Day: February 15, 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 17th of the new functionality in the Application section is use currencies when posting employee transactions.

You can use general journals for employee accounts to register employee expenses and reimbursement transactions in foreign currencies, and then easily track the amounts and compare them to receipts. Leave your calculator in your desk drawer—Business Central can adjust the exchange rate for you.

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

Feature Details

When you use general journals to post transactions for employee accounts, such as when you reimburse expenses, you can use the Currency Code field to specify the currency for the transactions. Specifying a currency lets you use the same features as when you register transactions in the customer and vendor ledgers. For example, employees can register an expense in euros but get paid in dollars.

To ensure that the exchange rate for the amounts is up to date, you can adjust employee balances when you run the currency exchange rate batch job. If you want to use the exchange rate table, but settle employee balances in your local currency, you can exclude employee accounts when you adjust exchange rates.

My Opinion

Again this is one of the enhancements which strikes me as unusual that it isn’t already available, as it isn’t unusual for me to deal with clients who have people in several countries. Perhaps this is more of a European thing, but at least the functionality is coming.

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 16th of the new functionality in the Application section is Use standard terminology for project management.

Microsoft are making it easier to work with project accounting by updating the terminology Microsoft use for its features in the product and documentation. Specifically, Microsoft are renaming things that were called “jobs” to “projects.” The goal is to improve the user experience, the clarity of the documentation, and the consistency of the terminology across the application.

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

Feature Details

For a long time now, Microsoft have referred to project accounting features as “jobs,” which has caused confusion in their community because that’s not the term that people who work with project accounting expect. Microsoft are happy to announce that they’re addressing this legacy problem. To clarify the true nature and purpose of the project accounting features for various types of businesses, Microsoft are replacing the term “job” with “project” in the user interface and documentation.

For example, entities such as job tasks, job journals, and job planning lines are now project tasks, project journals, and project planning lines. The renaming won’t break existing integrations and customizations because Microsoft are only updating the captions in the user interface and the terms in their documentation. Microsoft aren’t touching the names of the underlying table and field objects.

My Opinion

It might be a small change, but I do like that jobs are being renamed to project, as this is a term much more widely used by clients. Microsoft do note that the change is only a surface change and the underlying objects will retain their name of Jobs so as to not break existing integrations or reports.

This is a good idea in general, but I do worry that future additions end up being called projects rather than jobs, thereby complicating the naming convention behind the scenes.