Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business application solution that is designed and optimized for small and midsized organizations. In 2022 release wave 1, you will see further investments centering on helping users get to productive usage faster, whether they are new or existing customers, by providing in-app improvements to help them get started. Microsoft expands out on the capabilities of the Help pane and make it the go-to resource for helping both new and existing users. Microsoft continues its geographic expansion and will improve performance and usability by focusing on easier navigation in menus. To help users be productive, they enhance reporting capabilities with Excel layouts.
Seamless service: No matter the industry type of a small or midsized business (SMB), business users expect dependable service and platform that they can run their business on.
Application: The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with several optimizations and enhancements of the capabilities so that users can execute business processes more productively.
Better with Microsoft 365: In 2022 release wave 1, they improve the efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams, and also harden the Excel and Outlook add-ins.
Onboarding: In 2022 release wave 1, customers can get to productive usage faster using the new modern Help pane.
Power Platform: Microsoft improves the Power Automate capabilities, making it much easier to set up workflows for the specific needs of an organization.
Application
In 2022 release wave 1, Microsoft delivers updates based on the most popular requests for improvement. They invest in better reporting, improve the control of deferral postings, improve the Dimensions capabilities by allowing default dimensions on locations and deliver several improvements to the supply chain area.
Blocking deletion of G/L Accounts:
Maintenance of the chart of accounts takes place only a few times, once it’s been set up for an organization, but it does occur. To help avoid accidental deletion of general ledger (G/L) accounts, this release wave adds an extra check.
To delete G/L accounts, you must first balance the account to zero. Then, you must close the fiscal year for any entries. The Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field is checked to see if there are ledger entries in the account after this date, in which case it’s likely not to be deleted. The user can still proceed to delete if they need to.
In this release wave, Microsoft introduced an extra safeguard against accidental deletion of G/L accounts even in the scenarios where the criteria are met.
A new field, Block Deletion of G/L Accounts, is added to the General Ledger Setup page. The field acts as an extra validation when a user tries to delete an account where there are ledger entries after the date that is specified in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field.
When the Block Deletion of G/L Accounts field is set to Yes, you cannot delete G/L accounts that have ledger entries after the date in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field. In order to delete such an account, a user with access to the General Ledger Setup page must first set this field to No. Then the account can be deleted.
Microsoft recommends setting the Block Deletion of G/L Accounts field to Yes. Microsoft also recommends that you always have a date set in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field, such as the time you’re required to store your finance data.
Allow the sell-to and bill-to customers to be different for jobs:
Microsoft added support for projects where the party that is receiving a service is different from the party that is paying the bill. When a project manager creates a job, they can specify the customer who will benefit from the project, and this customer can be different from the company that will pay for the project. Additionally, the project manager can specify the place where the work will happen by selecting from a list of ship-to addresses for the customer, add information about external references to simplify communication about the project, and overwrite the standard financial terms of the specific project.
Also added Sell-to and Ship-to field groups to the Jobs page. Existing jobs will be updated automatically, and these new fields will inherit values from the respective fields in the Bill-to group that was already available.
Additionally, the Your Reference, External Document No., Payment Terms Code, and Payment Method Code fields are added to jobs and will be respected when you create invoices.
Bank reconciliation:
Bank reconciliation is a critical accounting task for most businesses because it helps make sure that everything is registered, and that the cash positions are correct. The report for the posted bank reconciliations (bank account statements) has now been improved to allow for more efficient validation and auditing.
The Bank Account Statement report on the posted bank reconciliations has been modified so it now shows a more detailed snapshot of the bank information as of the time when the bank reconciliation was posted. G/L Balance, Outstanding Payments, and Checks fields have been added, making it easier to validate and audit.
Find the Bank Statement Report in the Bank Statements list (posted bank reconciliations list).
Change default company bank account on sales and service documents:
Companies today use multiple bank accounts at different banks, which reduces the costs of handling financial transactions, limits currency risks, and so on. Also, more and more companies use electronic sales invoices that need to include the bank account that the company expects to get paid. Being able to change the bank account on sales and service documents adds flexibility to directing customer payments.
You can now set default bank accounts for companies, and for individual currencies, by choosing Default Bank Account from the list of company bank accounts on the Company Information and Currencies pages.
When someone creates a sales document, the default bank account is automatically assigned. Users who have the appropriate permissions can change the default bank account by choosing a different account in the Bank Account field. Bank account details, such as bank account branch, bank account number, or IBAN, are shown as read-only. When sales or service documents are posted, the selected bank account is copied to the documents, but can be changed by choosing the Update Document action (by users with appropriate permissions). Printed documents also contain details about the selected bank account.
