Month: August 2023

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The twelfth of the new functionality in the Application section is usability improves for warehouse, inventory, and tracking.

Productivity increases when processes are easy, so Microsoft have improved the usability of several areas within inventory and warehouse management. For example, you can get help to create warehouse employees, and in several places data is easier to access and digest.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

Based on feedback from their customers, Microsoft have made it easier to complete several inventory and warehouse processes.

Create warehouse employees during testing and presale

Each user who performs warehouse activities must be set up as a warehouse employee and assigned to a default location, and potentially more non-default locations. This setup filters all warehouse activities across the database to the employee’s location so that they can only perform activities at their assigned locations.

During testing or presale activities, you may run into scenarios where Business Central checks whether a warehouse employee record exists for a user. If the warehouse employee record is missing for the user, and the user has the right permissions, Business Central will suggest that you create a warehouse employee without interrupting your flow.

On the Warehouse Employees page, you can add a location for the user. Alternatively, you can choose the Add me as warehouse employee action and select one or more locations. The page is filtered for the current user, so the User ID field will be filled in automatically.

Warehouse locations

For users who don’t have permission to add warehouse employees, the behavior is unchanged. Business Central will stop the flow and notify the user that a warehouse employee record is missing. They’ll need to contact their administrator to get unblocked.

My Opinion

I can see the benefit of this when performing QA or UAT, but there are risks for production systems, unless clients are locking down permissions correctly. I’m still somewhat finding my way with Business Central, and two recent projects I’ve worked on, the clients have been setting up and assigning permission sets but when I was working with Dynamics GP, lots of clients were running systems with super user permissions (despite my regular advice not to do this).

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The eleventh of the new functionality in the Application section is troubleshoot Shopify integration issues.

When a business experiences a problem with the integration of their front end, Shopify, and their back end, Business Central, it’s important to quickly get to the bottom of the issue. Having different levels of logging reduces the time it takes to resolve a problem with your integration between Shopify and Business Central.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

The logging functionality can help you troubleshoot an issue and quickly identify its root cause. On the other hand, overly detailed logs can be difficult to decipher and might consume a lot of space in your database storage. In this release, Microsoft have introduced a new logging mode that records only errors.

The new Logging Mode field replaces the Log Enabled toggle. Now you can choose between:

• Disabled: This is the equivalent of turning off the Log Enabled toggle.
• Error Only: This is turned on by default for new shops.
• All: This is the equivalent of turning on the Log Enabled toggle.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Troubleshoot Shopify Integration Issues”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The tenth of the new functionality in the Application section is sync document and posting dates for sales and purchases.

The option to synchronize or decouple document dates and posting dates on sales and purchase documents improves financial accuracy and operational flexibility.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

To help you comply with accounting standards and ensure accurate financial calculations, sales and purchase documents have date fields that serve different purposes.

• The Document Date must align with the date on the sales invoice that you sent to the customer, or with the date on the purchase invoice that you received from your vendor, so that Business Central can correctly calculate finance charges and the amount due.
• The Posting Date shows when a document was registered in Business Central. Many accounting standards and regulations require businesses to accurately record and report financial transactions based on the date they occurred.

Depending on your business processes, these dates might not be the same. To give you the flexibility you need, the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date setting on the Sales & Receivables Setup and Purchases & Payables Setup pages lets you configure your sales and purchase processes accordingly.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Sync Document and Posting Dates for Sales and Purchases”

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Business Central allows you to add a picture or logo to each company which is used on documents when they are printed or emailed. The picture is added via the Company Information window which you can access via search or through the Settings cog button in the top right corner and selecting Company information.

The Picture field in the General fasttab is where the logo can be uploaded; an existing logo will display:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Add a Company Logo”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The ninth of the new functionality in the Application section is suggest the next step for sales and production orders.

Improve customer satisfaction by delivering on sales and production orders faster. Business Central monitors the inventory status of the items on orders for you, and suggests the next step accordingly.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

Business Central offers a reservation worksheet that can help you reserve and allocate incoming goods in bulk, so you can be sure that quantities are available for your sales and production orders.

