Automating a delivery board from Dynamics 365 Business Central

At a national door hardware distributor, the day runs on a shared Excel sheet: the daily deliveries board. Which orders go out, to which jobsite, for which contractor, with whose phone number — dispatch, drivers, and the warehouse all read the same grid. Every fact on it already lived in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Someone still retyped it, order by order, every day.

Retyping isn't just slow — it's where the wrong job number and the stale address come from. The system of record and the board the crews read had no connection at all.

Now the operator double-clicks Pull from Business Central. The workflow calls the Business Central API for every open sales order due in the next two weeks, joins in the jobsite address, contact, and project manager from the contract record, and shows exactly what it's about to write — then asks Y/N before touching the board. Need specific orders instead of the date window? Name them on the command line and it pulls just those.

Eight fields land per delivery: contractor, job name, job number, contact, PM, sales order, and location. The two columns that need human judgment — labeling and truck type — are never written by the tool. The board stays theirs; the retyping is what disappeared.

When the API is unreachable, the workflow degrades gracefully: the operator exports the Sales Orders list from Business Central's own Open in Excel and feeds it the file instead — same preview, same Y/N, same board. The quirks live in the docs, not in tribal memory: Business Central only exports the columns you can currently see, so the setup guide makes the required ones visible once, and anything without a delivery date gets reported back instead of guessed at. It shipped with a maintenance guide and a running edge-case log, like every workflow here.