Perspectives from our consultants on Microsoft Dynamics 365, LS Retail, Azure, AI Copilots and the things that actually change how teams work.
Featured
Business Intelligence has had a 25-year run as the retailer's window into the business. Dashboards in Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik are excellent at summarising the past. The question is whether summary…
Read articleWritten for IT and business leaders who would rather skip the slide deck and read a clear answer.
LS Retail
A Gulf petrol station has two profit centres: fuel sales (high volume, low margin) and the convenience store (lower volume, higher margin). Most forecourt management systems do one well.…
AI
If your finance team takes 5+ business days to close the month, you're paying an opportunity cost competitors with AI-assisted close don't pay. Each closed-late month means delayed…
LS Retail
UAE pharmacy operators don't run on standard retail POS. The differences:
LS Retail
F&B in Saudi Arabia in 2026 looks nothing like 2018. Aggregators (Hungerstation, Jahez, ToYou) drive 35–55% of total orders for QSR chains. Cloud kitchens multiply faster than physical…
AI
Copilot in Business Central matches bank statement lines against open AR/AP entries using fuzzy matching, amount tolerance, and date proximity. A reconciliation that used to take a finance…
LS Retail
UAE hypermarkets reached self-checkout adoption of 25–35% of transactions in 2026 — up from single digits in 2020. Carrefour, Lulu, Spinneys and the Sharaf group all deploy mixed-mode lanes…
AI
To add Microsoft Copilot in Business Central, you need three licences:
LS Retail
The most common cause of multi-store rollout failures isn't software — it's trying to go live everywhere at once. A 50-store chain that goes live in one weekend hits the same problem 50…
LS Retail
Most Shopify-to-BC plugins solve the easy path: catalogue sync and order creation. They fail at the hard things: real-time inventory accuracy across stores, partial fulfilment, returns,…
ERP / BC
Before starting ZATCA Phase 2 setup in Business Central, confirm:
ERP / BC
Microsoft Dynamics NAV reached end-of-mainstream-support in 2028 for most version branches. Beyond that, no new security updates, no new feature releases, no Microsoft technical support.…
ERP / BC
ZATCA Phase 2 — the Integration Phase of Saudi e-Invoicing — requires every taxable B2B invoice to be sent to FATOORA in real time, cryptographically stamped, archived, and QR-coded.…
ERP / BC
Microsoft has built ZATCA Phase 2 readiness into Dynamics 365 natively. The Novasoft KSA e-Invoicing extension handles the complete FATOORA flow — cryptographic stamping, QR codes, archive,…
LS Retail
Square is unbeatable for a single physical store or a market stall in the UAE. The hardware is plug-and-play and the monthly cost is the lowest on the market. Beyond two stores it starts to…
LS Retail
LS Central is licensed two ways: per named user (back office) and per POS lane (store). Pricing in SAR for 2026:
ERP / BC
Odoo's Community edition is free and Enterprise starts at around USD 15 per user per month. Microsoft Business Central Essentials sits at around USD 70 per user per month — roughly 4x. For…
ERP / BC
Microsoft sells Business Central via two named-user tiers plus team-member access:
ERP / BC
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is purpose-built for organisations between 25 and 500 users. It runs on the same cloud foundation as Microsoft 365 and Azure, so users already living…
LS Retail
A typical Gulf retail group is a holding company sitting on top of separate trading entities — one per brand, often one per country. Each entity has its own LS Central tenant, its own GL, its ow…
LS Retail
Below are twenty representative questions Retail Co-Pilot answers daily across UAE and KSA retail operations - organised by the role most likely to ask them. Each question is asked in plain English. E…
CRM
Every retail number has a half-life — the time after which the action it suggests is no longer useful. A morning sales total has a half-life of about three hours: by lunch, the morning trend has…
LS Retail
Retail Co-Pilot is a conversational AI layer built by Novasoft on top of LS Central — itself running on Business Central. It reads structured retail data — sales, item ledger, transfers, c…
ERP
The UAE e-invoicing framework, announced by the Ministry of Finance and operated under the FTA, requires structured electronic invoices for B2B and B2G transactions, exchanged through a network of Acc…
LS Retail
A retailer sells SKUs as bought. A restaurant transforms raw items into finished dishes — and one raw item ends up in twenty different dishes. The inventory system has to track ingredients, reci…
