Stop Clicking Through the Same Screens Over and Over, Business Central Has a Better Way: Page Scripting
If you’ve ever been involved in a Business Central upgrade or go-live, you’ll know this feeling. Testing has long been one of the most time-consuming and frustrating parts of any ERP implementation or upgrade. For Business Central users and their partners, user acceptance testing (UAT) has traditionally meant hours of manual, repetitive clicking — retracing the same steps after every update to make sure nothing has broken.
It’s nobody’s favorite job and it’s the kind of thing that either gets done poorly because people are rushing or doesn’t get done thoroughly enough because there simply isn’t time.
Well, there’s now a much better way to handle this. If you haven’t come across it yet, it’s worth knowing about. I am currently managing a large upgrade project, and my partner introduced me to the Page Scripting tool, which has been a game-changer.
The Page Scripting Tool
In April 2024, Microsoft introduced something called the Page Scripting tool as part of the Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1. The idea is simple: You open Business Central, go into the Settings menu (the little cog in the top right), and hit Page Scripting. From there, you press record and just…do the steps that you would normally do.
The Page Scripting tool is a built-in, no-code testing feature accessible directly from the Business Central web client. It allows users to record their actions — opening pages, entering data, navigating through processes — and replay those recordings at any time.
They can be shared across teams, stored in version control, and reused indefinitely. You don’t need to be a developer to use it. Any user with the appropriate permissions can record, save, and run a script. That’s it. You now have a reusable test script you can run any time you need to.
Optimizing Steps & Processes
As you already know, Business Central gets updated regularly. Every update, every customization change, every new bit of code introduced by a developer or an ISV means someone needs to verify that the system still behaves the way it’s supposed to. That job has always fallen to consultants, key users, or whoever can be pulled away from their actual work to go clicking through screens.
With Page Scripting, you record the process once, and then you just replay it. It runs through the same steps in exactly the same way every time, and tells you whether it passed or failed. That process that used to take an afternoon can now take minutes.
For those of us who manage implementations or support clients through upgrade cycles, this is a significant game-changer. You can build up a proper library of scripts covering all the key workflows and reuse them every single time something changes. The recording and playback are all done through the web client interface, which means your end users — the finance team, the warehouse staff, whoever actually runs these processes day-to-day — can create and run the tests themselves. That’s a big deal.
The people who know best how a process should work are the ones who do it every day. Getting them to record their own workflows means you capture the real thing, not a consultant’s best guess at what the process looks like.
Because scripts save as files, they’re easy to share. You can build up a shared library for your team or your clients and anyone with the right permissions can run them. If you’re a partner, you can hand a set of scripts over to your client at the end of an implementation so they can use them independently going forward. You can also combine scripts into test suites to cover full end-to-end scenarios — not just individual steps but whole processes from start to finish.
Microsoft has also been adding improvements with each release. In the 2025 Release Wave 2 update, it made it easier to insert steps into the middle of an existing script rather than having to re-record them from scratch, which makes maintaining scripts a lot less painful.
The best part is it built right into the platform, so there’s nothing to install, no extra licenses to buy, and no learning curve beyond what I’ve just described.
Final Thoughts
The bottom line is, if your team is still doing all its testing manually, give this a try. Spend an hour recording the processes that cause the most anxiety or take the most time when you upgrade to see how much faster your next round of testing goes.
It won’t eliminate testing effort entirely, but it’ll make it a lot less painful. In my experience, anything that makes testing less time-consuming means it actually gets done properly, which is kind of the whole point. The tool is already there and built into the platform, free to use, and easier to get started than you might expect. Give it a try and see how much time you can save.
