Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

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.

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.

In this blog, we’ll discuss leads within Dynamics 365 Sales: how we get them there, what we do with them, and also how we move them from a lead into the next step of the sales funnel—an opportunity. In future blogs, we will discuss the sales process beyond this step.

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.

Back in 2019, Microsoft implemented a new model for Dynamics 365 storage capacity. This was done in an effort to help organizations better take command of their database usages. The amount of data that organizations need to track and store has been ballooning as digital transformation progresses. Understanding data usage and storage is integral to maintaining a database of effective, relevant data.

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.

On its own, Microsoft Teams give great tools like messaging, calling, file sharing, and much more. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, provides a plethora of tools for sales teams to better engage leads and customers. By combining these two products, we can expand the capabilities of both. Teams can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales to allow for conversations to start directly from records, initiate calls to customers, or link records into Teams channels.

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.

We’re always watching the latest and greatest changes coming to the Dynamics 365 suite to see how they can benefit our users. Lately, there have been a few helpful shifts regarding the timeline and forms within Dynamics 365 CRM apps that allow for better workflow and easier management of what you’re doing within the system. Although these features aren’t brand new—they are generally available and your administrator or partner can help get you started with them whenever you want—but we’re highlighting them since they may not be on your radar.

Sometimes, Dynamics GP needs to be taken offline to perform certain activities that are easiest with an empty system—such as regular maintenance, system updates, error fixes, and even year-end close. Luckily, version GP 2013 R2 and beyond have a feature that allows you to take the system offline, making these routine updates and fixes easier than ever.

Note that taking a company (or several companies—you can choose) offline only allows the offline administrator and other specified users to log into the company, but you can set a message to alert anyone who tries to access the system during that timeframe so they’re aware of the reason they aren’t able to login.

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. 

It may feel like Community Summit NA 2022 just came to an end, but we’re already planning for next year, which will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from October 15-20, 2023.

If you’re looking forward and thinking I’d like to go to Summit this year, it’s a good moment to start the process, because until January 31, Early Bird registration will provide the lowest price on all-access passes to the conference. If you can’t make that deadline, don’t worry – there are a few additional discount registration timeframes that will all provide a nice discount for you to benefit from.

1099s must be sent out by the last day of January, and if you need a refresher or first-time walkthrough for editing and generating 1099s in Business Central, we’re here to help.

We’re starting the new year off with an ongoing roster of exciting webinar offerings to help anyone using Business Central or Dynamics NAV optimize their system functionality by adding extensions, or add-ons, to their already established Business Central. If you use Business Central and have thought, “Oh, I wish the system did this,” then stick around for our monthly add-on spotlight webinars. First up this year: Multi-Entity Management with Binary Stream!

Information has never been more widely and readily available than in the hyper-fast, cloud-driven reality we have today; yet, office workers can still spend upwards of 20% of their workdays searching through digital clutter for information. Sometimes that’s due to siloed systems, departments, teams, or processes that are due for an update.