Check documents and journals in background:
To help users with visual indications of issues in documents and journals, Microsoft introduced validations that can help prevent issues with posting before they happen. Early, unobtrusive visual indications that there is a problem can help improve user productivity and save time.
If you enable this feature on the Feature Management page, Business Central will validate documents and journals while you’re working on them. When the validation is enabled, the Check FactBox displays next to the document or journal lines and shows issues in the current document or journal line or the whole journal batch. Validation happens when you load a document or journal batch, and when you choose another document or 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.
Consolidate customer and vendor balances:
A company that you do business with might be both a customer and a vendor. When that’s the case, you can avoid making unnecessary payments or receipts and save on transaction fees by consolidating the customer and vendor balances.
You can turn a contact company into a customer or vendor by using the Create as Customer or Create as Vendor actions on the Contact Card page.
Shows Create as, Vendor functions to create a vendor from contact.
On the Customer Card page, you can view the Balance as Vendor, and on the Vendor Card page you can view the Balance as Customer for companies that were created or linked to the same contact company.
Shows Balance As Vendor field when customer is created as a vendor.
On the Payment Journal page, you can use the Net Customer/Vendor Balances action to net the customer and vendor balances for the company.
Shows Net Customer/Vendor Balances action on Payment Journal page.
The Net Customer/Vendor Balances action creates payment journal lines that net balances for a customer and vendor that are linked.
Fixed Quantity in product bills of materials:
You can ensure that the consumption of a component is the same, regardless of the scrap or output quantities.
You can select the Fixed Quantity option in the Calculation Formula field on production BOM lines, planning components, and production order components to ensure that the consumption of a component is the same.
You can choose from the following values in the Calculation Formula field:
Blank: The quantity is not calculated.
Length: Quantity = Length * Quantity per
Length * Width: Quantity = Length * Width * Quantity per
Length * Width * Depth: Quantity = Length * Width * Height * Quantity per
Weight: Quantity = Weight * Quantity per
Fixed Quantity = Quantity Per
Improved and extensible Adjust Exchange Rates batch job:
When companies operate in multiple countries or regions, it’s important that they can do business and run financial reports in more than one currency. Because exchange rates often change, businesses must periodically update the rates in Business Central. This feature update gives accountants additional control over how they adjust exchange rates.
You can now preview the effect that an exchange rate adjustment will have on posting before you actually post by choosing Preview on the Adjust Exchange Rates report request page. You can select whether you want a detailed (per entry) or summarized (per currency) posting to general ledger by choosing Summarize Entries on the Adjust Exchange Rates report. You can also pick how Adjust Exchange Rates will handle dimensions for unrealized gains and losses postings by choosing one of the following options in the Transfer Dimension Values field:
- Source Entry: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses will have dimensions values transferred from the entry being adjusted.
- By G/L Account: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses will have dimensions values transferred from the unrealized gains and losses G/L account’s dimension settings source entry.
- No Transfer: G/L entries for unrealized gains and losses won’t have dimensions values.
Map to Dataverse option sets such as payment terms, freight terms, and shipping agents without code:
Payment terms, shipment methods, and shipping agents can change along with the environments in which businesses operate. To react quickly to changing business conditions, businesses must be able to quickly and cost effectively change their payment, shipping, or freight policies across their business systems.
You can manually map payment terms, freight terms, shipping methods, and shipping agents between Business Central and Microsoft Dataverse.
If you enable the Feature Update: Map to option sets in Dataverse without code feature in Feature Management in Business Central, you will no longer need to do code customizations to synchronize payment terms, shipment methods, and freight terms. The feature update will add integration table mappings for payment terms (PAYMENT TERMS), shipment methods(SHIPMENT METHOD), and shipping agents (SHIPPING AGENT).
Because payment terms, shipment methods, and shipping agents are handled as standard integration table mappings, you can view which payment terms, shipment methods, and shipping agents are coupled using the Coupled in Dataverse column.
You can synchronize payment terms, shipment methods, and shipping agents data by using the Synchronize action, couple or delete unit groups by choosing the Coupling, Set up coupling or Delete coupling actions, or do a match-based coupling by choosing the Match-Based Coupling action.
More control over deferrals posting:
People use deferrals to recognize a revenue or an expense during a period that is different from the one in which the transaction was actually posted. Most accounting controls are focused on the current accounting period. The deferrals functionality lets you automatically defer revenues and expenses over a specified schedule and multiple accounting periods, giving accountants more control over when people post deferrals.
