The 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Finance focuses on achieving rapid innovation through automation and artificial intelligence.

This release of Dynamics 365 Finance focuses on achieving rapid innovation through automation, creating high-performing teams that can work smarter with AI, and optimise costs and take action faster with planning, forecasting, analytics, and insights. Let’s check out some of these new updates below.

Invoice Capture

The Accounts Payable (AP) teams need to verify data on invoices to ensure that amounts are correct and errors are avoided. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been an ISV solution often implemented to D365 F&O to convert physically printed text documents into electronically displayed formats.

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled modern OCR solutions to read different invoice formats from different vendors without requiring much human intervention. More companies are recognising that they can save effort and improve accuracy by processing invoices via automation instead of doing manual processing.

Invoice capture is a new feature which brings the functionality into D365 F&O natively, replacing the need for an ISV. This will help to dramatically reduce the heavy manual workload of the AP team by automatically generating an invoice with a consistent degree of accuracy.

In this release wave, the functionality is further enhanced as more scenarios are included such as non PO invoices like employee expenses and items purchased without a Purchase Order. The solution can now scan letters and emails and other formats, not just images.

Automatic Bank statement importing

Importing bank statement automatically is a simple feature, but will be very effective for the accounting team who manually import statements. This can now be replaced by a batch job. Statement files can be shared in a SharePoint folder, where a periodical batch job can pick up the statements in this folder and automatically upload them.

Enhancements to bank foreign currency revaluation bank statement importing

The bank foreign currency revaluation (bank FCR) will be enhanced in two ways. First, we will allow an organisation to define whether to use all, or no, financial dimensions when calculating the unrealised gain or loss. This is one of the top 10 feature requests for the cash and bank management module. This will reduce the number of lines included in the accounting entries for each bank FCR.

Second, the calculation of the unrealised gain or loss will change, which will allow organisations to give a clear definition of the calculation to their auditors. This will also prevent the scenario for some organisations where large amounts were posted to different dimensions as the result of all debits for cash being posted to one dimension but the credits being posted to a different dimension. This will also ensure that a gain or loss is calculated correctly for periods where no new transactions are posted for a specific set of dimensions.

Other updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance 2023 release wave 2 include:

  • General availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyse.
  • General availability of business performance analytics, which streamlines financial reporting by centralising data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.
  • Further enhancements to invoice capture and AP automation with a new AP clerk workspace and support for the invoice journal.
  • Enhancements to bank foreign currency revaluation, bank statement importing, and bank statement management.
  • Expanding country coverage to additional LATAM countries of Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.
  • Integration of Tax Calculation service with Project Operations and invoice registers, approvals, and pools.
  • Delivery of regulatory updates to comply with tax digitisation requirements including e-invoicing and SAF-T for Denmark, e-reporting for France, and e-invoicing for Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.

Find out more about Dynamics 365 Finance here, or check out this Microsoft 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics Copilot.