Getting started with BDP SmartFlow Projects
Install, activate and generate your first finite-capacity schedule — a day-scaled Gantt board for Business Central Jobs, with real resource capacity checked before a date ever gets promised.
1. What SmartFlow Projects does
Business Central's Jobs (Projects) module tracks budgets, WIP and billing — a financial ledger. It doesn't tell you whether the person assigned to a task is already committed to a different project the same week. SmartFlow Projects adds a visual, day-scaled board on top of your existing Jobs, Job Planning Lines and Resources, and a finite-capacity scheduling engine that checks every project's plan against everyone's real, native Business Central resource capacity — a hard ceiling, not a suggestion. When it finds a conflict, it proposes a plan that resolves it, with a reason attached to every task it moves. Nothing changes in Business Central until you review that proposal and choose Accept.
SmartFlow Projects runs on Business Central Essentials — there is no Premium licence requirement, and no separate Manufacturing-module dependency.
2. Installing and activating
New to SmartFlow Projects? Install it from AppSource, then work through these in order.
Install from AppSource
Install BDP SmartFlow Projects from Microsoft AppSource into your Business Central environment, the same way as any other AppSource extension.
Open SmartFlow Projects Setup
Search for SmartFlow Projects Setup and open it.
Activate / Start Trial
Starts your 7-day trial (no credit card required) and connects your environment to the licensing and scheduling service. You'll need an email address on your Business Central user record (Contact Email) or on Company Information — SmartFlow Projects uses it to reach you about your trial or subscription.
Subscribe when you're ready
Choose Subscribe / Buy from the same Setup page, or purchase directly through the AppSource listing. If you ever need to reconnect a lost tenant key, use Redeem Tenant Key on the same page — a key is issued once per tenant, so re-running Activate on an already-activated tenant will not reissue one.
Sandbox environments include ready-to-explore sample project data, so you can evaluate every capability before pointing SmartFlow Projects at a real project.
3. Generating your first plan
Open the SmartFlow Projects Board
It shows every SmartFlow-enabled project's tasks on one day-scaled timeline, with dependency arrows between linked tasks and a per-person capacity heatmap beneath.
Check your source data
Make sure the projects you want scheduled have their tasks, durations, resource assignments and dependencies entered — SmartFlow Projects schedules from your native Job Planning Lines, it doesn't invent data.
Choose Generate Schedule
The scheduling engine computes a proposed plan against each assigned person's actual working capacity over the horizon, respecting all four dependency types (Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, Start-to-Finish, each with its own lag) and any tasks you've locked or pinned in place.
Let it run
A run can take anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on how much you've asked it to schedule at once — the board keeps working while it waits, so you can keep reviewing projects, dependencies and capacity in the meantime.
4. Reviewing and accepting a proposal
Every Generate Schedule run opens a Proposal Review workspace: current dates next to proposed dates, side by side, with a plain-language reason attached to every task that moved. A summary reports what changed — how many tasks moved, how many stayed put and why (a task can be skipped because it's locked, pinned, or inside your frozen horizon — SmartFlow Projects counts and discloses every skip, it never silently ignores one).
Nothing is written back to Business Central until you choose Accept. Accepting writes exactly two things back to native Business Central tables: task start/end dates and, where the solver reassigned or re-timed an assignment, the affected Job Planning Lines. If you don't like the proposal, close the review without accepting and nothing in Business Central changes.
5. Project Templates
Package a proven project shape — tasks, planning lines, dependencies and skill requirements — and reuse it in minutes instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
Build or capture one
Open Project Templates and add tasks, lines, dependencies and skill requirements directly, or open an already-delivered project and choose Save as Template to capture its shape. Actuals, absolute dates and run history are never captured — only durations, in working days, survive.
Certify it
A new template starts Draft and is fully editable. Certify checks that every named resource and skill code actually exists and that the dependency network has no circular chain, then locks it. Only a Certified template can be instantiated. Reopen sends it back to Draft to edit again.
Open the template and choose Instantiate
Set an anchor start date, an optional project number and description, and the customer to bill.
Review the preview
Every task's computed start, end and duration is shown before anything is created. These dates use plain working-day arithmetic (Monday-to-Friday) — they are not yet a capacity-levelled schedule. Choose Refresh Preview after changing the anchor date.
Decide on staffing
A template's resource lines can name a role with nobody assigned yet. Choose to keep the template's named resources as-is, cast a person into each open role now (filtered by the skills the task requires), or leave every open role unstaffed to staff later — an unstaffed role is a normal, supported state, not an error.
Instantiate, then Generate Schedule
Instantiate creates the real project, tasks, planning lines and dependencies. It is still a working-day estimate — run Generate Schedule from the Board afterward to level it against everyone's real capacity, calendars and absences.
Export to Excel and Import from Excel on the template card round-trip a template's tasks, lines, dependencies and skill requirements through a workbook — useful for building a large template offline. Every import previews its changes before anything is written, and a Certified template must be Reopened to Draft before it will accept one.
6. The main screens
Four screens cover day-to-day use.
Board
The primary workspace — every project's tasks on a day-scaled Gantt, switchable between a project perspective (grouped by project) and a resource perspective (grouped by person), plus a capacity heatmap that reads native resource capacity independent of whether you've run a solve.
Proposal Review
Opens after Generate Schedule — current vs. proposed dates, per-task reasons, and the Accept/Reject decision.
Dependency Worksheet
Bulk entry for predecessor links across hundreds of planning lines at once, instead of one task at a time. Circular dependencies are refused the moment you try to create them.
SmartFlow Projects Setup
Activation, subscription status, scheduling horizon, and the solver's weighting preferences (how strongly it should favour on-time delivery versus levelling everyone's workload evenly).
7. Seats: Planner vs. Viewer
Two per-user seat types, billed monthly through Microsoft AppSource.
Planner
Full access: drag tasks, edit dependencies, generate schedules, review proposals and accept them.
Viewer
Read-only: see the board, the capacity heatmap, and proposal review results. Requires at least one Planner seat on the tenant.
Every seat includes support. There is no separate support contract to buy. New tenants get a 7-day free trial — no credit card required.
Getting help
Email us for product support — Monday to Friday, with a next-business-day response. For questions about what data SmartFlow Projects sends or stores, see the privacy policy.