You can define periods during which you allow people to post deferrals for specific users on the G/L Setup page, and for users on the User Setup page by entering dates in the Allow Deferral Posting From and Allow Deferral Posting To fields. This lets people post deferral entries in a future period, even though the Allow Posting From/To fields block other entries.
For deferral templates, you now have an option to specify Beginning of Next Calendar Year as the starting date.
New option for Start Date: Beginning of Next Calendar Year.
New UI for entering demand forecasts to add support for variant code and other improvements:
Accurate demand forecasting gives businesses valuable insight into their position in the market, which helps decision makers shape their strategies for pricing, business growth, and market potential. The ability to include the right level of detail on item variants in demand forecasts unlocks planning capabilities and reduces lead times for companies that don’t have an inflow of sales orders and manage many nearly identical items.
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.
You can already register the anticipated demand not only with respect to locations and dates, but with item variants as well in the Demand Forecast Entries page directly or use the Edit in Excel action for bulk editing.
With 2022 release wave 1, you can define the right level of details in the Forecast by Location and Forecast by Variant fields in the Demand Forecast Overview page. Notice that filters by date, locations, items, as well as forecast type are stored in the Demand Forecast Name table. So you can easily stop and continue your work later.
Existing customers must activate the new experience in the Feature Management page: Feature Update: Enable a new user experience for creating demand forecasts. For new customers of Business Central, this experience is enabled by default.
Payment Reconciliation Journal:
Bank and payment reconciliations are key processes for all businesses because they provide an overview of whether the cash flow is accurate, and that all transactions have been accounted for. In this release, Microsoft made it even more efficient to use payment reconciliation journals.
The Payment Reconciliation Journal has been improved with the following capabilities:
- View fields for debits and credits on the footer of journals.
- Use separate number series.
- Preview before posting.
- Use the payment reference on the auto-application rule.
- Identify the bank ledger entries that are already posted.
- Reverse the G/L register posted through the payment reconciliation journal.
Report selection for Projects:
The Report Selections for Jobs page lets users specify which report object will be used to print job quotes if you use the Jobs module to manage your projects.
Use the in-product Search to open the new Report Selection – Job page. The default configuration will use report 1016 Job Quote, but you can change this default behavior. You can also add reports to the Report Selection – Job page if you want to print more than one report per document type, for example.
In this version, you can only specify Job Queue as the value for the Usage field.
For more information, see Report Selection
Set default Dimensions on locations:
Dimensions are values that categorize entries so you can track and analyze them on documents, such as sales orders. For example, dimensions can indicate the department or project an entry came from. That can help people avoid making a mistake and having to enter dimensions manually on the transaction level if all goods are coming out of a single location and department.
You can now set default dimensions for a location on the Location Card page by choosing Location, and then Dimensions. The location’s default dimensions are copied to journals and documents when you specify the location on a line, but you can delete or change the dimension on the line if needed. You can require that people specify dimensions for specific locations before they can post an entry. You can also include location dimension values in Default Dimension Priorities and Dimension Combinations for combinations of priority and dimension rules.
Shopify connector:
Dynamics 365 Business Central is teaming up with Shopify to help companies create a better shopping experience. Shopify provides merchants with an easy-to-use e-commerce solution, and Dynamics 365 Business Central offers comprehensive business management across finance, sales, service, and operations teams in a single application. Seamless connection between the two systems will synchronize 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 Dynamics 365 Business Central to connect data to help businesses adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better.
Adapt faster- Connecting Dynamics 365 Business Central with Shopify will help merchants all over the world implement more agile online business processes, while keeping people focused on selling. With connected data across your online stores and business operations, you can rapidly respond to consumer demands to adjust product pricing and merchandising. With support for multitier pricing structures and multiple currencies, companies, and entities, Business Central will support multiple Shopify store scenarios with ease.
Work smarter- Eliminating manual processes will not only improve accuracy, but also keep people focused on taking care of customers. By connecting Shopify and Business Central, you will improve visibility into stock, pricing, existing customers and order history, order status, billing, and payments. Better visibility means faster customer inquiry responses, timely returns and refunds, and more accurate order processing.
Perform better- Enhanced operational efficiency not only saves you time and reduces costs but can also translate into better results and faster decision-making. You’ll have the confidence to expand your online presence while minimizing overhead with automatic synchronization between systems for price changes, product updates, and customers. At the end of accounting periods, Business Central will help merchants handle their financial reporting and tax reporting as required by local legislation.
Support inventory pick and warehouse pick operations for jobs:
Enable internal warehouse activities for jobs to ensure an effective flow through the warehouse and to organize and maintain company inventories.
