Microsoft, in keeping in line with their cadence to release new functionality bi-annually has announced plans for their October release. In this Blog, We will focus on highlighting those application improvements that are relevant to end users. There are several other feature releases that are pretty exciting that you can check out here as well: New and planned features for Dynamics 365 Business Central, 2020 release wave 2 – Dynamics 365 Release Plan | Microsoft Docs

Business Central provides a comprehensive business application solution designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations.  The wave 2, Business Central investments center on delivering a world-class service to meet the demands of a rapidly growing customer base, improved performance, handling of file storage, top customer requested features, and deeper integration with Microsoft Teams.

Seamless service is the main focus with performance, reliability, and supportability are all three essential to ensure that the service quality remains ahead of the growth in usage with the useage of Business Central. Accessibility, already in a strong position, must be preserved, and better support for resizing pages is added. The 2020 release wave 2 also incorporates the results of a material top-to-bottom investment in Business Central service security. Partners are a critical component of the Business Central ecosystem; this release wave enables further telemetry visibility for partners through Azure Insights, and it brings improvements in conflict handling for synchronization with Microsoft Dataverse.

This release continues Microsoft’s commitment toward world-class productivity with enhancements to the modern clients, and requested features such as returning to the request page after previewing a report, and the ability to change the assigned printer before printing a report.

Business Central continues to focus on responding to top customer enhancement requests. In addition to multiple features harvested from the product Ideas portal, top feedback areas such as email setup and use is enhanced.

To simplify the journey for existing Dynamics customers to Business Central online, support is added for migration from a broader set of Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV versions. Improvements are also made for selective migration of Dynamics GP customers and vendors along with enhanced migration of Dynamics GP Chart of Account setups.

These enhancements are designed to drive further service growth by empowering the migration from various versions of Dynamics on-premises, activating partners that bring their vertical solutions to Business Central online, and further accelerating the growth of net-new customers to Dynamics 365. All of this comes with improved service quality, supportability, end-user productivity, and improved experiences for customers and partners.

Application: 

With Business Central 2020 release wave 2, Microsoft delivered enhancements that were suggested.

Business Central company hub:

The company hub in Business Central gives you a list of the companies you work in. You can easily add new companies by just providing a URL and a name for the company. The list of companies contains a few KPIs for the company that is displayed for the user if they have the needed access. You also have a list of assigned user tasks for a given company, so you can keep track of work required for each company.

The company hub is an extension that gives you either a dedicated Company Hub home page (if you use one tenant as the main access point) or a similar task page if you use the company hub from within a company where your role requires you to have a different home page. Both have the same features and the same easy access to the companies you work in.

If you use Dynamics 365-Accountant Hub today, Accountant Hub is deprecated in this release wave. The company hub supports the same features, and it is recommended that you use the company hub as a replacement for Accountant Hub.

It’s easy to migrate to the company hub from Accountant Hub. When you have installed the company hub in a Business Central tenant, use the Edit in Excel feature on the Client list page to export data from Accountant Hub and open a similar Excel spreadsheet in the company hub. Then, use copy and paste to move the data and finally publish the spreadsheet from the company hub to get the data into your Business Central. For more information, go to the See also section.

VAT group reporting:

VAT group reporting in Dynamics 365 Business Central focuses on inter-group communication and the gathering of VAT data to allow for easy and secure management of VAT reporting. With the new VAT Group Management assisted setup guide made available in an extension, companies quickly get up and running with inter-group submission of VAT returns.

Default unit cost for non-inventory items:

To ensure that item costs are up to date for service and non-inventory items, the default Unit Cost for such items can be updated on the Item and Stockkeeping Unit pages.

Track packages from more types of sales documents:

To provide broader, and thereby faster, access to package tracking information from your shipping agent, the package tracking feature is available on more types of sales documents. In addition to the Posted Sales Shipments page, the tracking feature is also available on the Posted Sales Invoice, Posted Sales Credit Memo, and Posted Return Receipt pages.

Consolidation file format support for Dynamics 365 Finance:

When you use Export Consolidation, the request page field File Format has a new option value, Dynamics 365 Finance (.txt), that will generate a file that you can import straight into Dynamics 365 Finance.

When you choose the Dynamics 365 Finance file format, the F&O Legal Entity ID field becomes required. Here, you must provide the ID of the legal entity in Dynamics 365 Finance that represents your Business Central company.