Based on the quantities you’ve reserved in inventory, Business Central displays a status on the documents so that you’re quickly aware of the next step. For example, Business Central will indicate that you can ship a sales order or start to work on a job, assembly, or production order. The status also helps reduce the risk of accidental partial shipments or hold-ups due to missing stock for production and assembly orders.

There are three scenarios available here from Microsoft to illustrate this new features.

My Opinion

As always, the proof is in the pudding, but this sounds like it could be beneficial to clients in making processes more efficient.

This post is part of the series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

As I say in the introduction to this series, I a only really started learning Business Central in 2022, although I’d done some work with it before then. I’ve done a few posts already on personalising Business Central, to change pages, card pages, fact boxes and action bars as well as moving personalisations to another environment.

More recently, I discovered an option when working in a sandbox environment to Design as well as Personalise. I checked in live and this Design option isn’t present. After doing some investigation I found confirmation from Microsoft that Design is not and will not be available in a production database. This makes sense as you should make changes in a development sandbox first and then deploy to production only when you’re happy with the changes.

One of the differences between design and personalise is that when you personalise it is for your user account or the selected profile only, whereas changes made through design mode will effect all users in the environment. Design more works by creating an extension for Business Central, which you can then deploy by exporting from the development sandbox and importing to the production environment.

In theory, design seems like it might be a good function for rolling out changes to everyone, but the major flaw is that every time you click the Design button a new extension is created. This means that you could in a fairly short time have many extensions installed into your environment.

From an admittedly fairly short look at design mode, I think you are better sticking with personalisation for most changes to pages, fact boxes, action bars and so on and have a developer create an extension through VS rather than using design mode as this will give you much more control over the extension.

Microsoft, on the Using Designer page on Microsoft Learn, also not that extensions created using design more are removed whenever the sandbox environment is updated or relocated and should not be used to control the extensions; instead you would need to export and manage them yourself.

In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I…
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Personalize a Page
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Remove Personalization from a Page
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Personalize Card Pages
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Understand the Best Way of Customising a Card Page
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Personalize the FactBox
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Personalize the Action Bar
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Understand the Best Way of Personalizing the Action Bar
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Create Customizations for Other Users Using Profiles
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Customisation), how do I… Copy Profile Personalizations to Another Environment

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The eighth of the new functionality in the Application section is make intercompany transactions across Business Central environments.

It’s easier for businesses to handle transactions when they have multiple companies. Intercompany postings help you do accounting for multiple companies operating in multiple Business Central tenant environments, eliminating the need to manage files.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

It’s easy to set up an intercompany partnership between companies that operate in different Business Central environments. On the Intercompany Partner Setup page, when you choose an environment that you have access to, you can choose a company that you’re allowed to set up as an intercompany partner in that environment. Afterward, you’ll be able to automatically send and receive transactions for the company even though it’s in a different environment.

You can use all intercompany features across environments, including sales and purchase documents, intercompany general journals, and purchase invoice cost distributions. For example, if you’ve chosen to map accounts to an intercompany chart of accounts, or dimensions or items, transactions can flow even though the partners reside in different Business Central environments.

My Opinion

Like the earlier financial consolidations across environments new feature, I think this could be useful to clients who operate multiple instances of Business Central spread across geographical locations, but do hope there are some safeguards around sandbox/production to avoid contamination.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The seventh of the new functionality in the Application section is include approvals for intercompany general journals in your workflows.

To increase control and reduce errors in intercompany posting, you can include intercompany general journals in an approval workflow. The approval workflow gives someone, like a manager, the opportunity to review intercompany general journals before they’re posted.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

An approval workflow is available for intercompany general journals. You set up the workflow by using an assisted setup that’s similar to the user template workflows. You find the new workflow under Workflow Templates named Intercompany General Journal Line Approval. To use the workflow, you must set up users on the Approval User Setup page.

My Opinion

The approval workflows in Business Central has always struck me as being quite limite, so I welcome any enhancements.