Category: Business Central (Nav/Navision)

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 7th of the new functionality in the Application section is replenish items for projects.

Business Central makes it fast and easy to ensure that you have the items you need to kick off a new project or keep one running smoothly. On the Project Card page, you can create purchase orders for the items by choosing the Create Purchase Order action. Afterward, you can review and edit the orders before you send them to your vendors.

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

Feature Details

The process of creating purchase orders from projects is similar to the functionality you might already be familiar with from the sales area. The process lets you create purchase orders right from a project. It shares the same algorithm as Order Planning worksheet, which means it doesn’t require elaborated setup to produce recommendations, but it’s intelligent enough to analyze demand and supply for required items.

To create one or more purchase orders from a project

To create a purchase order for the quantity of each item the project is missing, use the Create Purchase Orders action.

1. Choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Projects, and then choose the related link.
2. Open a project that you want to purchase items for.
3. Choose the Create Purchase Orders action.
4. The Create Purchase Orders page opens and shows a line for each item on the project. Lines for both fully available quantities and unavailable quantities show by default. Unavailable quantities aren’t available. To show only unavailable quantities, choose the Show Unavailable action.
5. The Quantity to Purchase field contains the unavailable quantity. To purchase a different quantity, edit the value in the field. You can also turn on the Reserve toggle if you want to reserve the quantity on the purchase line against demand.

6. Choose OK.

This process creates a purchase order for each vendor from which you purchase the items on the project, including any quantity changes that you made on the Create Purchase Orders page. You can continue to process the purchase order or orders, for example, by editing or adding purchase order lines.

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 6th of the new functionality in the Application section is export posted sales invoices to Shopify.

Buyers can sign in to Shopify and access all their invoices, regardless of whether the invoices were created in Shopify or in Business Central.

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

Feature Details

You can export posted sales invoices to Shopify as orders by using a new report (batch job). The report is available on the Shopify Shop Card page, or you can use Tell Me search to find it. You can also run the report by using the job queue.

To enable the capability for specific shop, go to the Shopify Shop Card page and turn on the ** Posted Invoice Sync** toggle.

The sync includes invoices under the following conditions:

• The Shopify Order ID field contains 0.
• The bill-to customer has a mapping in the Shopify Customers or Shopify Companies tables.
• The bill-to customer isn’t used as the Default Customer on the Shopify Shop Card or Shopify Customer Template.
• The posted invoice has at least one non-comment line where the No. field has a value.

When you run the report, the following happens in Business Central and Shopify.

Business Central

Update the Shopify Order ID field based on results of sync:

• Successful export – update Shopify Order Id field with ID of order in Shopify.
• Export failed – set “-1”
• Invoice is excluded from sync for a reason listed in the conditions mentioned earlier – set “-2”

The same pattern is used in the Posted Sales Shipment, where the Update Document page lets you replace “-1” and “-2” or “0” to retry the export.

Shopify

The connector uses GraphQL to first create a draft order with header and item lines, and then complete the draft order and convert it to an order.

Headers and lines

The following fields are exported on the order header:

• The mapped bill-to customer/company is used.
• The Fulfilment Status field shows Fulfilled. Tracking Details don’t synchronize.
• The Paid Status field shows Paid or Partially Paid, based on the customer ledger entry linked to the sales invoice. For partially paid, it shows the Remaining Amount field.

The following fields are exported on the order lines:

• Items (item variants) that are mapped export as products.
• Items that aren’t mapped and lines of other types, such as G/L Account or Item Charge lines, export as custom products in Shopify.
• Shipping charges in Shopify aren’t created. The shipping cost is registered as a custom product in Shopify.
• The new setting on the Shopify Shop Card page lets you avoid exporting invoices with non-mapped items. Turn on the Items must be mapped to Products toggle to exclude posted invoices from sync if there’s at least one line of type Item where the selected item isn’t mapped to a product or variant in Shopify.
• Tax amounts. Because the Graph API doesn’t currently support the TaxLine object, the calculated tax is added as a custom product. Tax information from Business Central won’t be available in the tax report in Shopify Admin. To avoid Shopify recalculating taxes, orders are marked as Tax Exempt.
• Quantity, in whole numbers. Shopify doesn’t support fractions.