Auto-resolve Microsoft Dataverse conflicts:

Integration table mappings now include rules that control how synchronization jobs synchronize records in Business Central tables with entities in Microsoft Dataverse. On the Integration Table Mapping page, in the Resolve Deletion Conflicts and Resolve Update Conflicts columns, you can specify how Business Central will resolve conflicts that occur because records were deleted in tables in one or the other business application, or updated in both.

In the Resolve Deletion Conflicts column you can choose to have Business Central automatically restore deleted records, remove the coupling between the records, or do nothing. If you do nothing, you must manually resolve conflicts.

In the Resolve Update Conflicts column you can choose to have Business Central automatically send a data update to the integration table when sending data to Microsoft Dataverse, or to get a data update from the integration table when getting data from Microsoft Dataverse, or do nothing. If you do nothing, you must manually resolve conflicts.

After you specify the strategy, on the Coupled Data Synchronization Errors page you can choose the Retry All action to automatically resolve conflicts.

Check financial journals in background:

On the General Journal Batch page, you can choose Background Error Check to have Business Central validate financial journals, such as general or payment journals, while you’re working on them. When the validation is enabled, the Journal Check FactBox displays next to the journal lines and will show issues in the current line and the whole batch. Validation happens when you load a financial journal batch, and when you choose another journal line. The Issues total tile in the FactBox shows the total number of issues that Business Central found, and choosing it will open an overview of the issues.

You can use the Show Lines with Issues and Show All Lines actions to toggle between journal lines that have or don’t have issues.

The new Journal Line Details FactBox provides a quick overview and access to data from journal lines, such as the G/L account, customer, or vendor, as well as to the posting setup for specific accounts.

Improved control over how and when you post WIP entries for jobs to the general ledger:

When you close the Job WIP Entries page, Business Central displays a confirmation dialog with “You must run the Job Post WIP to G/L function to post the completion entries for this job. Do you want to run this function now?” If you choose No, you can manually run the function later. When you do, you can specify parameters for the function.

Write longer item references:

You can set up an item reference between your item description and the description that your customer or vendor uses. When you create a sales or purchase document, you can fill in the Item Reference No. field to automatically add the customer’s or vendor’s item description to the document.

Use the copy journal function on Posted General Journals and control date for reversing entries in Recurring General Journals:

You can choose to Copy to Posted Jnl. Lines in General Journal Templates to enable copying of journals to Posted General Journals. You can also enable or disable Copy to Posted Jnl. Lines on a specific General Journal Batch that belongs to General Journal Templates where Copy to Posted Jnl. Lines was enabled.

On the Posted General Journals page, you can now use the Copy Selected Lines to Journal function to create a copy of a general journal line or a batch with opposite signs (a reversing journal), a different posting date or document number. The Copy G/L Register to Journal function will copy all journal lines that belong to selected G/L Register to target General Journal.

On Recurring General Journals, in the Reverse Date Calculation column, you can now enter the date formula that will be used to calculate the date with which reversal entries will be posted where Reversal Recurring Methods are used. Please note that Reverse Date Calculation can be added to Recurring General Journals through page personalization.

Use Word document layouts to customize outgoing customer documents:

You can now export the document layout for Sales Shipments (Report 1308) and Return Orders (Report 1309). Simply modify the layouts in Word and import them back into Business Central to use next time you send a shipment or return order.

Easier to choose the right Role Center:

The Role Center is the home page, a landing page that is designed for the needs of a specific role in an organization. Depending on your role, the Role Center gives you an overview of the business, your department, or your personal tasks.

The default role assigned to most new users is Business Manager, but you can switch to another role that uses a Role Center that fits your needs better.

With this release, the list of available roles is clearer.

In earlier versions, the default company includes roles of which some roles have only the navigation menu as content. Those roles defined the content of the Role Explorer feature but were often chosen by users who mistook them for actual Role Centers. To reduce confusion, those profiles are now filtered from the list of available Role Centers

If, for any reason, you want to make these roles available again, make sure that the description doesn’t contain the wording navigation menu only. This is the string to filter out the roles.

With a slightly repurposing of the existing Role Centers to make them more focused on a department’s needs.

