Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and TrueCommerce integration

What moves between them

Documents move in both directions. Inbound from TrueCommerce, retailer purchase orders arrive as X12 850 documents and ml-connector creates matching sales orders in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central; remittance advice arrives as 820 documents and posts as customer payments. Outbound from Business Central, posted sales invoices are sent to TrueCommerce as 810 invoice documents for delivery to the retailer, item availability is sent as 846 inventory advice, and order acknowledgments go out as 855 documents. Polling cadence is tied to your trading partner activity, typically hourly for the inbound 850 and remittance pickups and after each posting run for the outbound invoices.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores both credential sets encrypted. It presents the TrueCommerce SFTP username and password or the per-customer Exchange API key on each pickup, and refreshes the Business Central bearer token when a call returns 401, building the base URL from the tenant environment name you supply. Because TrueCommerce does not push, it polls the inbound and outbound FTP directories on a cron schedule rather than waiting for a notification. Each X12 segment is mapped to Business Central fields: the 850 buyer and ship-to map to a customer, the line items map to sales order lines by item number and unit of measure, and the 810 is built from the posted sales invoice and its lines. Business Central throttles at 429 and times out long queries at 408, so ml-connector backs off with jitter, narrows reads with an OData filter, and respects the 20,000 record page limit. Sales invoices stay in draft until the bound post action runs, so the connector only emits an 810 once the invoice is posted. Trading partner ISA sender and receiver IDs and the exact FTP directory names are confirmed at onboarding because they are not standard across customers. Every document carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream step fails.

A real-world example

A mid-sized consumer goods supplier with about 150 employees sells to several national grocery chains and runs Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for finance, inventory, and order management. Each chain sends purchase orders over EDI, and TrueCommerce is the supplier's value-added network. Before the integration, a customer service clerk printed the 850 purchase orders from the TrueCommerce portal and keyed each one into Business Central as a sales order, then re-keyed the matching invoice totals back into TrueCommerce after shipping, which caused late acknowledgments and chargebacks from retailers. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and TrueCommerce connected, each 850 becomes a Business Central sales order automatically, posted invoices flow back out as 810 documents on time, and the manual re-keying is gone.

What you can do

• •Turn inbound TrueCommerce 850 purchase orders into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central sales orders without manual entry.
• •Send posted Business Central sales invoices back to TrueCommerce as 810 documents for delivery to the retailer.
• •Push Business Central item availability to TrueCommerce as 846 inventory advice and emit 855 order acknowledgments.
• •Post inbound TrueCommerce 820 remittance advice into Business Central as customer payments.
• •Bridge TrueCommerce SFTP or Exchange API credentials and the Business Central Entra ID OAuth2 token, polling on the schedule you set.

Questions

Which direction does data move between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and TrueCommerce?

Documents move both ways. Retailer purchase orders and remittance advice come from TrueCommerce into Business Central as X12 850 and 820 documents, while posted sales invoices, inventory advice, and order acknowledgments go from Business Central out to TrueCommerce as 810, 846, and 855 documents. The 850 to sales order path and the posted invoice to 810 path are the core flows.

Does TrueCommerce push events, or does the connector poll?

TrueCommerce is primarily pull-based and has no reliable self-serve webhook with a documented payload or signature. The supported pattern is a scheduled poll of the TrueCommerce SFTP drop directories or Exchange API, typically hourly for inbound pickups. ml-connector runs that poll on a cron schedule and processes each document it finds.

How does the connector handle Business Central authentication and the tenant environment URL?

Business Central uses an OAuth2 client credentials token from Microsoft Entra ID, scoped to a named environment such as production that forms part of the tenant-specific base URL. ml-connector stores the client secret encrypted, builds the base URL from the environment name you provide, and refreshes the bearer token whenever a call returns 401 so the sync keeps running.