Impact on the process of synchronizing orders

Synchronization imports the order and checks whether it was exported earlier. If it was exported earlier:

• It marks the order as processed.
• It adds a link to the posted sales invoice (related documents, should happen automatically because the Shopify Order ID is already populated). Shopify might automatically archive Fully Paid and Fulfilled orders, and the synchronization won’t process them.

Deal with updates

In Shopify, because the order is already fulfilled, the only meaningful changes are Notes, Payment Status, and payment transactions. If payments are processed in Shopify, refunds and returns are as well.

In Business Central, changes aren’t tracked. Currently, if you want to mark order as paid, use the Mark as Paid action on the Shopify Order Card page.

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 5th of the new functionality in the Application section is view item availability in Field Service work orders.

When integrated with Business Central, technicians and dispatchers can get insight into item availability for a specific warehouse or technician’s truck on a work order in Field Service. Having this information readily available helps businesses optimize work order scheduling, avoid unnecessary (travel) costs, and at the same time, optimize their service and purchasing operations.

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

Feature Details

You can integrate, configure, and customize Field Service warehouses with Business Central’s locations. The integration can give you information about the availability of a product or item at a specific location. To manage the synchronization of data, Microsoft have added a unidirectional (from Business Central) integration table mapping between Business Central locations and warehouses in Field Service. To use the new integration table mapping, in Business Central you must turn on the Location Mandatory toggle on the Inventory Setup page.

Business Central synchronizes locations with the following settings on the Location Card page:

• The Use as In-Transit toggle is turned off.
• Project Consump. Whse. Handling is different from Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
• Assm. Consump. Whse. Handling is different from Warehouse Pick (mandatory)

On the Locations and Location Card pages, you can use the Dynamics 365 Field Service action to open a coupled location in Field Service, synchronize it, set up and delete couplings, and view synchronization logs.

You can use Open in Business Central in Field Service to open a location in Business Central that’s coupled to a warehouse in Field Service.

You can now view the allocated product quantity from work orders in Field Service as part of the gross requirements in Business Central’s inventory availability calculation. Demand generated by orders in Field Service automatically become an input for planning.

On the Field Service side, on a work order, technicians can check how much of particular product is available at a warehouse they specify.

My Opinion

This sounds like one of those things which I’d probably have expected to be already present, so it is good to see that it is being made available.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), 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.

Master Data Management (MDM) is new functionality, introduced in Release 2023 Wave 1, which allows data to be synchronised from one company in an environment to another in the same environment.

It works on a pull basis where a job queue in the “destination” company pulls changes from the connected company.

With MDM you can choose any setup or master table, which fields from those tables should be synchronised and if any filters should be applied to the data (for example, you might want to exclude the values of a specific dimension).

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 User experiences section is access keys with Key Tips in more languages.

Organizations are looking to streamline their operations through AI, automation, and empowering workers with productivity tools. When time to enter data is critical, every keystroke and mouse click counts. Business Central adopts the familiar experience from Microsoft 365 applications, such as Excel and Word, to boost efficiency for keyboard users. Access keys with key tips help users quickly explore, navigate, and activate any action in the action bar, navigation menus, and other user interface (UI) elements.

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

Feature Details

You can use access keys with key tips, regardless of your language setting in My Settings. Key tips are optimized for the following languages:

• English
• Danish
• Dutch
• Italian
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Swedish
• Finnish
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Czech
• Icelandic

If you’re using the Business Central Web client, when you press the Alt key, the following becomes available:

• Key tips are revealed alongside UI elements to indicate the next keystroke.
• Sequences of keystrokes can be used to navigate the user interface and activate UI elements, without leaving your current focused element.
• Access keys are available for actions in the action bar and links in the navigation menu, regardless of whether they are assigned a specific shortcut key.

My Opinion

This is one of those seemingly small enhancements which I think will be very useful.

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.

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”