Of course, just changing names is rarely enough, there are enhancements to the content of these and other Role Centers to better reflect their new purpose:

• Changes for page 9010 Production Planner Role Center:
  • New caption: Manufacturing Manager
  • Added Machine Operator Activities part
  • Navigation menus are extended with Consumption, Output, and Capacity Journals, both regular and recurring ones. More elements such as Work Shifts, Shop Calendars, Work Center Groups, Stop and Scrap Codes can be found under the Capacity group.
  • New actions of type create are added to the Action Bar. In addition to Planned Production Order, users can create Firm Planned Production Order or Released Production Order.
• Changes for page 9016 Service Dispatcher Role Center:
  • New caption: Service Manager
  • New Service Orders – Today cue on the Service Dispatcher Activities part
• Changes for page 9008 Whse. Basic Role Center:
  • New caption: Inventory Manager
  • Added a WMS Ship & Receive Activities part that also received new cues to show the number of unassigned warehouse pick, put-aways, and movements.
  • Navigation menus are extended with all types of sales documents, such as Invoice, Quote, Order, Return, and Credit Memo, both drafts and posted. More elements, such as Item Charges and Item Attributes, are available under Sales. Archived purchase documents can be found under Posted Documents.
  • New actions of type create are added to the action bar. Users can create new warehouse shipments and warehouse receipts straight from their home page.
  • New actions of type processing are added to the action bar. Users can open warehouse worksheets, such as the Put-away Worksheet, Pick Worksheet, or Movement Worksheet, as well as the inventory planning worksheets: the Requisition Worksheet, Planning Worksheet, and Order Planning pages.
• Changes for page 9026 Sales & Relationship Mgr. RC:
  • Navigation menus are extended with all types of warehouse documents, journals, and worksheets, and documents such as Invoice, Quote, Order, Return, and Credit Memo, drafts, posted, and archived. More elements such as Items, Locations, Shipping Agent, Catalog Items, Stockkeeping Units, and Bin Contents can be found under Reference Data.
  • From the navigation bar, users can open Sales Orders – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
  • New actions of type create are added to the Action Bar. Users can create new sales quotes, sales invoices, sales orders, sales return orders, and sales credit memos straight from their home page.
• Changes for page 9006 Order Processor Role Center:
  • Layout changed to Normal for the Sales Quotes – Open and Sales Orders – Open cues on the SO Processor Activities part.
  • Navigation menus are extended with all types of archived sales documents.
• Changes for page 9022 Business Manager Role Center:
  • Part “Product Video Topics” is hidden because its content is now available in the Assisted Setup page.
• Changes for page 9027 Accountant Role Center:
  • Part “Product Video Topics” is hidden because its content is now available in the Assisted Setup page.

While each Role Center consists of a unique collection of parts and actions, they also have a lot in common.

With the changes described here, users will be able to find a Role Center that fits their needs better. Remember that you can always enhance your Role Center by bookmarking a page or report, or by hiding or unhiding parts.

Important note about the upcoming upgrade

As you can see, multiple Role Centers received new elements. For these Role Centers to properly work adjustments have been made to the permissions. The next update will include updated license, entitlements, and standard permission sets. However, it is important for administrators to update any customized permissions sets, so that users will not experience disruption once the tenant is upgraded. Here are some objects that you should consider adding to any customer-specific permission sets upfront.

Remove coupling of records integrated with Microsoft Dataverse in bulk:

When something goes wrong in an integration between Business Central and Microsoft Dataverse and you need to uncouple records to stop synchronizing them, you can do so for multiple records at a time. Previously, you had to delete couplings for each record one at a time. This release offers two ways to bulk-remove couplings. On the Integration Table Mappings page, you can choose Uncoupling, and then Delete Coupling. Alternatively, on the Coupled Data Synchronization Errors page, you can choose the errors and then choose Remove Couplings.

Restore synchronization defaults for Microsoft Dataverse integration for selected Integration Table Mapping:

You can now reset configuration changes made to integration table and field mappings for selected integration table mappings. Previously, you had to reset defaults for all table and field mappings. Now you can reset integration table mappings to their default settings by choosing Use Default Synchronization Setup for selected integration table mappings.

Use contact mobile phone number and email consistently across application:

You can now use the Mobile Phone Number and Email fields on data entry pages, report data sets, report layouts, and segment lines that have contact details in Business Central.

Use contact mobile phone number and email consistently across application:

You can now use the Mobile Phone Number and Email fields on data entry pages, report data sets, report layouts, and segment lines that have contact details in Business Central.

Use conversion templates to convert contacts to vendors and employees:

When selecting a contact, you can now convert it to a vendor or employee. During conversion, you can choose a contact conversion template to use when the contact is converted to a vendor or employee.

