Let’s be honest about something up front: GP users love SmartList. If we had a dollar for every client who said “I just need my SmartLists” during a Business Central demo, we could sponsor the office coffee for a year. And the affection is earned — SmartList made GP data reachable for regular users long before “self-service analytics” was a buzzword.
So today’s round is a real fight. The question isn’t whether SmartList is good. It’s whether BC’s answer — filters, saved views, and Analysis Mode — is better. Let’s look.
How You Do It in Dynamics GP
Step 1: Open SmartList and pick your list. SmartList lives right in the GP menu, organized by module folders — Financial, Sales, Purchasing, and so on. Per the Dynamics GP System User’s Guide, each module ships with predefined lists and default favorites (marked with an asterisk), so Open Purchase Orders or Customer Balances is two clicks away.
Step 2: Search and refine. Select a favorite and choose Search to set up to four criteria — say, document amounts over $1,000 posted this month. Need different columns? The Columns button adds them, or an admin can change the defaults for everyone in SmartList Options (Tools > Setup > System). Sort by clicking a column header.
Step 3: Save it as a favorite. Your refined list becomes a favorite with a visibility setting — System, Company, User, or User Class. One tip from years in the field: default visibility to User, or the shared favorites list grows into a jungle.
Step 4: Export to Excel. Here’s the SmartList rhythm every GP user knows: build the list, hit the Excel button, and do the real analysis — totals, pivots, charts — in the spreadsheet. SmartList finds the data; Excel crunches it. And when the data changes tomorrow, you export again.
Step 5: For anything beyond the built-ins, SmartList Builder. Custom lists joining multiple tables need the SmartList Builder add-on — powerful, but it’s a separate purchase and a job for your GP admin or partner.
How You Do It in Business Central
Step 1: Every list is already a SmartList. There’s no separate tool to open. Per Microsoft’s sorting, searching, and filtering guide, every list page — customers, items, ledger entries — sorts by any column, searches across visible fields, and filters on any field in the table, including ones not shown on screen. Filter formulas handle ranges, dates like “today,” and more.
Step 2: Save the view. Set your filters once and save them as a named view — “My Georgia customers,” “Open POs over $5K” — pinned to the page for one-click reuse. That’s the favorite, without the visibility jungle: your views are yours.
Step 3: Enter Analysis Mode. This is BC’s headline act. Per Microsoft’s Analysis Mode documentation, one click on Enter Analysis Mode turns any list or query into an interactive analysis surface: group rows, pivot on fields, sum and average columns, and keep multiple tabs for different questions — “Sales by region,” “Follow-up items” — all live on real-time data, all without touching the underlying records. The Excel round-trip that SmartList users perform daily happens in place, and it’s still current tomorrow.
Step 4: Or just ask Copilot. With analysis assist, you describe the layout in plain words — “show average cost per category,” “sort on quantity from smallest to largest” — and Copilot builds the analysis tab as a starting point. It can even pull in fields from related tables.
Step 5: Excel is still there when you want it. Open in Excel works from any list — with a live connection back to BC data. The spreadsheet becomes a choice, not a requirement.
Side by Side
| Dynamics GP | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| Where inquiry lives | SmartList window, module folders | Every list page, built in |
| Refining data | Search window, up to 4 criteria | Filter pane on any field, filter formulas |
| Reusable lists | Favorites with visibility levels | Named views, saved per user |
| Totals, grouping, pivots | Export to Excel first | Analysis Mode, in place |
| Multiple saved analyses | Multiple favorites + exports | Tabs within Analysis Mode |
| Natural-language help | — | Copilot analysis assist |
| Custom multi-table lists | SmartList Builder (add-on) | Queries + Analysis Mode; related fields via Copilot |
| Data freshness | As of the export | Live, every time |
Why BC Comes Out Ahead
SmartList earned its fan club by making data reachable. But its rhythm has a tell: the moment the question gets interesting — totals, groupings, comparisons — the answer moves to Excel, and the data goes stale the moment it lands there.
Business Central keeps the reachability and removes the export. Filters live on every list. Views save without an admin. Analysis Mode does the pivot-table work on live data, in the same window, with tabs for every recurring question — and Copilot will draft the layout if you’d rather describe it than build it. Your SmartList instincts don’t just survive the move to BC; they get an upgrade.
Thinking About the Switch?
Aisling Dynamics helps GP teams get more from SmartList today, and shows them what those same questions look like in Business Central — usually in about ten minutes, usually with at least one “wait, it just does that?” If your team’s reporting day still runs through the Excel button, meet our team, see how BC handles financial reporting too, or contact us at (251) 293-0555.
Come back tomorrow for Round 26: approvals and workflow — GP Workflow vs. BC approval workflows and Power Automate.