IT reports that Business Central adoption is going well, citing daily active user counts that look healthy across the board. Three months later, finance discovers that a third of the sales team has quietly been keeping a parallel spreadsheet for quote tracking, logging into Business Central mainly to satisfy the login metric IT is watching, without actually using the module the way it was designed. Login counts were technically accurate the entire time. They just measured the wrong thing.
This is a specific, recurring gap in how IT teams monitor Business Central adoption after go-live: tracking whether people are signing in, rather than whether they're actually doing the work inside the system the way it was intended.
Why Login Counts Are the Wrong Metric
A login confirms someone opened Business Central. It says nothing about whether they created a sales order correctly, whether they used the intended workflow instead of a manual workaround, or whether they closed the application within thirty seconds because the screen they needed was too slow or confusing to use. Measuring adoption by login volume treats every session as equally meaningful, when the actual question worth answering is much narrower: are the specific workflows this system was implemented to support actually being used correctly, consistently, by the people who are supposed to be using them.
What's Actually Worth Tracking
Feature-Level Usage, Not Session Counts
The more useful question is whether specific transaction types — sales orders, purchase invoices, approval requests — are being created through Business Central at the volume the business's actual activity would predict. If sales volume implies roughly forty new orders a week should be entered, and the system shows meaningfully fewer, that gap is a much stronger adoption signal than any login count, because it points directly at a workaround happening somewhere outside the system.
Telemetry Data Most Companies Never Turn On
Business Central's own telemetry, sent to Azure Application Insights once connected, captures genuinely useful operational signals — long-running queries, page load performance, and usage patterns — that go well beyond simple login tracking, covered in more depth in a related article on this site about performance troubleshooting specifically. The same telemetry connection that helps diagnose performance issues also gives IT a much richer picture of actual usage patterns than anything visible from login logs alone.
Workflow Completion Rates, Not Just Workflow Existence
For companies running approval workflows — covered in more depth elsewhere on this site — a genuinely useful adoption signal is tracking how many approval requests sit unresolved past their expected timeframe, using the built-in overdue notification functionality. A workflow that technically exists but consistently has requests stalling for days is a workflow that isn't actually being used the way it was designed, even though it's technically "adopted" in the sense that it's configured and running.
Support Ticket Patterns as an Indirect Signal
A steady stream of "how do I" questions about a specific screen or process, weeks or months after go-live, is a strong indirect adoption signal — it usually means training didn't fully land for that specific workflow, and people are either asking colleagues informally or avoiding the feature entirely rather than raising a ticket every time. Tracking which specific areas generate recurring questions, rather than just overall ticket volume, points directly at where adoption is genuinely weak.
Why This Requires More Deliberate Setup Than Login Reports
None of these more useful metrics come pre-built as a simple dashboard — they require connecting Application Insights if it isn't already, and deliberately deciding which specific transaction volumes and workflow completion patterns actually matter for your business, rather than accepting whatever generic usage report happens to be easiest to pull. This is real, upfront work, but it's the difference between an adoption report that reassures IT and one that actually reflects whether the implementation is delivering the value it was built for.
Where to Start
If your current adoption reporting is built around login counts or session frequency, it's worth replacing that with a small set of specific transaction-volume checks tied to your actual business activity, plus a review of overdue approval workflow requests if you're running any. Both are more work to set up than pulling a login report, and both actually tell you something true about whether the system is being used the way it was implemented to be used.