and the archived document is available right there, usually through a factbox or attached-documents view, without leaving the screen they're already on.

Good retrieval also means good search. Beyond record-by-record access, the archive should let users find documents by attributes like customer, date range, amount, or document number. This turns the archive from a passive store into an active tool: a supplier queries an old invoice, and your team finds it in seconds rather than digging through email or filing cabinets. The daily habit becomes trusting that if it was posted, it's in the archive and findable.

Handle exceptions and inbound documents

Not everything flows through posting cleanly, so part of usage is handling the exceptions. Inbound documents — a scanned supplier invoice, a signed contract, correspondence — often need to be attached and archived manually or through a capture inbox. Establish a routine for these: as documents arrive, they get linked to the relevant Business Central record and archived alongside the system-generated ones, so the archive holds the complete picture, not just the outputs.

Also plan for corrections. When a document is posted in error and reversed, decide how the archive reflects that — typically both the original and the correction are retained, because archiving is about preserving history, not editing it. Understanding this immutability is part of using the system well: the archive is a record of what happened, and that permanence is exactly what makes it trustworthy for audit and compliance. Train your team on this distinction early, because people used to editing files on a shared drive often expect to be able to "fix" an archived document, and that expectation is the wrong one. The archive doesn't get corrected; it gets added to, so a mistake and its remedy sit side by side as an honest history.

Monitor, review, and report on the archive

A well-run archive isn't set-and-forget; light ongoing attention keeps it healthy. Periodically review that documents are being captured as expected, that no document types have silently fallen out of scope after an update, and that retention is expiring old records on schedule. A monthly glance is usually enough once the configuration is stable, and it catches problems while they're small.

The archive also generates genuinely useful management information — documents processed, volumes by type, average time to retrieve, upcoming retention expiries — and surfacing that turns a compliance tool into an operational asset. Feeding those figures into a reporting layer such as EasyBusinessReports lets you monitor the archive's health and workload at a glance, closing the loop between capturing documents diligently and actually understanding what that activity tells you about the business.