Define retention policies:

Administrators can define retention policies to specify how frequently they want Business Central to delete outdated data in tables that contain log entries and archived records. For example, cleaning up log entries can make it easier to work with the data that’s actually relevant. Policies can include all data in the tables that is past the expiration date, or they can add filter criteria that will include only certain expired data in the policy.

Notify users of high-risk changes in selected setup fields:

You can now define a list of fields that contain high-risk and business-critical data that you want to be notified about when they are changed.

Enhanced email capabilities:

Microsoft intends to lift the email capabilities to the next level by embracing the capabilities and security that many modern email providers offer. They enable entirely new scenarios such as added support for multiple accounts, distribution groups, and improved attachment management. Also they look to take the experience even further by adding support for workflows and preview capabilities, which will unlock new and exciting opportunities for businesses to communicate with the outside world.

Control how Account Schedules for core financial reports are generated:

Core financial reports such as the balance sheet, profit and loss statements, and cash flow statements are defined using account schedules. Account schedules are based on G/L account categories assigned to G/L accounts or groups of G/L accounts. When changes impact financial reports, you can specify whether to add new account schedules and keep those you already have, or to overwrite your existing account schedules. On the G/L Account Categories page, the Keep existing account schedules and create new and Overwrite existing account schedules actions make that easy to do when you choose Generate Account Schedules.

Use new sales pricing experience:

In 2020 release wave 1 the introduced of new ways to Extend price calculation so that developers and ISVs can build solutions that address industry or business-specific pricing needs.

In 2020 release wave 2, the administrators are given users improved experiences that are built on top of the extensible price calculation engine.

To view the list of the price calculation methods that are installed and available in your tenant, search for Price Calculation Method. By default, if there are no ISV solutions or extensions installed, the list will only show the method called Lowest Price, which comes with Business Central. For more information about this price calculation method, see Best Price Calculation. If you have installed an extension that adds pricing methods, for example, to define exceptions to standard price calculations, you can use those by choosing Price Calculation Method.

To set up prices, sales or purchase prices, search for Sales Price List or Purchase Price List. If you choose Applies-to Type and Applies-to No., you can choose what this price list will apply to, such as customer or customer price group. Using View Columns for, you can show or hide columns relevant for setting prices, discounts or prices and discounts.

You can set up Price List lines manually or you can use, for example, the Suggest Lines action to create new prices for selected items, item discount groups, resources, and other product types. If you choose Suggest Lines, the Price Lines – Create New page allows you to set filters to select products for which you want to create new price list lines. You can also specify whether to consider a Minimum quantity when calculating prices, the adjustment factor to apply for new price list lines, and the rounding method to apply for prices. The Copy Lines action allows you to copy existing price list lines between price lists.

By default, the status of new price lists is Draft. When you’re done adding lines and want the price calculation engine to include it, you can change the status to Active.

To review price lists and prices that apply for specific customers or vendors, on the Customer page, choose Sales Price Lists or, on the Vendor page, choose Purchase Price Lists. You can view price list lines set in various price lists by choosing Sales Prices or Purchase Prices from the Item and Resource pages.

Use shortcut dimensions in G/L entries for financial reporting:

You can specify shortcut dimensions on the General Ledger Setup page so that you can filter entries pages, such as general ledger entries, customer or vendor ledger entries, and many others, using the dimension value. For example, if you add Area as a shortcut dimension, you’ll be able to filter general ledger entries by area. To enable this, add a newly created dimension—for example, Area—as a shortcut dimension in the Dimensions FastTab on the General Ledger Setup page.

Additionally, you can now export data from these columns to Excel for easy ad hoc analysis of entries, such as general ledger entries, customer or vendor ledger entries, and many others—for example, by creating pivot tables.

Handle price list exceptions with Allow Updating Defaults:

You can now select the Allow Updating Defaults check box on the Sales Price List or Purchase Price List pages to enable users to change the values in columns such as Applies-to Type, Applies-to No., Currency Code, Starting Date, and Ending Date, when they must add an exception to a price list.

For example, a company prepares a year-end price list with a starting date in November and an ending date in December for items with high turnover during the holiday season. However, some items on the price list will have a special price only for the last two weeks of December. The sales manager can choose a Starting Date in November and an Ending Date in December on the header of the price list. However, knowing that there are exceptions to this rule, the manager can choose Allow Updating Defaults to allow people to change, for example, the starting and ending dates on the price list lines. This lets the sales manager avoid having to create separate price lists for exceptions. However, if exceptions have a business process that requires a separate price list, the sales manager can also create one for them.

