A veterinary practice runs on a relationship Business Central does not model: the paying customer is the owner, but almost every clinical and commercial fact belongs to the animal. Out of the box you get a Customer card, a Sales Invoice and Item tracking — there is nowhere to record that Bella is a 7-year-old Labrador with a history of otitis, a rabies booster due in eleven weeks, a metronidazole sensitivity and a microchip number. Practices end up splitting the business across a clinical app that knows the animals and Business Central that knows the money, then reconciling the two by hand at month end. Dispensing makes it worse: veterinary medicines are batch-controlled and expiry-dated, some are controlled drugs with a legal register, and the dose is calculated from a bodyweight that lives in the other system entirely.

We build a single AL extension that puts the clinical record inside Business Central rather than beside it. New tables carry Animal (species, breed, sex, neuter status, date of birth, microchip, insurance policy, alerts) and Animal Owner Link so one animal can be co-owned or transferred without rewriting history, plus Visit, Clinical Note, Vaccination, Boarding Booking and Prescription. Table and page extensions hang the veterinary context off standard records — a Customer card gains a factbox of that owner's animals with outstanding balance and next due vaccination; a Sales Line gains Animal No., so every consultation fee, drug charge and boarding night posts against the patient and can be reported per species, per vet or per insurer. Because these are real Business Central documents, revenue recognition, VAT, dimensions and Customer Ledger Entries behave exactly as your accountant already expects.

The clinical mechanics run in codeunits and event subscribers rather than in a bolt-on UI. Dispensing subscribes to the sales posting events so that a prescription line reserves a specific Lot No. through standard Item Tracking, blocks an expired or short-dated lot, records the batch and expiry against the patient permanently, and writes a controlled-drug register entry where the schedule demands it — the register survives even if the source document is later corrected, because it is written to its own ledger table. Weight-based dosing is calculated from the latest weight observation on the visit and warns when the computed volume falls outside the product's licensed range. Vaccination protocols are defined per species and product so that posting a vaccination automatically schedules the next due date; a job queue entry then sweeps the due list nightly and queues owner reminders by email or SMS through your existing Business Central email accounts, with every send logged against the animal so the practice can prove a reminder went out. Boarding is modelled as dated occupancy against kennel or cattery resources with a conflict check on overlapping bookings, and it bills as sales lines on the same invoice as the medicines and the consultation. API pages exposed over REST API v2.0 / OData v4 let a booking website, an online shop or a Power BI report read and write animals, visits and bookings; Dataverse and Power Automate connectivity is available where you want reminder flows or an owner portal built on Power Apps. Everything ships with dedicated permission sets so a receptionist can book and take payment without opening clinical notes or the controlled-drug register.

This is build-to-order, not an AppSource download. We start with a scoping call, then produce a written functional specification covering your species mix, your vaccination protocols, your controlled-drug obligations in your jurisdiction, and whether you need retail counter sales and boarding on day one or later. We then develop the extension in AL against your Business Central version, deploy it to a sandbox for UAT, and only after you sign off do we install into production — as a per-tenant extension for SaaS, or a signed app package for on-premises. Typical delivery is 2-4 weeks from confirmed scope, longer only where an unusual integration or a regulated register is in play, and we say so before you commit. You receive the full AL source and the git repository, so you are never locked to us.