Custom report layouts for Business Central documents

Reporting · 7 min read

In Business Central, "report" also means the documents customers actually see: sales invoices and order confirmations sent out as PDF files, statements, reminders. The built-in layouts for those documents are competent and generic — wrong logo placement, fields nobody asked for, none of the wording a store's customers expect. The fix is a custom layout. The trap is that Business Central offers several layers of "which layout wins," an older custom-layout feature that Microsoft is phasing out, and an export-edit-import loop that silently does nothing if the last step is skipped. This guide connects the whole decision.

The layout stack: built-in, custom, and who decides

By default, every report has a built-in layout. That layout can be an RDLC layout, a Microsoft Word layout, or both — and built-in layouts cannot be modified. What can be created is a custom layout: a report can carry multiple custom layouts, typically starting as a copy of the built-in one.

Three different settings then decide which layout a given document uses:

• The company default, set per report on the Report Layout Selection page.
• The specific custom layout chosen when the default says "Custom."
• The per-customer or per-vendor override, set on the customer or vendor card for specific document types.

One warning before following older walkthroughs: Microsoft now describes the legacy custom report layouts feature as obsolete and being phased out, in favour of custom (user-defined) layouts. Blog posts that teach the old flow rarely mention this. The steps below follow the documented current pages; where the legacy feature still surfaces, it is called out.

Word or RDLC, built-in or custom: the decision

For retail document paperwork, the custom Word layout is the working default: it is the one editable without developer tooling, and it is the only type that works for email content — Microsoft is explicit that a layout used for email must be Word, and the RDLC file type cannot be used for email.

Build a custom Word layout for a sales document

1. Open Report Layout Selection and set the Company Name field at the top — the page lists the reports available in that company.
2. Select the report for the document — the sales invoice report, for example — and choose the Custom Layouts action. The Custom Report Layouts page lists every custom layout that exists for that report.
3. Choose New to base a layout on the built-in one. On the Insert Built-in Layout for a Report page, turn on the Insert Word Layout toggle (the Insert RDLC Layout toggle is the alternative), then choose OK. The new layout appears with Copy of a Built-in Layout in its Description. If the report has no built-in layout of that type, the Description instead reads New Layout — that layout is blank and is designed from scratch.
4. Alternatively, copy an existing custom layout with the Copy action; the copy shows Copy of in its Description. Useful when one store's variant becomes the starting point for another's.
5. Export the layout. Select it and choose Export Layout, then save the file. For a Word layout, the export is a Word document.
6. Edit in Word. Move the logo, adjust wording, rearrange fields — editing happens in the exported document, not in Business Central.
7. Import it back. Return to the Custom Report Layouts page, select the same layout, choose Import Layout, and pick the edited file. This step is not optional bookkeeping: if the modified layout is not imported, the new layout is not available.
8. Mind the company scope. A custom layout's Company Name is blank by default, which makes it available to all companies. Set it to scope the layout to one company only.

What success looks like: run the document — preview, print, or send the invoice — and the output carries the edited layout: new logo position, new wording, no leftover placeholder text. If the output looks identical to the built-in, the layout was either never imported or never assigned, which is the next section.

A blank starting point is also possible from the Report Layouts page: New opens an Add New Layout for a Report dialog (report ID, layout name, format Word, and a "create a blank layout from the report object" option), and Update and Export Layout downloads the .docx. In a Word layout, repeating document lines are rendered by a repeater — a control that renders a collection of records as repeating rows, one row per record and one column per field. Blank layouts are real layout work; the copy-and-edit route above is the right starting point for a branding fix.

Assign the layout: company default vs per-customer

Company default. On Report Layout Selection, the Layout Description field shows which layout each report currently uses. Set the Selected Layout field on the report's row to RDLC (built-in), Word (built-in), or Custom. A built-in choice needs no further action and is used the next time the report runs. For Custom, pick which custom layout applies through the lookup in the Custom Layout Description field; the chosen layout is then used the next time the document is previewed, printed, or sent. Because the page is company-scoped, the same report can legitimately use different layouts in different companies.

Per-customer and per-vendor overrides. After layouts are defined, they can be selected on the customer card and vendor card, and are then used when documents are created for that customer or vendor:

1. Open the Customer Card (or Vendor Card — the steps are the same) and choose the Document Layouts action.
2. Choose Copy from Report Selection to load the available documents onto the page.
3. On the line for the document type — the Usage field defines the process, with customer examples such as Reminder, Shipment, and Confirmation — set the layout for that document.
4. For emailed documents, set the Email Body Layout and Email Attachment Layout fields; the two can deliberately be different layouts.
5. Use Select Email from Contacts to route the document to the right people: statements to the customer's accountant contacts, sales orders to their purchasers, purchase orders to vendor salespeople. Multiple addresses are separated by a semicolon, with no spaces.

The three ways this goes wrong

• Choosing a built-in type the report does not have. Selecting RDLC (built-in) or Word (built-in) for a report with no layout of that type raises an error message. The documented remedies are to choose another layout option or create a custom layout of the wanted type — not to retry the same selection.
• Editing the export and never importing it. The Word document on a local drive is a working copy, nothing more. Until Import Layout brings it back, the business sees zero change, and the edited file is one lost laptop away from being the only copy.
• Wrong company scope. A layout created under the wrong Company Name — or left blank and therefore available to every company when it was meant for one — produces the baffling "it works in the test company" outcome. Check the scope before checking the layout.

A fourth, quieter trap: reaching for a legacy custom layout in per-customer assignment. On the Document Layouts page it is set in the Custom Layout Description field — which is hidden by default and has to be added by personalising the page. That hidden field is a signpost that the legacy path is the exception, not the route.

FAQ

Can the built-in layout be edited directly?
No. Built-in layouts cannot be modified. Create a custom layout — usually a copy of the built-in — and edit that instead.

Can one report have several custom layouts?
Yes. A report can have multiple custom layouts, which is what makes per-company and per-customer variation possible.

Word or RDLC for an email body layout?
Word, necessarily. Layouts used to add content to email messages must be Word file type; RDLC cannot be used for email.