Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Fall 2022 Release

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business application solution designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations. In 2022 release wave 2, will help users get onboarded, whether they are new or existing customers, by giving them easy access to the right apps to help them get started. Microsoft will improve tooltips to help new and existing users.

Microsoft continues their geographic expansion, and will improve performance and usability by making it easier to navigate menus. To help more users be more productive, and they enhance their automation story with Power Automate.

Additional updates in 2022 release wave 2 include:

Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect a dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.
Application: Continue to improve the application to support integration with Shopify. The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements so that users can run their business processes more efficiently.
Better with Microsoft 365: Improve the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams. Users can pin cards inside Teams, and delegated admins can now use the Excel add-in.
Onboarding: Organizations can get to productive usage faster because it’s easier to discover and install apps.
Power Platform: More efficient automation with Power Automate so that users can set up workflows for the specific needs of their organization.

Application

In 2022 release wave 2, Microsoft delivers updates based on the most popular requests for improvement.

In the financial area, Microsoft will continue to improve bank reconciliation. In this release wave, They improve the test report, add a statement report with two sections for outstanding reconciliations, and provide better automation for check ledger entries.

Users will be able to reverse the journal entries from posted payment reconciliation journals. This way, they can more efficiently recover the books from mistakes that may happen. Just like with other journal entries, the user must unapply the entries manually first.

Businesses that use check payments will now have multiple remit addresses available for vendors.

To make financial reporting more transparent for newcomers and experienced users alike, we’re renaming account schedules to financial reporting. They’re also changing the feature slightly to give a better overview of the available reports. A financial report is now defined as a combination of row and column definitions plus a few parameters. This means that variants of the same report can now be stored as separate reports. The core functionality is the same, but the name changes make it easier to grasp the concepts. New templates for row and column definitions will become available in updates over the next release waves, making it easier for business users to get started and get productive.

Better bank reconciliation for checks and improved reporting:

Bank reconciliation is a key task in every company, and performing the task efficiently is important to every finance department. Better matching rules improve the speed with which bank reconciliation is done.

In bank reconciliation, now you can match check entries from the bank based on information from the check ledger. This gives a much higher degree of match confidence than only using information from the bank ledger. The matching rules are also made more clear, and more rules are added to increase matching success rates.

The test report has been changed so the G/L Account Balance field now shows the balance on the real G/L account at the statement ending balance date. This lets you easily detect direct postings to the G/L account. Direct posting to G/L accounts often leads to errors in bank reconciliation.

The G/L Acc. Balance (LCY) field will be calculated if you’re using a bank denominated in currency. In some cases, this can lead to differences in actual bank balances due to rounding, but it still allows you to detect direct postings to the G/L account.

The Sum of Differences field is the same as the total in the Difference column for the reconciled entries. It’s convenient to also have the sum in the header.

The Bank Statement report now includes payments that were outstanding when the bank reconciliation was posted.

The new features are available on the Bank Reconciliation page, where the test report is found, and on Bank Acc. Statement reports.

When you add a G/L account to a bank posting group on the Bank Account card, you will get a warning if the G/L account allows direct posting. This lets you decide whether to leave direct posting turned on, such as if you need to manage an opening balance. For more information, see Entering an opening balance.

Financial reporting replaces account schedules:

In order to make it easier for new users to get started with Business Central, Microsoft renamed the account schedules capability Financial Reporting. They also separate the definition of a financial report from that of the definition of rows and columns, so that it’s clearer that a financial report is a combination of row and column definitions plus additional parameters.

You can now search for Financial Reporting in the in-product search field as well as links from some Home pages.

The link Financial Reporting will open a list of financial reports, and you can add user-defined reports to the list. The financial reports will have their own name, a row definition, a column definition, and additional parameters that will be set when you open the Financial Report page. In earlier versions, this page was called Overview.

The objects that have been known as account schedules will now be called Row Definitions, for which you can still define a default column layout and an analysis view. Column layouts become Column Definitions. For both row and column definitions, you can edit the definitions separately from the financial reports. You can now copy column definitions, making it easier to make variants of a column definition.

More details coming: The name changes will be propagated to pages that referenced Account Schedules.

Find posted and non-posted document lines in search:

Pages with document lines are often used for specific analysis. Now you can be more productive by finding them through the in-product search field and bookmark links to the documents on your home page for easy access to the original or a filtered view.

