Switching Business Central partner step by step

Changing partner in Business Central is more of a project than a notice of termination. Licences, access to your environment, documentation and the agreement with the old partner all have to fit together. If the order goes wrong, you can end up without support or lose track of what has been built. This article gives you a sequence to follow and the questions to ask both the new and the current partner.

Start by mapping what you have

Before you contact anyone, you need to know what the switch covers. Write down who sells your licences, which environments you have, which apps are installed, and whether any customisations were built specially for you. Also check your current agreement for the notice period and any lock-in.

Ask your internal administrator to look at which partners have access to your environment. In the Business Central admin center, an internal global administrator can see and control partner access per environment.

Licences: who sells them and when they renew
Environments: production and sandboxes
Apps: from AppSource and your own extensions
Integrations and scheduled runs
Lock-in period and notice period of the agreement

Agree the licence transfer

Your licences are a subscription held with a Microsoft reseller in the CSP programme. Changing reseller is a separate action that does not happen automatically just because you change consultant. Ask the new partner how they take over the subscription and whether users keep access without interruption. Get the answer in writing.

Do not cancel licences before the new partner has confirmed the takeover. This is a common mistake and it causes downtime.

Also check whether any apps are licensed through the app publisher rather than through your reseller.

Ask too whether prices change at the handover and when the next invoice will come from the new reseller. Compare with your current terms so you can see whether anything has become more or less expensive.

Give the new partner access, and close the old one

Microsoft describes how a partner gets access to your environments through a delegated administration relationship (GDAP), which you as the customer approve. The new partner sends you a link that a global administrator on your side accepts. Once that is in place, you can restrict access per environment with the Partner access setting.

When the old partner has finished, their access must be removed. Microsoft Learn says you should afterwards clean up any settings the previous partner made in the admin center. Set a date for when this happens and get written confirmation.

Take the documentation with you

Ask for setup documentation, descriptions of customisations, a list of integrations, and the login details for any third-party services the partner has set up for you. If you have had an extension built, you need to know who holds the source code and whether you are allowed to have it handed over. This should be in the original agreement. See also the article on documentation when changing partner.

Terminate, with an overlap

Plan a short overlap in which both partners can answer questions. Terminate the old agreement only after the new partner has resolved the first cases. Remember to check whether the notice must be given in writing and for a specific date.

Finish by testing the most important processes: posting, invoicing, inventory movements and scheduled runs in the Job Queue. Check that users can sign in and that permissions are as they should be.

Make a short list of who on your side talks to whom, so both partners know who to contact. This stops responsibility falling between two stools during the transition.

Services from Addverk

If you want a new partner for support, you can see how we work and what it costs on the page about support and services. Always compare with at least one other quote, and ask all of them the same questions.