Microsoft has announced the content of its 2021 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Finance
Microsoft recently announced the new features to Dynamics 365 Finance that will begin to come into effect from 1st October 2021 through to March 2022. This announcement forms part of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and industry clouds: 2021 release wave 2 plan reinforcing its commitment to continual enhancements across the full range of Dynamics 365 products. As there are many noteworthy updates across Finance and Operations this article forms the first of three.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance
Dynamics 365 Finance is Microsoft’s enterprise-scale ERP solution for finance leaders designed to support large or complex organisations to maximise financial visibility and profitability, automate and modernise global financial operations. It enables organisations to monitor performance in real-time, predict future outcomes and make data-driven decisions to drive business growth.
Dynamics 365 Finance 2021 release notes
Dynamics 365 Finance is investing in data insights as part of general availability of Finance Insights, the intelligent cash flow offering that empowers users with out-of-the-box (OOTB) machine learning for financial operations. Through automation and modernising the services that Microsoft’s customers use daily, this release wave brings enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions. Globalisation offering with additional localisations and the general availability of Microsoft’s Tax Calculation service are also added to this release.
Driving action through intelligent insights
Finance is at the core of all businesses, and Microsoft believes there is an immense opportunity to innovate through supporting new business models, embedded intelligence and automation, and reimagining how finance individuals work and interact with their data. The 2021 release wave 2 plan will focus on data-driven insights as part of the general availability of Finance Insight empowering users with OOTB machine learning for their financial operations. Insight examples include viewing when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting budgets, and viewing forecasted cash positions based on actual accounts payable, accounts receivable, project transactions and predicted outcomes.
Enhanced usability on everyday activities
To ensure that financial activities close on time, Microsoft is enabling its customers to increase productivity when it critically matters the most. Through automation and modernisation users will benefit from enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions.
Expanding global coverage, decreasing global complexity, and simplifying extensibility
Microsoft is continuing to enhance its globalisation offering. It will ship even more countries and regions OOTB, to simplify global Dynamics 365 Finance usage by its customers. Following the addition of six new countries and regions OOTB in the previous two waves, Microsoft is adding Indonesian localisation to this release. Microsoft is also committed to enhancing its configurable, no-code/low-code globalisation capabilities and transform them into globalisation microservices that will enable enterprise-scale functionality and performance further simplifying globalisation extensibility. The Tax Calculation service will be universally available and able to support complex tax compliance scenarios. The functionality and country coverage for Microsoft’s Electronic Invoicing service will be extended and will enable integration with any first-party or third-party application via Microsoft Dataverse.
Microsoft’s exciting new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Finance will be released between October 2021 and March 2022.
If you would like to learn more about Dynamics 365 Finance, get in touch and we will be glad to help your organisation transition through and harness the power of these planned changes.