In the in-product search field, you can search for the following pages, grouped here by document type.

Posted documents:

Posted Purchase Invoice Lines (page 529)
Posted Purchase Receipt Lines (page 528)
Posted Purchase Cr. Memo Lines (page 530)
Posted Sales Invoice Lines (page 526)
Posted Sales Shipment Lines (page 525)
Posted Sales Credit Memo Lines (page 527)

Open documents:

Purchase Lines (page 518)
Sales Lines (page 516)

And if you have a premium license:

Order Comp. Lines (page 5407)

You can bookmark pages from the search results to add them to your home page. Learn more at Bookmark a Page or Report on Your Role Center.

You can also add one or more views with predefined filters and sorting. Learn more at Save and Personalize List Views

Flexible sorting in the Planning Worksheet page:

Microsoft is aligning the ways you can work with the Planning Worksheet and Requisition Worksheet pages by enabling you to sort lines on both pages by choosing a column name.

The Planning Worksheet page is still slightly different than the Requisition Worksheet page because it can be used for multilevel production orders. By default, lines are sorted by the Item No field. To show lines of multilevel orders, sort by the Ref. Order No field to group different items from the same order. The MPS Order and Planning Level fields can help clarify the hierarchy of lines.

Make entry of variant codes required:

Avoid mistakes in data entry when dealing with items that have variants.

Item variants are a great way to keep your list of items under control, especially if you have a large number of items that are almost identical and vary only in color, for example. Rather than setting up each variant as a separate item, you can set up one item and then specify the various colors as variants of the item.

With this release wave, admins can require that users specify the variant in documents and journals for items that have variants.

To activate the capability, navigate to the Inventory Setup page and select the Variant Mandatory if Exists field.

You can override this global setting for specific items. For each item, the Variant Mandatory if Exists field on the item card has the following options:

Default: The setting from Inventory Setup applies to this item.

No: Users are not required to specify a variant for this item.

Yes: If one or more variant exists for this item, users must specify the relevant variant; otherwise they will be blocked from posting the transaction.

If the capability is switched on, for items with variants, users will see the field mandatory icon in documents. Users won’t be able to post an entry if the variant is not specified.

Post item charges for each step of the process:

Get more flexibility on how and when to register cost in the sales or purchasing process.

To help you track costs and capture valuation, your inventory items must carry any added costs, such as freight, physical handling, insurance, and transportation that you incur when purchasing or selling the items. For purchases, the landed cost of a purchased item consists of the vendor’s purchase price and all additional direct item charges that can be assigned to individual receipts or return shipments. For sales, knowing the cost of shipping sold items can be as vital to your company as knowing the landed cost of purchased items.

This release wave brings you more flexibility on how and when to post item charges. Let’s illustrate with a scenario:

You’ve created a purchase order with three lines. Two lines are for items, and one line captures item charges that are allocated across the items by amount.

When the goods are delivered, you discover that the first item is missing so that you cannot mark it as received. You can receive and post the invoice for the second line only, so that you can ship it to your customer and deal with another item later.

But how to handle item charges in this case?

It’s easy with the new Quantity to Handle field in the Item Charge Assignment page. You just set the Quantity to Handle field to 0, and now you can adjust the value of the Quantity to Invoice field on the purchase order lines—just copy the value from the Item Charge Qty. to Handle field.

Now you can post the partial invoice with the item charge allocated to one line, making sure that all cost factors are accounted.

Once you are ready to handle the second item, you just update the Quantity to Handle field and post the order.

Service – minor improvements:

Microsoft has made minor improvements in Service Management.

For sales, purchase, and now also service documents, you can add information and control the layout of an email with the Use for Email Body and Email Body Layout Description fields when sending a report to someone. For example, the Use for Email Body field adds information such as an invoice number or due date in an email. The Email Body Layout Description lets you use a custom report layout. These fields are now available on the Report Selection – Service page.

Additionally, they’ve expanded the types of items that you can include in standard service codes to include service and non-inventoriable items. If you often perform a certain type of service, you can save time by creating a standard service code that contains the lines you’d want to add to a service document. When you create a service document and choose the standard service code, its lines are added to the document.