Use recurring journals to allocate balances by dimension values:

To allocate costs based on a G/L account balance by dimension, in the Recurring General Journal page, set the Recurring Method field to BD Balance by Dimension or RBD Reversing Balance by Dimension. Additionally, you can now specify dimension filters to be used to calculate the source G/L account’s balance by dimension from which you want to allocate costs. Just choose the Set Dimension Filters action.

For example, your company has a couple of business units and a handful of departments that your controllers have set up as dimensions. To speed up the purchase invoice entry process, you decide to require the accounts payable clerks to enter only business unit dimensions. Because each business unit has specific allocation keys for the department dimension, such as based on the number of employees, you can use the BD Balance by Dimension or RBD Reversing Balance by Dimension recurring methods to reallocate expenses for each business unit to the right departments based on the allocation keys. Such balance allocation by dimension of source G/L account is not possible using the Balance or RB Reversing Balance recurring methods. Those methods will ignore the dimension values on source G/L accounts and always allocate the full balance. But now you can use the new BD Balance by Dimension or RBD Reversing Balance by Dimension recurring methods.

Bank reconciliation improvements:

The Bank Account Reconciliation page supports canceling a posted bank reconciliation so that users can recover from mistakes. The bank reconciliation will automate the reconciliation of differences.

For the North American version that is used in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the Bank Rec. Worksheet has three FastTabs for Checks, Deposits/Transfers, and Adjustments. The FastTabs are now expanded so you can work with more than four lines at a time. Each of the FastTabs can also be popped out to a full page. Lastly, the repeated fields at the top of each FastTab have been removed. They are only shown in the header of the worksheet so that you have more overall workspace on the page.

Better with Microsoft 365:

The 2020 release of wave 2, will enable better cross-app productivity by using Microsoft Teams as a way to interact in business processes.

Business Central in Microsoft Teams:

The new Business Central app for Teams provides two distinct but related features that help streamline conversations and empower users to act on their business data without leaving Microsoft Teams:

• Paste a link to any Business Central record into Microsoft Teams chat, and it will expand that into a compact card to share with your coworkers.
• View the full card details in a window inside Microsoft Teams, including FactBoxes and other embedded content such as charts. Edit fields, initiate workflows, and take action from the window without having to switch apps.
• The first URL that you paste is no longer slow to expand into a card.
• View card details on Microsoft Teams for iOS and Microsoft Teams for Android, and pop out to the Business Central mobile app to do more with your data.
• Ability to print reports to cloud-enabled printers from the details window.
• Functionality in the details window can access the device camera and location (as allowed by each Microsoft Teams client).
• Addition of extensive documentation for users, administrators, and developers.
• Visual adjustments to the details window, including removal of the New record system action, and FactBoxes always start out as collapsed.
• An instructional message is shown when the details window is unable to load due to the browser pop-up blocker.
• A link to a record on a list page will expand into a card only for simple lists with no corresponding details page in the web client.
• A link to https://businesscentral.dynamics.com (without significant parameters) will expand into a card, helping message recipients get started with Business Central. It includes buttons to sign in to Business Central in the browser, install the Business Central mobile app, and install the Business Central app for Teams.
• All other Business Central web client links expand into a simple card, including links to reports, tables, queries, list pages or other page types that do not represent single entities.
• The app now also works for customers connecting to embed apps using the *.bc.dynamics.com URL.
• Preview tag removed.

To benefit from all of the improvements and fixes:

• The app for Teams must be version 1.0.3 or later.
• You must connect to Business Central environments of version 17.3 or later.

Try it out

Add the Business Central app to your Microsoft Teams client by navigating to https://aka.ms/bcGetTeamsApp.

This requires administrators to make the app available based on organizational policies specified in the Microsoft Teams administration center.

Get ready to go

Adjusting the content of a Microsoft Teams card is as simple as specifying a Brick field group for the table, or subscribing to one of the new AL events. Learn about extending Teams Cards.

Compatibility

• The app is not intended to work with on-premises, hosted, or private cloud deployments of Business Central. The only supported deployment type is Business Central online (software as a service).
• The app is not intended to work with any versions of the Business Central service, platform, or business application prior to version 17.0.x.x. For the best experience, your environment should be upgraded to version 17.3 or later.