Merch and apparel brands that produce through print-on-demand partners usually end up running the business twice. Sales orders live in Dynamics 365 Business Central, but the artwork, the print placement, the garment colour and the partner's own SKU live in a spreadsheet, a Google Drive folder or the partner's dashboard. Someone re-keys each order into the partner portal, watches a separate screen for production status, copies tracking numbers back into Business Central so the sales order can be shipped, and at month end tries to reconcile a partner invoice line-by-line against orders that were never posted as purchases. Business Central out of the box has no concept of an external production partner that is neither a manufacturing work centre nor a straightforward drop-ship vendor: item variants carry no artwork reference, there is no place to store a partner's product and variant identifiers, and there is no outbound job that speaks a POD partner's REST API.

We build a Print-on-Demand Connector as an AL extension for your tenant — a per-tenant extension for a single company, or an AppSource-format app when you run multiple environments. The artwork and mapping layer is a new setup table plus table extensions on Item, Item Variant and Sales Line, so each variant carries its partner product ID, partner variant ID, print placement, artwork file reference and mock-up URL. Artwork itself is stored where you already keep it: a media field in Business Central, a SharePoint or Azure Blob URL, or the partner's own asset ID once uploaded. A validation codeunit refuses to release an order line whose variant has no complete mapping, so bad orders fail in Business Central rather than at the partner.

Order push runs through a job queue entry that picks up released sales orders (or specific document types and locations you nominate), builds the partner's JSON payload from the mapping, and calls the partner API with HttpClient over an OAuth 2.0 or API-key connection you configure per partner. Every call is logged to a request/response table with correlation IDs, retry count and last error, so a failed push is visible and re-runnable instead of silently lost. Event subscribers on Codeunit 80 Sales-Post and the release/reopen events keep Business Central and the partner in step when an order is changed or cancelled. Inbound, a second job queue entry polls partner webhooks or status endpoints and writes production status onto the order line — accepted, in production, quality hold, fulfilled — with a status history so support can answer "where is it" without leaving the role centre. When the partner ships, we import the carrier, tracking number and shipped quantities, and post the posted sales shipment (optionally per package) with the tracking number on the shipment header.

Cost reconciliation is the part most brands ask for last and value most. Each fulfilled partner order writes back its charged base cost, print cost and shipping, which we hold against the source sales line and expose as a reconciliation page that matches a partner's settlement or invoice file to Business Central documents. Depending on your accounting model we either post the partner charge as a purchase invoice against the POD vendor, or as an item charge onto the shipment so margin per order stays honest. Everything is exposed through custom API pages (REST API v2.0 / OData v4) so Power BI, Power Automate or a Dataverse-connected app can read mappings, status and cost variance without a separate export.

Delivery is build-to-order. After a scoping call we confirm your Business Central version and deployment (SaaS online or on-premises), which POD partners you use, how your items and variants are structured, and how you want partner cost posted. You get a written scope and fixed quotation before we start. Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope: we develop against your sandbox, install and configure it there, run UAT with your team on real orders, then deploy to production with a rollback plan. There is no instant download — this is an extension we write, test and support for your environment.