Simpler Shopify connection:

Business Central has teamed up with Shopify to help customers create a better online shopping experience. Shopify provides merchants with an easy-to-use e-commerce solution, and Business Central offers comprehensive business management across finance, sales, service, and operations teams in a single application. The seamless connection between the two systems synchronizes order, stock, and customer information to ensure that merchants can fulfill orders faster and better serve their customers. The joint effort furthers the commitment of Business Central to connect data to help businesses adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better.

In this release wave, they have made improvements in the user interface based on feedback from customers.

Shopify Shop Card

The Shop Code field is made mandatory, so you won’t create a shop card with a blank code by mistake.

The Item Synchronization tab is renamed to Item/Product Synchronization to educate the user about the differences in terminology.
The Inventory Synchronization tab is removed. The Inventory Tracked and Default Inventory Policy fields are moved to the Item/Product Synchronization tab. This way, it’s more obvious that these fields are default values used for products that are created in Shopify.
Some fields are made editable only if certain conditions are met so that users can focus on more important settings. Learn more in the table below.
The blank option for the Image Sync field is renamed to disabled to highlight that nothing will happen with images, unless another option is selected.
The Sync Orders and Sync Shipments actions are added to the Sync group.

Shopify locations

The order of the fields has been changed. Now, the Location Filter field is closer to the Disabled field, as both are responsible for synchronization of inventory.
You’ll be reminded to check settings if you specified filters but haven’t switched off the Disabled toggle.
The request page for Location Filter is now removed, switching to a standard filtering experience.

Add items to Shopify

The Add Item to Shopify task is the first thing you do to send items to Shopify. The Sync Images and Sync Inventory actions are usually triggered when this task is completed. However, the item synchronization can take some time.

Additionally, the Sync Image and Sync Inventory toggles to the request page of the Add Item to Shopify task. Use them to start the tasks automatically. These toggles are active if the shop that you’re adding items to is configured to sync images and inventory.

They have added a visualization to show that the Shop Code field is mandatory.

Sales orders

The sorting is changed and now shows the most recent orders on top of the list. The sorting is done by the Created At field.
The peak functionality was added to the Sales Order No. and Sales Invoice No., meaning you can navigate to related sales documents directly from the field.
The Sync Shipments to Shopify action is added to the Shopify Orders page. That should make it clearer that, on top of importing orders, you must export shipments to Shopify.
The sorting of transactions is changed and now shows the most recent transactions on top of the list. The sorting is done by the Created At field.
The sorting of payouts is changed and now shows the most recent transactions on top of the list. The sorting is done by the Date field.

Synchronization status

The Shopify Activities tile now has two new cues:

Unprocessed Shipments: This cue shows posted shipments that weren’t synchronized to Shopify. Usually, it means that you must run the Synchronize Shipments to Shopify task.
Synchronization Errors: This cue displays the number of failed job queue log entries related to various synchronization activities. This cue will be helpful to spot problems if you completely automate the process and everything is running in non-attended mode.

Track items that are used in projects, including picks:

From the job planning lines, access the Item Tracking Lines page so you can define lot, serial numbers, or package details for the job planning line. This way, you speed up the actual consumption at later stages, and you unlock pick and planning scenarios.

As the flow of goods in today’s supply chain becomes more and more complex, keeping track of items is increasingly important to the companies involved. For example, monitoring an item’s transaction flow is a legal requirement in the business of medical and chemical supply. Other businesses might want to monitor products with warranties or expiration dates for customer service reasons.

In this release wave, we extend the item tracking module to cover job planning lines. Users can find the Item Tracking Window action on the Job Planning Lines page and define specific lot, serial, or package number at an earlier stage. Item tracking is also a prerequisite for a number of scenarios, such as inventory picks or planning for specific item tracking.

You can specify item tracking only for lines of type Budget or Both Budget and Billable. Any specified serial and lot numbers affect only the consumption part of the process and will be transferred to job journal lines, the inventory pick process, and the warehouse pick process. Item tracking will not be transferred to sales invoices.

New VAT Date field on documents and entries:

Users can report VAT statements and returns based on the new VAT Date instead of the Posting Date to meet requirements by certain countries.

