Creating marketing emails is a core part of any digital strategy, and a marketing platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Journeys (formerly known as “Marketing”) makes real-time email campaign creation and management a breeze. If you’re a current Outbound Marketing customer, you may be wondering what the transition to Real-Time means for you and the things that you currently do in the Outbound area of the application. Namely, all the time and energy you’ve spent building and sending marketing emails in your Customer Journeys. But good news: you can very quickly and easily import your existing emails to use in Real-Time Marketing!

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?

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.

Make the most out of GP with the Professional Services Tool Library, a built-in catalogue of additional tools, capabilities, and shortcuts that allows you to more quickly view, combine, modify, and make system changes in all core modules of GP.

Winthrop Development Consultants offers a suite of tools that makes it easier to administer, develop, and work within Dynamics GP. GP Power Tools is an add-on product that allows system admins and developers alike to simplify a wide variety of processes and tasks. Let’s look at the three modules Winthrop provides.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

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.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

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.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

As we all already know, our fiscal year-end doesn’t have to line up with our calendar year-end. In fact, many businesses have fiscal year-ends right around now—mid-year. If you’re thinking about closing procedures and don’t remember every step (we only do it once a year, after all), we’ve got you covered. Here’s your refresher for Dynamics GP fiscal year-end closing procedures. And stick around to the end of the blog for a few resources to jumpstart your close!

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.

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size.

In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.

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 CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

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.