Business Need

In practice, Finance Managers, Controllers, Operations Managers, and Business Central Administrators often manage user access within Business Central but do not have permissions to access or modify Microsoft Entra ID settings.

A common scenario is temporary access for:

• Contractors
• Auditors
• External consultants
• Seasonal employees
• Project team members
• Temporary finance staff

Today, functional administrators must coordinate with Entra ID administrators to revoke access after a specific date. This creates administrative overhead and introduces the risk that temporary users remain active longer than intended.

Proposed Solution

Enhance the Business Central User Card by adding an Expiration Date (or Access End Date) field.

When the specified date is reached:

• The user is automatically prevented from signing in to Business Central.
• Existing permissions remain unchanged for audit purposes.
• The user can be reactivated by extending or removing the expiration date.
• Administrators can easily identify expired users through filtering and reporting.

Optionally:

• Display notifications when a user is approaching expiration.
• Include expired-user views in the Users page.
• Allow expiration dates to be managed through APIs and configuration packages.
• Support automated notifications to administrators before access expires.

Benefits

• Improves security by ensuring temporary access is automatically revoked.
• Reduces dependency on Microsoft Entra ID administrators for Business Central-specific access management.
• Helps organizations comply with audit and governance requirements.
• Simplifies user lifecycle management for functional administrators.
• Prevents inactive or temporary accounts from remaining active unintentionally.
• Provides a familiar experience similar to user expiration features available in many enterprise applications.
• 
  

Example Scenario

A company hires a temporary finance consultant for a month-end closing project. The Finance Administrator creates the user in Business Central and sets an expiration date of August 31, 2026. After that date, the consultant can no longer access Business Central without requiring manual intervention from IT or Entra ID administrators.

Expected Outcome

Business Central administrators should be able to manage temporary application access directly from Business Central through a user expiration date, without requiring Microsoft Entra ID administrative privileges, while still maintaining Microsoft's security and governance framework.