Some countries require reporting for VAT statements and VAT returns by using a date that’s different than the Posting Date. Sometimes, the date can be Document Date, but even this date can differ from the requirement. For this reason, the new VAT Date exists on all purchase and sales documents, as well as on journals. Before starting, users can set up the default value for VAT Date (Posting Date or Document Date) in the General Ledger Setup, but the date can be changed on individual documents and journals. When a document is posted, the new VAT Date will be visible in VAT entries and in G/L entries. If necessary, it’s possible to change the VAT Date after posting.

Set up data exchange more easily:

Making it easier to exchange data in specific tables with data from external files.

You can set up Business Central to exchange data in specific tables with data from external files, such as to send and receive electronic documents, or to import and export bank data or other data, such as payroll, currency exchange rates, and item catalogs. In this release wave, we improve this capability, adding new features and making it easier to work with different types of data.

Among the improvements are the ability to group by a chosen field, use the key index to sort results, and the new transformation types Rounding and Field Lookup.

Use multiple remit-to addresses for vendors:

Having multiple remit-to addresses for each vendor adds flexibility when paying invoices with checks.

Remit addresses are used when you print checks to pay your vendors. Vendors can have multiple remit-to addresses for payments. For example, a vendor might supply an item from a subsidiary company, but wants to receive payment at their headquarters. Business Central lets you set up multiple mailing addresses for each vendor, making it easy to choose the correct location to send payments to on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

Remit addresses are available on Vendor Card pages and on the Shipping & Payments FastTab on purchase orders and invoices.

When you create payment journal lines using the Pay Vendor or Create Payment actions on the Vendors list page or Vendor Card page, or the Apply Entries action on a payment journal, Business Central will use the remit-to code on the vendor ledger entry. You can overwrite this value.

Reverse payment reconciliation journal entries:

You can use different number series for payment reconciliation journals. You can also reverse any posting done through the journal.

If you use the Payment Reconciliation Journal page to register and apply customer payments, you can set up the journal to use a specific number series so that it’s easy to identify the entries that were posted through the journal. You set up the number series in the Bank Account page in the Posting FastTab.

When you use automatic application, Business Central skips bank ledger entries that have already been posted, which helps prevent double-posting.

If you’re also doing bank reconciliation, we’ve added the following to the test report:

The statement date is added as the most recent date of entries in the journal.
The statement ending balance is added as the sum of amounts in the journal.
Outstanding payments and checks are calculated based on the bank ledger entries within the statement ending date that isn’t applied, and therefore won’t be closed during a bank reconciliation.

Similar to other journals, when you correct posted entries you can reverse entries that were posted through the payment reconciliation journal from the G/L Register page. For example, it might be helpful to reverse entries if you applied a payment to the wrong customer. After you unapply the posted customer ledger entries you can use the Reverse Register action on the G/L Register page to reverse the journal that posted the payments. Alternatively, on the Posted General Journals page, you can use the Copy Selected Lines to Journal action to reverse specific lines from the posted payment reconciliation journal.

User experiences

Improvements across the portfolio of clients for desktop and mobile devices.

Auto-save as you work:

Since Business Central has no Save button, business users need full confidence that the data they enter or modify is saved automatically as they work. Similarly, developers need more accurate indication of data persistence when testing or debugging their code.

Business Central immediately saves changes to individual fields as soon as you tab away from the field or set focus to another element on the page, instead of only saving when the page is closed. Changes are saved to the database without any noticeable impact to performance.

Previously, this behavior was enabled exclusively for select UI experiences such as the Outlook add-in. Starting with 2022 release wave 2, this behavior applies to all Business Central clients including the desktop Web client, tablet client, phone client, Outlook add-in, Teams app, and embedding the client in any other applications.

The save indicator more accurately reflects the state of data on the page, even when working across multiple tabs or browser windows.

Administrators of Business Central on-premises can use the web server setting SaveValueToDatabasePromptly to turn off this capability (the setting is enabled by default).

Experience updated UI elements:

Lowering the learning curve through familiarity in visual design.

The web client keeps up to date with Fluent UI design elements across the different application pages and system controls. In this release:

Option fields and lookup fields are visually aligned when at rest.
Bricks can now display a single verbose text field, extending the brick with up to three lines of text.
Field and column tooltips updated.

Switch companies across environments:

Business Central is ready to adapt to the needs of complex SMB organizations by organizing multiple companies across environments. While most employees are bound to a single company, some users need to view, edit, and compare data across companies. The 2022 release wave 2 makes it easier to get an overview of the companies and environments you have access to, and to rapidly switch contexts.

