Business Central has included the occasional AI feature here and there for a while now, but recently, with Microsoft’s 2024 Release Wave 1, more and more are being added. Though all these features prove useful for various needs, there are five features we believe are most valuable to our clients and the broader Business Central user base.

When working with a Microsoft application like Outlook, you’ll notice the emphasis on productivity throughout the entire application interface, not to mention a seamless connection between all the business applications you might need from Microsoft.

In fact, the ability for all your systems to work in sync was likely a huge draw to Business Central in the first place. Business Central can be easily integrated to an Outlook account, but did you know that there’s a way to open up and work within Business Central, right from your Outlook window?

Release Wave 1 of 2024 is coming in April, and the plans have been out since January. We’re gearing up for the update by reviewing the plans and testing features in a sandbox environment as they move into preview. Let’s review some of our most highly anticipated features, specifically for the Jobs module.

It’s important to test your system to ensure the update will not interfere with your processes and, most importantly, system customizations and extensions. It is crucial to test the transactions that use any of your customizations or extensions early in a sandbox environment, lest they break in production and halt your business processes. So, we’ve put together a checklist of recommended tests to perform after Business Central is updated to the latest version, with those release wave changes.

Permissions errors can be triggered doing pretty much anything in Business Central, but where your employees may get error messages will vary based on the permissions assigned to them. Luckily, most permission errors actually show you where the error originated and, therefore, you have the means to resolve that error.

Several new features have released, which you can review and track via the Microsoft’s Release Planner, which allows you to effectively plan for new features that will be added to the stack of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.

Note that these are features that were announced with 2023 Release Wave 2. Some features have already been made generally available since their release, but some other features will be made available for public preview in March 2024.

There are lots of reasons why you should start to think about modernizing your ERP, but here are five tried-and-true benefits once you migrate your Dynamics GP to Business Central, the most modern, full-featured, and competitively-priced ERP application on the market.

Stay tuned for part two of this blog series for more reasons you’ll love Business Central after migrating from Dynamics GP!

When you’re using a system for things so important as account and order fulfillment, you want to vet that any changes you make to the system—whether it be new features or processes, or even changes to your role centers or pages—will not detract from your system’s functionality.

It’s time for Microsoft’s twice-annual updates to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 suite of applications. With each of these updates, new features, improvements, and fixes are rolled out to Power Automate, Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Business Central, and more. There’s a lot of material to cover, so we’ve broken down a few of the features that we’re most excited to see rolled out in Business Central:

Business Central has added a new way to analyze your data right within the pages and lists you’re currently in. Analysis mode is a toggle that provides interactive and versatile functionality to calculate, summarize, and examine data right there, without going to another page or another application (like Excel). It’s faster than running reports, and you can add multiple tabs that each represent different tasks or views of the data.

Business Central’s Chart of Accounts shows you all the ledger accounts storing your financial data. It can also be a behemoth to navigate, making the ability to filter on different values to find exactly what you’re looking for all the more valuable for your accounting practices. And there’s one type of filter that is common to overlook that we’d like to dig into—the “Filter totals by” function.

Many organizations’ fiscal year-end doesn’t match up with the calendar year-end. In fact, June 30 is a pretty common fiscal year-end. So if you’re in this boat, here’s your closing procedures refresher for Business Central/NAV, plus a handful of useful resources to get you started on your close.

Data security is at the core of all of Microsoft’s business applications, and Business Central has several layers of protection for every user account. As a growth-minded solution, it’s equipped to handle the changing needs of your business, including scaling permissions up and dialing them back as often as you need.

There are a few basic components to the makeup of Business Central’s security setup: user access, user permissions, and general data security.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the newest AI feature that helps users save time when working in Business Central and the rest of the Dynamics 365 CRM suite. Copilot is your new AI-assistant, taking your previous work and other inputs to generate content for you – from emails and presentations to proposal drafts and beyond. It is the ultimate idea starter to get you going with new material that you can use as-is or edit to fit your needs.

You get the most out of your ERP when it’s a best-fit solution for your business needs, allowing you to reap the benefits of saving time, getting more work done, and building cleaner processes. Even long after your implementation, there are plenty of ways to keep building up Business Central as a highly customized system that empowers users to do more with the tools they’re provided. Working with Role Centers is another way to make Business Central work exactly how you need it to.

In this newest rollout of features (2023 Release Wave 1), Business Central is seeing a shift to how users can customize their workspaces to serve them best. With the goal of always being able to quickly adapt to new needs to facilitate company growth. In terms of system use, being able to view and enter data quickly and efficiently is paramount. So with this wave, all table fields will be unlocked so that any user can add them to their pages and personalize their workspace without the need to use extensions, saving time and cost.

In April 2021, Microsoft made generally available the ability to correct dimensions for general ledger entries. The goal of this shift is to allow your financial reporting to provide you with the most accurate insight possible, and this means not having to account or note data entry errors. Because, let’s face it: mistakes happen! But your financial reporting shouldn’t need to be negatively impacted as a result.

If you manually track deferred revenue or expenses, you know how timely and tedious it can be to balance these items on various spreadsheets before bringing those entries into your accounting system. Although not difficult, it requires you to manage things outside your system—like an Excel spreadsheet that you have to keep up with and post a recurring entry for each month. Luckily, Business Central has a solution that simplifies this. If you set up a deferral template, you can use it to defer revenue or expense over a set period of time. When you set up this deferral and post it, the monthly lines will be posted and booked automatically with no need for tracking or balancing. You can also check in on the deferrals with reports to ensure the process went through correctly.

The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.

Productive changes were made to Business Central with last year’s Release Wave 2: from report visibility for bank reconciliation to more seamless integrations with Power Automate, the Dataverse, and beyond. We covered these changes in our 2022 Release Wave 2 summary blog, but there’s one change in particular we’d like to dig into further—the Financial Reporting name shift. Here are the details you should be aware of.