You already know where you’re trying to go — you just can’t remember the exact path to get there. So you click through the menu. Then a submenu. Then another. You find the page, you do the work, you close it. And you do the exact same thing again tomorrow. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. There’s also a faster way.
Most Business Central users navigate the same way they did on day one: menu by menu, layer by layer. It works. But it’s slow, and slow compounds. Research from G2 and ERP industry analysts consistently shows that only about 26% of employees actively use their company’s ERP system — meaning even among users who are in the system, many are working around features they don’t know exist.
Tell Me is one of those features. It’s been in BC for years. Most users have never touched it.
Tell Me is Business Central’s built-in search tool. You open it with Alt+Q on Windows (Ctrl+Option+Q on Mac), type what you’re looking for — a page, a report, an action — and jump straight to it. No menus. No submenus. Three seconds instead of thirty.
You can search for pages you use every day, reports you only run occasionally, or actions available within the page you’re already on. Tell Me surfaces them all. The frustrating part is that the shortcut has been sitting right there, unused, on every BC screen.
The 2025 Wave 2 release (BC27), generally available since October 2025, upgraded Tell Me from keyword matching to semantic search powered by a language model. That’s a meaningful shift.
Before the update, you needed to know exactly what BC called something to find it. Search for the wrong term and you got nothing useful. Now, if you search “procurement,” you get purchase-related pages even if the word “procurement” doesn’t appear in their name. The system understands intent, not just text.
This matters most for users who don’t yet have the full BC vocabulary locked in — and for experienced users who move across modules and don’t always land on the right term from memory. If you tried Tell Me a year ago and gave up because results felt unreliable, it’s worth trying again.
You don’t need training to get started. Open Tell Me with Alt+Q and try these:
Each of these replaces a click trail with a direct path. The first time feels like a shortcut. The tenth time feels like how it was always supposed to work.
A Forrester study found that organizations using Dynamics 365 Business Central see a 162% ROI over three years. That return assumes the system is being used — and used well. Navigation friction is one of the quieter ways that ROI gets left unrealized. It’s not dramatic. It’s thirty extra seconds on a task you perform forty times a week. Multiplied across a team, across a year, it adds up to a lot of time spent going the long way.
Business Central recently hit 50,000 cloud customers worldwide, growing at a pace that outpaces most ERP platforms in the SMB market. The businesses getting the most from that investment are the ones where users actually know what the system can do.
Tell Me is the kind of feature that feels minor until it becomes automatic. Commit to using Alt+Q for two weeks — every time you’d otherwise start clicking through a menu — and you’ll stop thinking about it as a shortcut. You’ll just be faster.
That’s the pattern we see with teams that get the most out of BC: they invest a few minutes in a habit that pays back every single day. Small tweaks, done consistently, unlock the efficiency that justifies the system in the first place.
The Western Computer team has been helping businesses build that kind of system fluency for 35+ years, across more than 1,250 implementations. If you’re curious what other time-savers are sitting unused in your current BC setup, we’re happy to take a look. Contact us to learn more.