Day: August 1, 2024

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2.

The 2nd of the new functionality in the Application section is manage subscription billing and revenue and expense recognition.

Businesses are finding ways to create recurring revenue streams by selling goods and services on a subscription basis. This release lets you manage subscription contracts in Business Central. The new subscription module lets you spend more time selling and less time organizing and invoicing contracts.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Sep 2024
General Availability: Oct 2024

Feature Details

Companies across sectors have increased their adoption of digitalization and are revamping their products and services to accommodate subscription-based business models.

You can now support many different types of subscription scenarios in Business Central. There’s a simple set of processes that let you manage portfolios of the items and services that you bill on a recurring schedule. For example, hardware maintenance, IT support, cleaning services, and so on. You combine the sale of services and items in mixed subscription contracts that hold information about the items, services, and billing schedule.

Templates simplify the process of creating subscription contracts by standardizing the parameters and schedules for recurring billing. You can manage current pricing and plan for future price updates. On the accounting side, posting accruals to balance sheet accounts is automated, and revenue or expense are assigned to the correct periods in the income statement.

The new module comes with:

• Contracts for which you do recurring billing for items and services.
• Billing schedules with flexible parameters that cater to typical use cases for recurring billing.
• Usage-based billing.
• Automated billing.
• Deferral integration.
• Revenue recognition based on billing schedules.
• Contract updates (parameters and prices).
• Standard reports for contracts, customers, billing schedules, recognized revenue, future billing dates and amounts, and so on. Most reports are available as Power BI reports.

My Opinion

It’s interesting to see this module introduced; I can see how more Business Central users would be interested in this module. I’ll need to take a look and see how things work.

I do wonder what impact this will have on the ISVs out there with extensions for Business Central in this area? Is the new Microsoft module comprehensive or do the third party extensions offer more functionality?

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2.

The 1st of the new functionality in the Application section is use new reports and demo data for financial reporting.

New reports are provided as demo data for Business Central. The reports can serve as ready to use reports, or as template you can use to create your own financial reports. In addition, you can generate more demo data to get a better idea of what data the reports display.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2024

Feature Details

The list of standard reports for financial reporting is expanded to include five new reports. In addition, a set of five new row definitions and 12 column definitions are provided. You can combine them to create more than 25 new reports.

The following table lists the new reports:

Name	Description
TB	Trial Balance
BS DET	Balance Sheet Detailed
BS SUM	Balance sheet Summary
IS DET	Income Statement Detailed
IS SUM	Income Statement Summary

The new row definitions have the same names and descriptions as the reports.

The following table lists the new column definitions:

Name	Description
BBDRCREB	TB Beginning Balance Debits Credits Ending Balance
BSTREND	BS 12 Months Balance Trending Current Fiscal Year
CB	BS Current Month Balance
CB V PB	BS Current Month Balance v Prior Month Balance
CB V SPYB	BS Current Month Balance v Same Month Prior Year Balance
CNC	IS Current Month Net Change
CNC BUD	IS 12 Months Net Change Budget Only
CNC V PNC	IS Current Month Net Change v Prior Month Net Change
CNC VSPYNC	IS Current Month Net Change v Same Month Prior Year Net Change
CNCVPNCYOY	IS Current Month v Prior Month for CY and Current Month v Prior Month for PY
CVC YTDBUD	IS Current Month v Budget Year to Date v Budget and Bud Total and Bud Remaining
ISTREND	IS 12 Months Net Change Trending Current Fiscal Year

Financial reporting demo data

Financial reporting is at the core of every business, and when evaluating business management applications it’s often desirable to view the reporting capabilities as they would look like for a running company. The new demo data can be generated by running the Contoso Financial demo data from the Contoso Demo Data tool page. The data will contain three years of G/L entries, broken down to dimensions with a Budget for the current year for variance analysis reporting.

My Opinion

This sounds like it could be a good enhancement with additional reports available for demo purposes, although it will require work for anyone outside of the US to configure the row definitions with the chart of accounts.