Author: Ian Grieve

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:

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

The following table lists the new column definitions:

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.

This post is part of a series on the new functionality available in Wave 2 of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024. There are two release waves for Business Central each year, with functionality being released over the six months of the wave.

In this series of posts, I am going to take a look at what is new with Business Central in this release wave. My understanding is the announced new functionality will become available in the six months of the wave, so not all of it will be available immediately. When posting about some new functionality, I’ll try to indicate where something will be available in October or later. Microsoft do reserve the right to withdraw announced functionality before release; when this happens, I’ll try to publish an article on the removed functionality and update the original article I published.

This series index, below (assuming you’re reading this on azurecurve | Ramblings of an IT Professional), will automatically update as each post in the series goes live, so make sure you bookmark this post so you can see keep up-to-date with this series.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 2: Series Index”

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 12th of the new functionality in the Governance and administration section is Migrate record links and notes with cloud migration tooling.

Business users often attach links and notes to records in Business Central to add context and extra information. For businesses transitioning from on-premises to cloud environments, this feature ensures that these links and notes on records are included in the cloud migration without the need for the external tooling. The feature saves valuable time and reduces the risks of error with manual data transfer..

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

Feature Details

Previously, the record links and notes were not automatically migrated to the online tenant as part of the cloud migration process. Instead, you had to use manual means to move the data. Now, the cloud migration setup and replication tooling will automatically migrate the links and notes on records for you with minimal work on your part.

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 11th of the new functionality in the Copilot and AI innovation section is automate tests for your Copilot extensions with the Business Central Test Toolkit.

As the partner community brings generative AI capabilities to market and matures their offerings, partners need new engineering tools and practices to help them succeed in the AI era. Data-driven test automation is vital to ensure AI systems are accurate against diverse inputs, preserve the trust and safety of customers and their data, and are resilient to changes in AI model versions. The developer tools for Copilot in Business Central are an end-to-end toolkit covering development, deployment, administration, feedback loops, and now test automation.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Jul 2024
General Availability: Dec 2024

Feature Details

With this feature, you can:

• Author tests for your prompt dialogs using a familiar framework in AL and Visual Studio Code.
• Organize your test datasets based on purpose and prompt variations.
• Implement automated verification depending on your feature use case.
• Run tests as fully automated or semi-automated.

Initially, this feature launches as a PR on the Business Central BCApps repo on GitHub, which allows partners to review and try out the tool with their own Copilot features and provide feedback.

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 10th of the new functionality in the Copilot and AI innovation section is Simplify collections with Copilot for Finance and Business Central.

Improve your cash flow and lower the cost of collecting payments for unpaid invoices by empowering your collections team with easy access to relevant and timely data about customers with outstanding payments, without having to do expensive task-switching between applications.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Jun 2024
General Availability: Sep 2024

Feature Details

A healthy cash flow is key to business operations, and in a perfect world, all customers pay their invoices on time. When they don’t, the cost compounds in delayed payments combined with the costly effort of collecting payments. This release helps you claim payments faster by increasíng the effectiveness and productivity of your collections team to drive down the cost of collections while improving your cash flow.

Business Central supports native integration with Copilot for Finance. This integration lets you access and work with real-time financial data from Business Central directly within Copilot for Finance in Outlook. The direct access to financial data helps you make informed decisions and act quickly, without wasting time switching between Outlook and Business Central to look up key information about the customer. This integration supports your collections team with relevant and timely information to support constructive dialogs with the customers.

Copilot for Finance provides AI-powered assistance while working in Microsoft 365 applications, eliminating the need to juggle tasks, making financial processes more streamlined and automated.

Key features of the integration

• Copilot assistance with drafting dunning letter emails and other correspondence with customers who have outstanding balances. This helps your collections team draft personalized emails for every customer.
• Real-time access in Outlook to customer aging data from Business Central, contextual to the company of the current email, which is key to understanding the customer’s payment patterns.
• Access in Outlook to unpaid invoices from Business Central, contextual to the company of the current email. It’s easy to attach the invoice to the email draft, and providing the document makes the process more convenient for your customer convenience and can speed up payment.
• Access in Outlook to contact information from Business Central, related to the company of the current email.
• Set a Promised to Pay date on a posted invoice in Business Central directly from Outlook. The date adds transparency so that other stakeholders know that payment of the invoice is underway and agreed with the customer.

All of this makes your collections more efficient because people don’t have to switch between Outlook and Business Central while they’re in a dialog with customers over email.

The integration is easy to set up and use, and is designed to help you save time and improve your financial management processes. With Copilot for Finance and Business Central working together, you can free up time for your finance and collections teams.

For more information about the Copilot for Finance integration to Business Central, including regional and language availability, see the Copilot for Finance release plan here.

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 35th of the new functionality in the Application section is install Field Service Integration with Business Central from AppSource.

The Field Service Integration application published on AppSource is designed to improve the integration experience, reduce the complexity of the setup, and prepare for future scalability and flexibility. It also aims to minimize disruption for existing users while paving the way for broader adoption.

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

Feature Details

To avoid disrupting existing integrations to Sales for customers who aren’t using Field Service integration, you can now install and enable Field Service Integration as an application from AppSource. Although it introduces additional steps for setting up Field Service integration, the process is documented and the Set up integration to Dynamics 365 Sales assisted setup guide, which is currently a prerequisite part for integrating with Field Service, now contains an optional step to install the Field Service Integration application from AppSource.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1: Install Field Service Integration with Business Central from AppSource”