On the 8th July 2020, Microsoft announced the range of new features it expects to make to Dynamics 365 Business Central in October 2020. This forms part of Microsoft’s 2020 wave 2 release and its commitment to continual enhancements across the full range of Dynamics 365 products.

This article explores the latest features announced for Dynamics 365 Business Central which include several improvements to finance and operational features that continue to streamline business processes and reduce manual tasks and inefficiencies.

Financial updates

Updates to the Group VAT reporting will improve inter-company communication and gathering of the VAT data to provide a streamlined and secure process of VAT reporting.

Release wave 2 also sees further improvements to the bank reconciliation functionality as the bank reconciliation page will now provide the ability to cancel a posted bank reconciliation to resolve any errors. The payment reconciliation will also support one to many matching and preview postings. New guides will also be available to users to assist in the setup of bank accounts and opening balances.

There are also updates coming to journals functionality with the ability to use recurring journals to allocate balances by dimensions using a filter on source GL accounts to allocate costs. You can set the recurring method to balance or reversing balance. General journals are now available to copy creating a reversing journal and therefore allowing you to streamline the accrual process.

Operational updates

The new default unit cost for non-inventory feature coming as part of release wave 2 will allow you to apply a default cost for services or non-stock items on the item page and stockkeeping unit page. The purpose of this feature is to prevent regular manual intervention on documents or journals when changes to these costs occur which directly impact on the profit for the sale.

As a number of shipping agents provide internet-based services to track parcels they are delivering on your behalf, Dynamics 365 Business Central allows you to setup automatic tracking to receive updates on your delivery. As part of wave 2 updates to the ‘Track Package’ feature allow you to setup up the automatic tracking function available on more sales based documents including the posted sales shipment, posted sales invoices, posted sales credit notes and posted return receipts pages.

In addition to the existing change log functionality that allows the tracking of changes to data or settings, there is now the option to setup notifications where changes have been made to a defined set of fields such as vendor bank accounts and other high risk or business critical data.

With release wave 2, you will be able to use conversion templates to convert contacts to a supplier or employee record preventing double entry. When selecting the contact, you wish to convert you will be able to choose which template you wish to use, ensuring the contact is added to the correct data entity with the necessary information. You will also be able to use email addresses and mobile phone contact details consistently across applications as these fields are now available on data entry pages, report data sets, report layouts and segment lines.

Globalisation

As the demand for Business Central continues to grow, release wave 2 sees the application become available in four new countries. Further localisations to the product will continue to be supported through partners and will be available on AppSource, ensuring the solution continues to fit with your organisation’s local legislation and market specific operations.

Modern clients and development tools

Several updates have been made to the modern client to improve access to low vision users, making pages and fact boxes more responsive and role centres open faster. Users can also update page stylings and navigation terminology to improve the user experience.

Modern development tools continue to be an area of invest for Microsoft.  In wave 2 we see the availability of Performance Regression and Application Benchmark tools through GitHub, which include sample tests for key application scenarios.

Dynamics 365 connectivity

As part of the Dynamics 365 product group, release wave 2 see Dynamics 365 Business Central undergo several additional technical updates which provide better connectivity with other Microsoft products including:

• The ability to bring Dynamics 365 Business Central data into Microsoft Teams conversations to improve decision making as a team.
• Common Data Service virtual entities will provide Power Apps the ability to leverage and access data stored within Business Central data entities as if they were native to the Common Data Service.
• Auto resolving of Common Data Service conflicts that occur as part of the bidirectional synchronisation of entities between Business Central and the Common Data Service through mappings at field level and setting up auto resolution rules.
• Word document layouts to customise outgoing customer documents by exporting the document to Microsoft Word where the layouts can be simplified and improved before importing back into Dynamics 365 Business Central for future use.
• Updates to the Company Hub extension to allow user to see a list of all entities even if these are stored in different Microsoft tenancies. Users can now easily add new companies, see KPI’s and keep track of assigned user tasks for each company.
• Service-to-service authentication for Automation APIs will now be available.

Summary

These new powerful capabilities are free to organisations who hold an active subscription to Dynamics 365 Business Central. The features can be applied in an automatic update from October 2020 through March 2021. Dynamics 365 Business Central users can also benefit from the wave 2 updates in the Power Platform.