What’s Cooking in Business Central: Replace Permission Sets Upon Import 

If you spend a lot of time configuring and refining permission sets in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the upcoming 2025 Wave 2 release brings an update you’ll want to know about. 

Managing permissions is an ongoing task for many teams. It’s common to experiment in a test environment, only to later import changes back into production. Until now, this process hasn’t always been as smooth as it could be. The new release introduces an important improvement that makes permission set management more flexible and efficient. 

The Challenge: Merging vs. Replacing Permissions 

Let’s say your production environment has a simple permission set that grants access to sales documents. In your test company, however, you tweak the set to focus on purchase documents instead. 

When you import that test permission set back into production, Business Central has historically asked whether you’d like to update the existing set. Choosing Yes would merge the permissions, meaning both sales and purchase document access would remain in place. 

That works well in many cases. But what if you wanted to replace the permissions entirely, not merge them? 

The New Option: Overwriting Permission Sets 

Here’s where the 2025 Wave 2 release comes in. Now, when importing a permission set, if you select No at the update prompt, Business Central will overwrite the existing permissions instead of merging them. 

For example: 

In production, you originally had permissions for Customer, Vendor, and Sales Document tables. 

In test, someone reconfigured the set to include Customer, Contact, and Sales Document tables. 

With the new update, importing the test version and choosing No will remove Vendor and add Contact, exactly as defined in test. 

This change eliminates the need to manually delete old permissions before importing a revised set. 

Why This Matters for Users 

This small but powerful update will save time and reduce errors for teams that regularly: 

 

• • Test and refine permissions in non-production environments. 

 

• • Deploy changes across multiple companies. 

 

• • Need consistency between test and production setups. 

Instead of fiddling with manual adjustments, you now have greater control over whether permissions are merged or overwritten during import. 

Final Thoughts

The Business Central 2025 Wave 2 release brings a welcome enhancement to permission set management. Whether you’re merging updates or fully replacing existing permissions, you can now handle both scenarios with ease. 

For admins and power users, this means less cleanup, fewer mistakes, and more confidence when moving configurations between environments.