Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a business management solution for small and mid-sized organisations that automates and streamlines business processes and helps you manage your business. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the new name for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018.

A fresh, modern experience makes it easier to adapt Dynamics 365 Business Central to your organisation and simplify the learning path for users. Users get a new refreshed experience that helps them become more productive.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central universal app is able to connect to cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments of Business Central.

You can schedule a report to run at a specific date and time. Scheduled reports are entered in the job queue and processed at the scheduled time, similar to other jobs. You can choose to save the processed report to a file, such as an Excel, Word, or PDF, print it to a selected printer, or process the report only.

Business Central can help you work smarter by notifying you about certain events or changes in status, such as when you are about to invoice a customer who has an overdue balance, or the available inventory is lower than the quantity you are about to sell, for example. These notifications are shown as discreet tips in the context of the task you are doing, and you can choose to ignore the notification or to see details about the issue.

A Cue provides a visual representation of aggregated business data, such as the number of open sales invoices or the total sales for the month. Cues are interactive, meaning that you can select the Cue to drill down to data.

As you type in the Tell Me window, the scope has broadened to include online Help content as well as actions from the current page that you can immediately activate.  You can also navigate to pages and reports across the application based on their page caption.

Business Central includes several built-in layouts. Built-in layouts are predefined layouts that are designed for specific reports.  Custom layouts are report layouts that you design to change the appearance of a report. You typically create a custom layout based on a built-in layout, but you can create them from scratch or from a copy of an existing custom layout.

Word documents can also be sent automatically as an email. You can create professional-looking email cover-letter templates that include images and invoice information, such as totals, due dates, and payment terms, to use when sending emails to customers.

Rapid Start services is the import / export utility through which you can setup / configure a new company, import customers, vendors, chart of accounts, items…

There are a number of new profiles and we now have the facility to prevent any personalisation on certain profiles.

On the incoming documents page, you can use different functions to review expense receipts, manage OCR tasks, and convert incoming document files, manually or automatically, to the relevant documents or journal lines. The external files can be attached at any process stage, including to posted documents and to the resulting vendor, customer, and general ledger entries.

From a transaction the user can preview the results of the posting before it is actually posted.

You can set up and use workflows that connect business-process tasks performed by different users. System tasks, such as automatic posting, can be included as steps in workflows, preceded or followed by user tasks. Requesting and granting approval to create new records are typical workflow steps.

Users can create quotes, process orders, and submit invoices without leaving Outlook.

This enables the Business Central client to work with data from list pages in Excel.

You can use the assisted setup feature to guide you through setup scenarios, simplifying and streamlining the setup of selected areas.

To support companies that supply products to their customers by combining components in simple processes without the need of manufacturing functionality, Business Central includes features to assemble items that integrate with existing features, such as sales, planning, reservations, and warehousing.

In Business Central can block an item from being entered on sales or purchase lines, and you can block it from being posted in any transaction.

Manage items by creating custom item attributes that capture data about your items and help you pick your items.  You can save time by filtering on attribute values when adding items to sales and purchase documents, or organising your items, limiting the list of items to choose from or act on.

In the Type field on the Item Card you can select what the item is used for in our business and consequently how it is managed in Business Central.

You can personalise the structure of your financial statements by mapping general ledger accounts to account categories.

You can use Financial Reports to quickly view financial performance. Using the account categories and sub categories, Business Central builds standard reports. 

You can use an external service to keep your currency exchange rates up to date automatically, such as FloatRates.

To recognise a revenue or an expense in a period other than the period in which the transaction was posted, you can use functionality to automatically defer revenues and expenses over a specified schedule by setting up deferral templates.

In Business Central you can use the VAT Return report for creating VAT reports. The Making Tax Digital VAT features extend this capability to communicate with HMRC.

The cash flow in a business is a good indicator of its financial solvency and can reveal whether the business can meet its financial obligations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central provides tools that businesses can use to analyse their cash flow by analysing historic data to make predictions for future periods.

Cost accounting can help you understand the costs of running a business.

To reconcile bank accounts in Business Central with statements received from the bank, you begin by filling in the left-hand pane on the Bank Acc. Reconciliation page with bank statement information that you then match (reconcile) with bank account ledger entries in the right-hand pane. A more efficient way to fill in bank statement lines is by importing a bank statement file or feed.

You must regularly reconcile your bank, receivables, and payables accounts by applying payments recorded in the bank to their related unpaid invoices and credit memos or other open entries in Business Central.

The new user tasks allow you to create tasks to remind you of work to be done.  You can create tasks for yourself and assign tasks to others or be assigned a task to someone else in your organisation.

In general journal lines there is a new account type and new balancing account type, Employee.  Posting a gen journal line with this account type will generate an employee ledger entry.

Connect your Dynamics 365 for Sales solution in a few easy steps.  The assisted setups help you synchronise your data across the two apps, including sales orders, item availability, units of measure and currencies.

Business Manager and Accountant Role centres can choose a pre-configured report that is ready to print from Excel.

You can now indicate that you’re required to prepare intrastat reports and set the default transaction types for normal sales and purchases as well as sales and purchase returns.

The GetAddress.io UK Postcodes extension can save time and prevent mistakes when you enter addresses for entities like customers, vendors, bank accounts, and employees.