New and upcoming features in Business Central: January 2024
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. Learn more about the Release Planner →
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.
Here are a few of the new features that will be particularly nice to have, and feature updates that will be nice to know about:
More control over General Ledger Approvals
This feature was made generally available in October 2023, but it’s a small enough change that it might have slipped through the cracks since it’s been made available.
This update to General Ledger approvals will give you more control over approval status and revisions.
New entries will be marked as “Pending Approval” once entered, and changes can’t be made to batches or journals before or after they’ve been approved. This will build in an approval phase where corrections and edits can be made before finalizing all changes. Managers and approvers can document changes with a dialogue pop-up that recommends you to either add comments explaining what modification is needed or reject it to send it back to the requester for modifications.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Renaming the Jobs module
A long-awaited update is finally here: the “Jobs” module will now be called “Projects” and all accounting will now be known as project accounting. This is something that feels like an obvious and intuitive change. By renaming entities that were called "jobs" to "projects,” you can expect a more consistent naming convention across the system. Job tasks are project tasks, job journals are project journals, job planning lines are project planning lines, and so on.
Note that the names of the underlying table and field objects won’t be changing—this is only a change to the user interface and language in Microsoft documentation, leading to an enhanced user experience.
Easier-to-resolve error messages
Another long-awaited update will improve the error resolution process by providing additional information on error messages you encounter. With this addition, error messages will provide actions that hyperlink the page or specific field on a page that needs to be addressed. This change will significantly improve and simplify your error resolution by providing that explanation and navigation straight to the error, allowing you to either highlight or fix them directly on the screen.
Image courtesy of Microsoft
Improved Mobile Functionality
Another UX improvement will be the ability to access worksheet pages from mobile phones or other iOS and Android devices. Previously, users weren’t able to open worksheet pages while working on a mobile device—only on tablet or desktop devices. Now, worksheets will render in a way that shortens the header and footer sections as well as the lines in the worksheet, allowing you to have a more complete look at the page contents when working on your smartphone.