Day: February 14, 2024

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 15th of the new functionality in the Application section is use new Excel layouts for 35 selected reports.

Running reports to analyze and present business information is a frequent task in any business. Now you can use the Excel report layouts to interactively generate analyses and present learnings

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2024
General Availability: Apr 2024

Feature Details

Microsoft have added 35 Excel reports with new report layouts for finance, sales (customers), and purchases (vendors). To give you more options in creating your own Excel layouts for the report, you also get data from the report request pages and data for translations of a layout. If the data in the reports comes from multiple tables, the report layouts show the data in multiple worksheets, which makes it easy to understand where the data originated.

The reports are flexible, and you can use them in the way that best fits your needs:

• Use the reports as-is to get insight about your business.
• Use pivot tables to slice and dice data for analysis.
• Use them as a template to create your own Excel layouts for the same data.

Over the course of 2024 release wave 1 Microsoft expect to add more layouts to cover areas like Fixed Assets, Inventory Jobs (Projects), and Service Management. You’ll find examples, typical use cases, and a description of the data for each report in their documentation.

My Opinion

Since starting to work with Business Central, I have to admit that I’ve not been very impressed with the quality, or in fact the number, of reports available in the system. This feature may improve things a little, but the reporting standard in Business Central remains quite poor.

I understand more now why third-party products like Jet Reports are popular with Business Central.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 14th of the new functionality in the Application section is invoice a customer for multiple projects.

Simplify your invoicing process by sending one invoice for multiple projects, which reduces manual effort and improves accuracy.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Mar 2024
General Availability: Apr 2024

Feature Details

Add project planning lines from multiple projects to a sales invoice in one go. This process is similar to creating a sales invoice from a project planning line and entering a value in the Append to Sales Invoice No. field.

Here’s an overview of the process.

1. Create a new sales invoice, and fill in the Sell-to Customer No. field. If needed, also fill in the Bill-to Customer No. and Currency Code fields.
2. On the Lines FastTab, choose the Get Project Planning Lines action. The Get Project Planning Lines page shows billable project planning lines from projects for the sell-to customer, bill-to customer, and invoicing currency where the quantity to invoice is more than zero.
3. Choose the lines you want to add to the invoice, and then choose OK.

You can repeat these steps to add another set of project planning lines. You can also delete the invoice or its lines and start over.

There are these noteworthy limitations:

• The Get Project Planning Lines action isn’t available on sales orders or sales quotes.
• You can’t filter on the Ship-to Code or Contact No. fields.

My Opinion

This sounds like it could be a decent time saver, allowing for the production of consolidated invoices for a project.

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Sales), 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.

A while ago I was preparing for training a client on the purchasing module in Business Central and was identifying the key reports to show them and realised that there was a rather key one missing: the Goods Shipped but Not Invoiced report.

I’ve done some exploring of the system and it really does seem that there is no shipped but not invoiced report available in the system. However, there is a list page which can be used to easily get this information, and which can be exported to Excel.

That list is the Item Ledger Entries list:

By applying filters of Completely Invoiced = No, Entry Type = Sales and Document Type = Sales Shipment, you can get a view of the posted shipments in the system which have not been fully invoiced.

While there is no report as standard, you can create a report using the data from the Item Ledger Entry page in a report; the data is in the Item Ledger Entry (32) table.