What is Dynamics 365 RSAT?

April 10, 2025·Jason Axelrod·Updated April 8, 2026

Your customers and employees rely on the Microsoft solutions that make up your most critical business processes, which means they need to work. Ensuring the quality of these systems including Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O), is no easy feat. These are interconnected software ecosystems, where even the smallest defect can disrupt the flow of business and have severe, compounding consequences. This is where Dynamics 365 RSAT comes in.

In this article, we will explore what Dynamics 365 RSAT is and the benefits and limitations it brings in helping organizations maintain the quality of their D365 F&O application.

Why do you need to test Dynamics 365 F&O?

Testing Dynamics 365 F&O is essential to ensure the quality and continuity of ERP (enterprise resource planning) and finance processes and capabilities, as well as preventing critical incidents that could negatively impact user experience.

To ensure this quality, testing should be done on several levels, spanning from functional validation of features within modules, to testing across integrations to validate processes across applications.

And it’s not only new functionality that needs to be tested, but also existing functionality when something new is introduced. This is what we know as regression testing in Dynamics.

Regression testing of key business processes is perhaps the most important aspect of securing quality, yet is often compromised because it requires significant investment in resources.

And, this has become especially pressing since Microsoft’s One Version update process, which involves fewer but more impactful updates, meaning that businesses need to rethink and adjust their release and testing strategies to match.

Ensuring your business has the latest Microsoft innovations and critical security patches is vital for a successful application ecosystem as it provides users with more features, automation and AI capabilities. However, ensuring everything is running smoothly can be a resource-intensive task.

The challenges of testing Dynamics 365

Testing D365 F&O is a complex affair for a few reasons:

The application is nearly always highly customized and often integrated with other applications. In addition, D365 applications undergo frequent updates, including the aforementioned Microsoft One Version.

These factors impact the requirements for testing.

You need to allocate significant resources to planning, documenting, executing, maintaining, and reporting on testing activities. As a solution to this, automation can be introduced to reduce the Dynamics 365 manual testing effort and overall test cycle time.

What is RSAT and what are its capabilities?

The Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT) was introduced by Microsoft as a testing solution for its D365 F&O customers to assure the quality of processes that run within the application.

It was built to help organizations be in a ready state to accept new updates from Microsoft. This is a part of Microsoft’s greater mission to help organizations streamline operations and enhance productivity within the Dynamics 365 F&O module.

It achieves this objective by enabling Microsoft F&O customers to orchestrate the validation of processes and report on these to give insight into their performance.

In other words, it checks that the processes running within F&O run as intended.

From a technical perspective, the way it works is that you create or automate your processes with F&O. This could, for example, be an order-to-cash or procure-to-pay process, and F&O saves that as a recording file. This recording file is then copied into RSAT where you can parameterize and orchestrate the execution to validate the recorded process.

It’s important to note, however, that Microsoft suggests other solutions than RSAT for their customers looking to regression test across unique configurations and extensions.

What are the benefits and limitations of RSAT?

Using RSAT to test your regression cases comes with pros and cons.

The benefits of RSAT for D365 F&O include:

• Faster testing cycles: Through automation, manual testing efforts can be reduced. Dynamics regression testing can be very time-consuming and is a prime candidate for automation that can save QA teams valuable time. RSAT was built with this benefit in mind.
• Quality enhancements: By reducing manual testing and increasing automation, more testing can be covered. This will result in greater confidence in business processes. By minimizing repetitive manual regression testing, human error, which is inherent to manual testing, is reduced.

RSAT also has its limitations:

• Usability: RSAT can be a challenge to set up, configure, and maintain. It requires cross-functional technical expertise, in addition to knowing the ins and outs of the business requirements for D365 F&O, you also need to have a strong foundational knowledge of testing frameworks and code – a rare talent combination that’s hard to find.
• Difficult to scale: When changes to D365 occur, whether due to new releases or system updates, RSAT test cases need to be maintained. This means re-recording every single test that breaks. And because RSAT requires technical know-how, only a special subset of people will be able to do this. This creates bottlenecks in many QA teams and makes it difficult to reach the full potential of automation.
• Limited scope: RSAT works only with D365 F&O. It cannot be used with other applications in D365 or beyond. For businesses with processes spanning across multiple applications and technologies, this puts a cap on scalability and limits end-to-end testing.

From a business perspective, the negative impact of these limitations include high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and high Total Time to Market (TTM), and as a result, a reduced Return on Investment (ROI).

When you’re evaluating the long-term costs and benefits as well as the financial viability of your investment, it is important to consider these metrics when you make the case for automation in your organization.

By approaching automation differently, through a composable, reusable, end-to-end test automation solution like Leapwork, you won’t experience the above limitations.

Using Leapwork to test Dynamics 365

Leapwork is a strategic Microsoft partner, and the Leapwork Test Automation Platform is recommended for regression testing by Microsoft CTO of Dynamics 365, Mike Ehrenberg:

“Leapwork’s no-code experience for test creation empowers a broader percentage of our customers to effectively implement automated testing. Enhancing the quality of their Microsoft Dynamics 365 service experience and lowering the total cost of ownership through Leapwork is a win-win opportunity.”

Leapwork helps software testing teams to ensure quality across their Microsoft applications ensuring that customer experiences are great, operations are uninterrupted, and business continues to flow. This includes Dynamics 365.

How is RSAT restricted in scope compared to Leapwork?

While RSAT offers basic testing capabilities for Dynamics 365, its functionality is limited when compared to a more comprehensive solution like Leapwork.

RSAT’s limitations become clear in several key areas:

• RSAT cannot support end-to-end testing
• The tool cannot support complex, data-driven testing scenarios
• RSAT is very technical, eliminating business users from using it
• The tool is difficult to maintain and scale

In contrast, Leapwork is purpose-built to simplify and automate regression testing for Dynamics 365, offering a more robust, scalable, and user-friendly approach.

Why is Leapwork ideal for Dynamics 365 regression testing?

1. Ease of use

Leapwork is a completely composable tool that allows users to build complex test flows visually without using code. This, of course, means that any user can work with testing, eliminating barriers to entry as no code is required to build or understand test automation.

2. Low maintenance

Maintenance is a burden that is easy to forget up front, but it shows its face as teams try to scale automation. What sets Leapwork apart from other solutions is how little maintenance it requires. You can run your entire regression suite automatically after every build, and can easily scale and maintain with reusable test flows.

3. Cross-technology capabilities

The biggest limitation of RSAT is that it is built only for Dynamics 365 F&O, and won’t allow you to test across other applications or technologies. Core business processes often involve multiple applications, and in order to test those processes, the tool must work cross-platform.

4. Test faster

Leapwork dramatically shortens the test execution cycle, allowing teams to go from days or hours of manual regression testing to minutes with automated, AI-powered test flows that are capable enough for the most complex data driven use cases.

5. Govern at scale

Enterprise-grade governance is built into Leapwork’s DNA. With full support for audit trails, change tracking, and video-based reporting, Leapwork ensures transparency across your test lifecycle.

6. Seamlessly integrate

Leapwork fits naturally into existing development and release pipelines. With native integrations into Azure DevOps, including test plans and CI/CD pipelines, it enables teams to automate regression testing as part of their broader DevOps practices.

7. Validate AI

Leapwork allows companies to extend regression testing to validate AI-generated suggestions and automated processes, verifying whether the AI behavior is consistent, accurate, and aligned with business goals.