Awards & Events
Finance directors, CFOs, and CIOs in UAE and KSA mid-market businesses (AED 20M+ turnover) who are running on legacy systems — Tally, Sage, on-premise NAV, or a patchwork of Excel — and co…
ERP
Most mid-market UAE evaluations converge on four products: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, SAP Business One, Oracle NetSuite, and Odoo. The right answer depends on existing Microsoft footprin…
LS Retail
A 2010-era retail supply chain was sequential — supplier ships, warehouse receives, stores order, consumer buys. A 2026 supply chain is concurrent: store, web, marketplace, and aggregator orders…
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Novasoft now publishes a portfolio of Microsoft-certified extensions on AppSource — from procurement and production to retail connectors and SEZ trading. Each app installs in m…
ERP
A typical mid-market UAE business processes 200–800 purchase requisitions a month. Without a structured flow, every requisition becomes an email thread — five forwards, two attachments, on…
ERP
Business Central ships with solid base manufacturing — production orders, BOMs, routings, capacity. It also stops short of what a real factory needs at scale: BOM versioning, alternate routings,…
LS Retail
Property Management Systems — Opera, Protel, Cloudbeds, Mews — handle reservations, room status, guest folios, and night audits. They are excellent at the front-of-house. They are not desi…
ERP
Business Central in 2026 is not the same product it was even three years ago. The platform now bundles Copilot AI, structured e-invoicing, M365 integration, and Power Platform extensibility — an…
ERP
Shopify is excellent at the storefront. It is not designed to be the system of record for inventory, customers, or finance. The brands that scale on Shopify are the ones whose Shopify is wired tightly…
AI
, , , , , , . --> AI in Business Central is no longer a roadmap item. Copilot ships inside BC for marketing-text generation, bank-statement reconciliation, narrative variance analysis, and natural-lan…
LS Retail
LS Retail's Diamond tier is the top level in the partner programme. It is earned annually on three measures: certified consultant headcount in LS Central and Business Central, recent customer go-lives…
ERP
Phase 2 rolled out in waves from 2023 onward, starting with the largest VAT-registered taxpayers and extending down to mid-market and smaller businesses through 2024–2026. By 2026, the bulk of K…
ERP
A typical UAE mid-market business processes 500–2,500 supplier invoices a month. Each invoice touches receiving, three-way match, approval, posting, payment, and reconciliation. If any one of th…
LS Retail
Urban Piper is the leading restaurant aggregator middleware in India and a growing presence in the Gulf — it sits between the dozen-plus food-delivery platforms and the restaurant's POS, normali…
LS Retail
Planet Payment is the UAE's appointed tourist VAT refund operator. When an eligible tourist makes a qualifying purchase, the retailer issues a "Tax-Free" tag tied to the transaction. The tourist valid…
ERP
A pure lift-and-shift from NAV to Business Central ports every customisation forward — including the ones that exist because somebody in 2014 wrote a workaround for a problem that has since been…
ERP
Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV both descend from acquisitions Microsoft made in the early 2000s — GP from Great Plains, NAV from Navision. Business Central is the cloud successor to NAV, with much…
LS Retail
LS Retail's Diamond tier — see the LS Retail Partner Directory — is annual and rebased every year. The 2022 bar required a minimum certified-consultant headcount in LS Central and Business…
ERP
MEA Markets runs an annual industry awards programme that evaluates partners on customer outcomes, technical depth, regional footprint, and operational practice. The Digital Transformations category s…
ERP
Microsoft has moved its mainstream investment to Business Central for a decade. NAV mainstream support has wound down; some versions are in extended support only. Customers who stay on NAV face accumu…
LS Retail
Omnichannel was supposed to mean a customer who buys in-store, returns online, and joins the loyalty programme on Instagram is the same customer to your system. In practice, the typical Gulf retailer …
LS Retail
Walk into a busy UAE restaurant and count the tablets at the counter. One for Talabat, one for Careem, one for Deliveroo, one for Uber Eats, one for noon food. Each one beeps; a runner takes the order…
ERP
Ask any one of the three questions below to your finance team. The answer tells you whether your storefront and backend are genuinely integrated — or just nominally so.