The warehouse activity of picking items before they are consumed is performed in different ways, depending on how warehouse management features are configured. The complexity can rank from no warehouse features, through basic warehouse configurations for order-by-order handling in one or more activities, to advanced configurations where all warehouse activities must be performed in a directed workflow.
If you decide to organize and record your picking activity with warehouse documents, you choose the Require Pick field on the Location Card page. This field specifies whether you must perform pick activities in the warehouse at this location.
Synchronize sales quotes and orders in both directions between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales:
Keep your sellers informed about possible shipment delays, inventory shortages, or other changes to the sales quotes and orders that you synchronize between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales.
You can now synchronize sales quotes and orders between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales in both directions. For example, if a customer changes their mind about the product or quantity they ordered in Dynamics 365 Sales, such changes can be automatically processed in Business Central by archiving the sales document and creating a new one. The same is true for changes in Business Central-for example, when prices, tax amounts, or expected shipment dates change, the changes are automatically synchronized to Dynamics 365 Sales. That helps keep your sellers up to date with the latest changes and the status of quotes and orders.
The Integration Table Mappings page contains new mappings for sales quote and order header and lines. When setting up the initial connection for Dynamics 365 Sales, active quotes and orders can be synched between Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales using Full Synchronization or Match-based coupling.
Use different G/L Accounts for payables and receivables transactions:
Sometimes businesses want to post payable and receivable transactions to a different G/L account than the one that is specified on the customer or vendor posting group-for example, in a case where a transaction is for a bad debt. Controllers can define policies for posting these non-standard transactions, and accountants can change them during posting.
You can enable alterations of default customer or vendor posting groups by choosing Allow Alteration of Posting Group on the Sales and Receivable Setup and Service Mgt. Setup pages for customer posting group changes, and the Purchases and Payables Setup page for vendor posting group changes.
On the Customer Posting Groups or Vendor Posting Groups pages, you can specify the posting groups to allow as substitutes by choosing Substitutions. Substitute posting groups can replace the default customer or vendor posting group specified for a customer or vendor.
After you set this up, you can pick among allowed substitute posting groups and change customer or vendor posting group when posting sales or purchase documents and journals. Changed, non-default, customer or vendor posting groups are copied to posted documents and journals, and payable or receivable G/L entries are posted to the G/L accounts specified for the substitutes.
When applying, for example, an invoice and payment that are posted to with different customer or vendor posting groups (different G/L accounts), Business Central transfers amounts between the G/L accounts to balance them.
A Suggest Vendor Payments report can now also be run using Vendor Posting Group as criteria for suggesting payments.
Better with Microsoft 365
In 2022 release wave 1, Microsoft invests in a stronger reporting story through better integration with Excel when using the Excel layout capabilities. Along with improving the support for collaborative business processes in Teams so you can bring Business Central pages into a Teams channel. Finally, enrich the information from Business Central when presenting it in Teams.
Improvements to the Teams integration and details page:
The Business Central app for Teams and the ability to view details of the shared content directly from Teams remains a crucial point of collaboration. They add more capabilities and strengthen the link between these two apps so that business decision makers can act fast and collaborate with other stakeholders without leaving Microsoft Teams.
When a link or record from Business Central is shared to Microsoft Teams, either though the Share feature that Microsoft introduced in 2021 release wave 2 or by copying the link from the browser tab, it renders an actionable mini-card that displays the most crucial information about the data that you shared. In this release wave, they added more capabilities to this adaptive card:
The card opens the Details view on a larger page that gives you more screen real estate. It also gives you access to more insights and details about the entry. You can open the FactBox pane on the side, see details in focus mode, or view more columns of information at the same time.
From the Details page, you can open the full Business Central experience in the browser. With the addition of this capability, they remove the equivalent option from the main mini-card.
The card can be pinned as a new tab in Microsoft Teams.
In addition to these improvements, you can also directly pin a new tab to a Teams channel or chat by choosing the New tab action in Teams, and then choosing the Business Central icon. This way, you can add a new tab with rich Business Central content.
Outlook add-in – add attachments from emails directly to Business Central documents:
Working with Business Central add-in for Outlook allows salespeople and decision makers to take direct action while communicating with customers. With this new change, Microsoft allows any attachments sent by the customer via email to be added to Business Central records, and this way simplify the workflows and shorten the learning curve.
This feature provides you with an option to take all or selected attachments sent by the external customer via email and directly add them to Business Central records (as attached documents for contacts, customers, and so on).
In Outlook, the add-in will display a list of the attachments to the email and allows the attachments to be moved to Business Central.