Every growing SME running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central reaches the same fork in the road. The system has bedded in, the finance team relies on it daily, and someone needs to own it properly: fixing issues, managing users, keeping reports accurate, and making sure the software keeps pace with the business. The question is who that someone should be.

Do you hire a dedicated Business Central administrator and build the capability in-house? Or do you lean on a support and consultancy partner to cover it for you? Neither answer is automatically right. Both are legitimate, well-used models, and plenty of successful SMEs run each one. What matters is understanding what each option actually involves, what it costs, and which one fits your size, growth rate and complexity. That's what this article sets out to do.

What an in-house Business Central administrator role actually involves

An in-house ERP or finance systems administrator role is broader than most job descriptions suggest. On a day-to-day basis it typically covers user setup and permissions, resolving posting errors and workflow issues, maintaining chart of accounts and dimension structures, and producing or troubleshooting reports for finance and operations teams. Beyond the daily maintenance, the role usually extends into training new starters on the system, managing integrations with other software (payroll, e-commerce, CRM), and acting as the first point of contact when something breaks.

Then there's the less visible but arguably more important part of the job: staying current. Microsoft releases two major Business Central updates a year, alongside a steady stream of smaller changes, and someone in the business needs to understand what's changing, test it against your specific setup, and manage the rollout. Add in occasional customisation work (which usually requires AL development skills, a Microsoft-specific programming language), data integrity checks, and liaison with your Microsoft partner for anything beyond day-to-day admin, and it becomes clear this isn't really a part-time or "someone can pick it up" role. It's a genuine specialism.

The cost and hiring-market reality

This is where the in-house route gets harder than it first appears. Business Central and Dynamics 365 skills are a narrow, specialist niche within an already tight UK tech labour market. According to job market data from IT Jobs Watch, the median salary for a Dynamics 365 Administrator in the UK currently sits at around £70,000 a year, and that's before accounting for the added cost of recruitment, onboarding and the training needed to keep the person's skills current. Broader consultant-level roles show a similarly wide range: Glassdoor data puts UK Business Central consultant pay anywhere from roughly £40,000 to £62,000 depending on experience, with senior practice-level roles climbing well beyond that.

There's a supply problem underneath those numbers, too. Deloitte's research into the UK tech sector has consistently found that demand for skilled talent is outstripping supply, and that the war for talent shows no sign of easing. Business Central sits inside a wider Microsoft ecosystem where good people are hard to find and quick to move on. For an SME, that means a realistic hiring timeline measured in months rather than weeks, salary expectations that can stretch a finance team's budget, and a genuine risk of building your entire ERP knowledge around one person. If that person is on holiday, off sick, or leaves for a better offer, you can be left exposed at exactly the wrong moment, whether that's month-end, a system upgrade, or an audit.

None of this means hiring in-house is a bad decision. For the right business, it's the best one. It just means the cost needs to be weighed honestly, not just in salary, but in time-to-hire, retention risk and the ongoing investment needed to keep one person's skills current across two major releases a year.

What a good outsourced or consultancy relationship covers instead

The alternative isn't a lesser version of an in-house administrator. Done well, it's a different shape of support entirely, one built around a team rather than an individual. At Creative Computing, for example, ongoing support covers the day-to-day: logging and resolving issues by phone or email, with service levels built around fixing problems properly the first time rather than applying a quick patch and moving on. Because every call and email is logged against your account, there's continuity even as your business, and the consultants working with you, evolve over time.

Alongside support sits consultancy: the more strategic work of planning upgrades, mapping a route from on-premise to cloud, scoping customisations, and building a roadmap that keeps your system aligned with where the business is heading. Crucially, this gives an SME access to a bench of specialists (implementation consultants, developers, functional experts) rather than the knowledge and availability of one hire. When Microsoft ships a new release wave, that's the partner's job to track, test and advise on, not something that lands solely on your internal team.

There's a genuine cost argument here too. McKinsey's research on outsourced business-support functions notes that service providers are well placed to offer clients greater efficiency and lower upfront costs than building the equivalent capability internally, largely because the cost of specialist skills, tooling and ongoing training is shared across a provider's client base rather than carried by a single business. For a growing SME, that typically translates into a predictable, scalable cost rather than a fixed salary commitment that has to be justified whether the workload is heavy that month or light.

A framework for deciding: size, growth rate and complexity

There's no universal answer, but three factors tend to drive the decision more than any others.

Company size and user numbers. As a rough guide, SMEs with a smaller number of Business Central users (broadly under 50) rarely generate enough day-to-day administration to justify a full-time hire. Once you're running a large user base across multiple departments or entities, the maths starts to shift towards at least a part-time internal resource.

Growth rate. Fast-growing SMEs tend to be the ones who benefit most from outsourced support, precisely because their needs change quickly. A partner relationship can flex up during an acquisition, a new site opening, or a busy reporting period, and flex back down afterwards, without the business carrying a fixed headcount cost either way. Businesses with a flatter, more predictable growth curve are better placed to justify the fixed cost of an in-house hire, because the workload is more stable and easier to plan around.

System complexity. The more customised, integrated and multi-entity your Business Central environment becomes, the stronger the case for specialist support, whether that's in-house, outsourced, or both. Heavily bespoke systems with multiple integrations often benefit from a blended model: an internal "super user" who handles day-to-day configuration, training and first-line troubleshooting, backed by an outsourced partner for development, upgrades and strategic planning. This hybrid approach is increasingly common among growing SMEs, and it's often the most realistic middle ground between the two extremes.

Where to start

If you're weighing this up, the honest starting point is an audit of what your current setup actually needs, not a theoretical job description or a generic support package, but a look at your system's complexity, your growth plans, and where the gaps genuinely sit.

Speak to the Creative Computing team about your Business Central environment and what ongoing support could look like for your business, whether that's full outsourced support, strategic consultancy, or a blended model that complements the team you already have.