LS Retail
Self-checkout adoption in the Gulf accelerated through the pandemic and never reverted. Customers prefer the choice; retailers value the queue elasticity; LS Central handles SCO and staffed lanes on t…
ERP
A UAE business buying from India in INR, billing a KSA customer in SAR, and reporting to a UK parent in GBP touches four currencies in a single transaction chain. BC keeps every transaction in its sou…
ERP
Most SMEs run for the first five years on whatever finance system the founder set up. The breakpoint comes when month-end takes too long, audit becomes stressful, or a second entity is launched. At th…
ERP
A free-zone trader is doing three things at once: importing under customs codes, holding stock in a bonded warehouse, and selling on either to a UAE mainland customer (VAT + duty) or another free-zone…
ERP
Power BI sits across the data — Business Central, LS Central, Excel, SQL, third-party apps — and renders dashboards in Teams, Outlook, and the web. The semantic model handles the modelling…
CRM
, , , , , , . --> Dynamics 365 Sales is Microsoft's sales-focused CRM — same Dataverse, same M365 integration, with Copilot baked in for email drafting, meeting summaries, and next-best-action s…
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Power Platform is Microsoft's low-code stack — Power Apps for screens, Power Automate for flows, Power BI for analytics, Copilot Studio for AI agents. For UAE and KSA businesse…
LS Retail
A legacy POS captures a transaction and forgets it. A new-age POS captures the transaction, enriches the customer file, applies loyalty rules, posts to the GL, refreshes web stock, and surfaces an ups…
LS Retail
LS Central tracks days-on-hand per SKU per location; dead-stock surfaces in the role centre before the buyer asks.
ERP
Full BC for finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, projects — the workhorse licence for most users.
CRM
, , , , , , . --> Business Central ships with sales functionality — quotes, orders, customer cards, basic opportunities. It is not a full CRM. The right question is whether your sales process ne…
ERP
BC's release cadence is what makes it a platform rather than a snapshot product. New capability ships every six months — Copilot, e-invoicing, AI agents, sustainability features. The business th…
ERP
Ticket-based support, 8x5 business hours, NBD response on standard incidents. Fits small BC tenants.
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Remote selling stopped being a workaround and started being a default channel for many UAE and KSA B2B teams. The Microsoft stack — Dynamics 365 Sales, Teams, Outlook, and Shar…
ERP
Multi-currency, multi-entity, period close, intercompany, fixed assets.
ERP
BC handles 80% of UAE and KSA mid-market businesses cleanly. The remaining 20% — large multi-site manufacturers, deep distribution networks, regulated public-sector — graduate to D365 Supp…
AI
, , , , , , . --> AI in business stopped being aspirational in 2024 and started being default in 2026. The UAE and KSA businesses that capture compounding value are the ones using Microsoft Copilot &m…
AI
, , , , , , . --> Business Central ships AI features in the platform — bank-statement reconciliation, sales-line suggestions, narrative variance analysis, marketing-text generation, and a chat-s…
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is Microsoft's customer data platform — unifying transactional, behavioural, and demographic data into one customer profile, then driving segment…
Azure & Cloud
Azure UAE North (Dubai/Abu Dhabi) and KSA Central (Riyadh) regions — data stays in-country for regulator-sensitive workloads.
ERP
Business Central, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations, Customer Insights, Commerce, Supply Chain.
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Schools and universities across UAE and KSA standardised on Microsoft 365 during the pandemic and stayed. The stack — Teams for Education, OneDrive, Outlook, Office, Copilot fo…
LS Retail
LS Central owns the item master and prices; Magento mirrors. Web team edits descriptions, back office stays canonical.
ERP
, , , , , , . --> Microsoft Teams in 2026 is no longer a video tool. It is the layer where decisions get made — chat, calls, file co-edit, line-of-business apps, and Copilot all in one canvas. F…
CRM
, , , , , , . --> Dynamics 365 Sales Professional is the lightweight tier of Microsoft's sales CRM — opportunities, accounts, leads, pipeline, native Outlook + Teams integration, and Copilot. Th…
CRM
, , , , , , . --> Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise is built around removing the salesperson's busywork — emails, meeting notes, account research, follow-up reminders, pipeline updates. Done well, i…