Feature details

Visual cues in the app bar help you to quickly understand which company and environment you’re currently working in, and include the company badge if one was specified for a company.
Activate the company switcher pane from anywhere in Business Central, either from the app bar or using the Ctrl+O keyboard shortcut.
Search for companies you have access to, grouped by environment, including production and sandbox environments within your organization.
Switch company in the current browser tab or open the selected company in a new tab to multitask or compare data side by side.

The experience and capabilities may vary between Business Central online and on-premises.

Changes to the company badge

The company badge provides a colorful and compact visual indicator so that users can understand at a glance which context they are working in. To support the company switcher, administrators can now specify a badge to have a specific color and up to 6 characters—all from the Company Information page.

Modern Action Bar:

You can now use a promoted section of the action bar to help users learn the product. You can tailor it to fit the needs of your industry, company, or yourself. Add actions that you want to make available in an easily discoverable and consistent way across the product for new users to quickly learn the product, or tailor it to your business-specific needs for proficient users.

The action bar is updated with improvements for all existing customers as they are updated to 2022 release wave 2.

The action bar is better at keeping related actions together and avoiding the same action being available in multiple menus. This helps reduce clutter and confusion, especially for users new to Business Central.
The Navigate menu that was previously available in some pages has been retired, and its contents merged with the entity menu. The entity menu is the one bearing the name of the entity displayed on a page, such as Customer on Customer Card or Order on Sales Order, and it is now the primary menu for information related to the current record.
You can now use split buttons in certain places. Split buttons are well known in other Microsoft products as a combination of a button and a menu. This type of control gives you quick one-click reach to the first action in a menu via the left button part and access to other related actions via the right dropdown part.
Based on user feedback and our statistics of how pages are used, certain actions are in more prominent places in the action bar. This reduces the number of clicks to reach frequently used actions and makes relevant actions more discoverable.
You now have more flexibility in the ways you can customize menus to suit your purpose and preference. That means previous limitations to which and where actions could be moved no longer apply. This greatly empowers users in personalizing pages and in configuring profiles.

Optional changes to the action bar in 2022 release wave 2

The following additional optimizations are available to all upgraded customers as well, but not enabled right away with the update. To activate the optionally available improvements to the action bar, choose the Try it out action in the Get started column, or have your admin choose All Users in the Enable for field in the Feature Management page.

On documents, cards, worksheets, and listplus pages, the Process tab is renamed to Home to better align with the ribbon terminology that users see in other Microsoft products.
On document pages that have Post and Release actions, the actions are now presented as split buttons in the Home tab. This provides better discoverability and one-click access to these frequently used actions. On several other pages, certain actions have been grouped into split buttons when the actions are strongly connected by the effect they have. For example, a new split button is created for the actions Correct, Cancel, and Create Corrective Credit Memo. This provides one-click access to Correct which is the most frequently used among the three.
With documents, cards, worksheets, and listplus pages, the action bar is now presented in the pinned state when opened for the first time. This helps you to discover relevant actions in the action bar and provides one-click reach to actions, without first pinning the action bar yourself.
With document pages that have a Lines subpage, or any other page having a subpage, the subpage’s actions are now visible right away, without requiring a click on “More options.”

Existing customers that are updated and new customers can choose to switch off the Modern Action Bar feature. For example, if an extension isn’t compatible, or if the optimization’s changes to the user interface require time to introduce to users.

Legacy list views will be hidden:

The April 2019 release of Business Central introduced a new way to implement filtered list views that makes them available across form factors, and empowers business users to easily create, modify, hide, show, reorder, and remove views from the web client. Customers benefit from all of these capabilities when using views created using this newer model.

Legacy views are list views that were created by developers in previous versions of Business Central by placing them on the role center page. Business Central displays legacy views side by side with modern views directly on the list page, but these offer a degraded experience and fewer options compared to modern views.

Starting with 2023 release wave 2 (version 23.0), which is currently targeting Q3 of calendar year 2023, legacy views will no longer be supported and won’t be displayed on list pages.

You can already experience this change in 2022 release wave 2 (version 21.0) by enabling Legacy list views are hidden in the Feature Management page in Business Central.

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