What new features are coming to Business Central?

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to revolutionize business management for small and mid-sized enterprises by offering a comprehensive suite of tools to streamline business operations. With its adaptability and robust capabilities, Business Central empowers organizations to efficiently manage finances, supply chains, projects, and more. Through seamless integration with Power Platform and innovative AI features like Copilot, Microsoft is set to introduce exciting enhancements in the upcoming release, enhancing usability, compliance, and productivity.

In the forthcoming release, Microsoft is doubling down on its investment in Copilot, aiming to empower users with more capabilities to optimize business processes efficiently. Developers will benefit from enhanced productivity tools within Visual Studio Code, while organizations can streamline regulatory compliance tasks, allowing them to focus on core business activities.

This article explores the new features and enhancements for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, scheduled for public preview in March 2024.

Key Updates

Adapt Faster with Power Platform

Microsoft continuously invests in a seamless experience for customers who use Business Central together with Power Apps, Power Automate or Power BI.

✔︎ Manage work orders in Field Service, invoice them in Business Central: This integration is particularly valuable for organizations that provide professional services. It offers a seamless and integrated solution for managing service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions, which benefits 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. This integration adds value to organizations by streamlining service operations, improving financial management, and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

✔︎ Use virtual tables to expose more Business Central data in Dataverse: Use virtual tables when you synchronize data between Business Central, Dataverse, and other Dynamics 365 apps to enhance the value of your Dynamics 365 investment. Virtual tables erase boundaries between Dynamics 365 apps and make your data accessible to users in their preferred app.

Application

Core application functionality is a key investment area for Microsoft. It’s what helps companies optimize their business processes.

✔︎ Archive Projects: Projects often change and evolve during their lifecycle. The archiving capability gives you control over your project data through audit trails and version control.

✔︎ Usability improves for service and projects: Productivity increases when processes are easy, so we’ve improved the usability of several areas within project and service management. For example, you can save a step by automatically releasing source documents, and in several places data is easier to access and digest.

✔︎ Use deferral codes in purchase and sales journals: Entering sales and purchase journals is sometimes associated with data entry for transactions that require deferrals. The process of entering data is smoother because you can specify a deferral code on sales and purchase journals, without having to create a general journal.

✔︎ Define a service invoice posting policy for various users: Companies often have unique processes for invoices and shipments. For example, processes can vary from one person posting everything on a service order to multiple employees, each working with their own pages. A setting on the User Setup page lets you specify how each user can process service invoices.

✔︎ Define default location for project or project phase: Reduce the time you spend on data entry and focus more on core tasks by specifying a default location and bin for projects on the Project Card page. When you create project tasks, project planning lines, and project journal lines for the project, the default location and bin are automatically assigned. Stay flexible with the ability to change the location code and bin on tasks and lines if needed. 

✔︎ Block item, item variant or service item from use in service management transactions: Prevent certain items, item variants, or service items from being used in service management transactions, such as service contracts, service orders, and service invoices. This can be useful if you want to restrict the availability of some items or service items for service purposes, for example, due to discontinued support, limited stock, or contractual agreements.

✔︎ Connect Business Central with Shopify B2B: Connecting Shopify B2B and Business Central improves visibility into pricing, customers and their order histories, order status, billing, and payments. Better visibility means faster response to customer inquiries, timely returns and refunds, and more accurate order processing 

✔︎ Simpler Shopify connection: Business Central has teamed up with Shopify to help businesses create a better online shopping experience. Shopify provides merchants with an easy-to-use e-commerce solution, and Business Central offers comprehensive business management across finance, sales, service, and operations. The seamless connection between the two applications synchronizes order, stock, and customer information to ensure that merchants can fulfill orders faster and better serve their customers. The joint effort furthers Business Central’s commitment to connecting data that can help businesses adapt faster, work smarter, and perform effectively. 

✔︎ Use general ledger account revaluation for more accurate financial statements: With a new setup on the G/L account card, you can now run G/L Revaluations for accounts with transactions in foreign currencies. This enables you to generate a more accurate financial statement with little need to keep separate spreadsheets.

 ✔︎ Get more productive while entering time sheets: Copying time sheets from previous periods can save you time and effort by reducing the need to manually enter data. The process improves productivity and efficiency by allowing you to quickly and easily create time sheets based on data you already have. Additionally, copying time sheets can help to ensure that your data is consistent and accurate by reducing the risk of data entry errors.

✔︎ Create projects that you can invoice to multiple customers: When projects involve multiple customers, billing the right customers for the right project tasks can be challenging and take time. Business Central makes billing less complex by letting you specify the bill-to and sell-to customers on each project task line. Having that information on each task lets you automatically generate invoices for the correct customers.

✔︎ Assemble to project: Assemble to project helps you improve inventory management by assembling to order only when it’s required, and enable other ways to customize projects.

✔︎ Invoice a customer for multiple projects: Simplify your invoicing process by sending one invoice for multiple projects, which reduces manual effort and improves accuracy. 

✔︎ Use new Excel layouts for 35 selected reports: Running reports to analyze and present business information is a frequent task in any business. Now you can use the Excel report layouts to interactively generate analyses and present learnings.

✔︎ Use standard terminology for project management: Microsoft is making it easier to work with project accounting by updating the terminology we use for its features in the product and documentation. Specifically, they 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. 

✔︎ 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.

Development

Microsoft’s current focus is on making Business Central AL developers more productive, and empowering consultants, citizen developers, and users to do more while lowering the cost of changes.

✔︎ Handle multiple file uploads and file drop zones: The ability for AL developers to handle multiple file uploads and designate different page parts as file drop zones in Business Central provides greater flexibility and usability. This enhancement benefits developers working on applications or customizations that require multifile upload functionality and adds value to organizations by improving productivity and the user experience.

User Experiences

Great user experiences help users enter, update, and fix mistakes in their data in an intuitive way.

✔︎ Use drag and drop to attach multiple files: Drag and drop functionality to attach multiple files to Business Central records makes it easier to manage files. This feature benefits users who work with multiple files, and adds value to organizations by enhancing data organization and accessibility.

✔︎ Use actions to navigate and highlight or fix platform-generated errors: Microsoft is making it easier for you to help yourself when something goes wrong in Business Central. Error messages provide actions that take you to the page, or even a specific field on a page, so you can quickly resolve the issue. The actions provide value to organizations by enhancing productivity and ensuring smooth workflows.

✔︎ Share error details to get help from another user: By facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing, Microsoft is enabling teams to work together more effectively and efficiently. You can leverage the expertise of colleagues or subject matter experts to overcome obstacles and minimize downtime. The ability to share error details in Business Central enhances collaboration and problem-solving capabilities.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s upcoming release promises a slew of enhancements across various fronts, from automation and compliance to developer productivity and user experience. With a focus on empowering organizations to adapt, innovate, and thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape, these features underscore Microsoft’s commitment to driving digital transformation for businesses worldwide.

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