Month: August 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 4th of the new functionality in the Application section is archive service management documents.

Service documents often change and evolve during their lifecycle. The archiving capability gives you control over your service data through audit trails and version control.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: –
General Availability: Oct 2024

Feature Details

Archiving capabilities for service management are similar to the functionality you might already be familiar with from the sales and purchase areas. You can set up documents to archive automatically, so that you don’t need to think about it. With automatic archiving, Business Central creates a new version of the archived document when people do the following:

1. Change the status of a document or delete it.
2. Print, download, or send a document by email.
3. Post service order.
4. Convert a service quote to an order or service contract quote to contract.

You’re in full control of archiving. The following list shows the documents and options you can choose when you set up automatic archiving on the Service Management Setup page:

• Archive service quotes: Never (default), Questions, Always.
• Archive service contract quotes: Never (default), Question, Always
• Archive orders: Yes/No

You can also use the Archive action to manually archive versions of service documents, such as service quotes, contract quotes, and orders.

To keep the size of your database under control, archived service documents are added to a list of Retention policy tables.

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 3rd of the new functionality in the Application section is integrate Field Service with Service Management.

This integration is particularly valuable for organizations that provide regular maintenance and proactive repair. It offers a seamlessly integrated solution for managing service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions to benefit service technicians, service managers, and finance teams. It’s a powerful solution for managing work orders and consumption in Field Service and efficiently invoicing and fulfilling them in Business Central.

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

Feature Details

To enable integration with Service Management module, you can turn on the Service Management Integration toggle in Set up integration to Dynamics 365 Field Service assisted setup guide, or on the Dynamics 365 Field Service Integration Setup page. This setting adds additional integration table mappings for service documents and work orders.

To specify where to integrate work order data from Field Service in service orders, you can choose a Work Order Type that’s mapped to a Service Order Type. You can also use the External Project field to link it to a project in Business Central.

To exchange the following data between work orders and service orders in both directions, turn on the Service Order Archiving toggle on the Service Management Setup page:

• Fields in the headers on service orders and work orders, such as Service Account, Billing Account, and Work Order Type.
• Service Item Lines and Work Order Incidents in Field Service to transfer information about the customer assets being repaired.
• Service Line fields and Work Order Products and Work Order Services fields, such as Qty. to Ship, Qty. to Invoice, and Qty. to Consume.

When a technician marks a work order product or service as Used on a work order with a specific work order type, the lines synchronize to a service order. Consumption is also posted, based on settings on the Dynamics 365 Field Service Integration Setup page.

During consumption and invoice posting in Business Central, the consumed and invoiced quantities are updated in the original work order product and work order service lines in Field Service.

You can send a Posted Service Invoice back to Field Service.

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.