Quick Tips: Understanding Business Central Localizations

Welcome to Quick Tips — a fast, focused series designed to help you work smarter.

Each post will give you one practical insight you can apply immediately, whether you’re coding, configuring your tools, or improving your workflow.

Here’s today’s Quick Tip:

What Are Localizations?

Dynamics 365 Business Central is available in over 240 countries and regions, but not every localization is built the same way. Understanding how localizations work helps you build extensions that play nicely across geographies and avoid surprises when deploying to new markets.

There are two types of localizations:

• Microsoft localizations — Microsoft provides the localized BaseApp for about 24 countries like the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, the UK, and others.
• Partner localizations — For the remaining 200+ countries, partners build localization apps primarily on top of the international version (known as W1) and publish them on AppSource.

You can learn more about Dynamics 365 Business Central local functionality here.

Why It Matters

When you create a new environment, the country/region you select determines two things:

• Which BaseApp version you get — A Microsoft localization (like US for United States or DE for Germany) includes country-specific tax, reporting, and compliance features baked in. A W1-based environment relies on partner apps from AppSource for those features.
• Where your data lives — The environment localization determines the Azure geography your database is deployed to. For example, a Canadian environment deploys to the Canada region, while a South African environment deploys to the South Africa region. Visit the Azure Region List for more information on where each country/region is hosted.

Key Things to Know

• Some localizations have migrated to W1. Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have had their BaseApps migrated to W1 in recent releases.
• Language ≠ localization. Business Central supports 50+ languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, and many more. Language apps are installed separately from AppSource; some are provided by Microsoft while others come from partners.
• English (US) is the only built-in language. Every other language requires installing a language app.

How to Check Availability

• Visit the Country/regional availability and supported languages page on Microsoft Learn.
• Look up your target country to see whether it uses a Microsoft or Partner localization and which BaseApp version applies.
• Check the supported languages table to see if your target language has a Microsoft-provided or partner-provided translation app.

Why It Helps

If you’re building extensions for international customers, knowing the localization landscape keeps you from making assumptions about what’s in the BaseApp. A feature that exists natively in the German localization might need a partner app in Brazil. Planning for W1 compatibility from the start makes your extensions more portable across markets.

Learn more about Country/regional availability and supported languages here.

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