This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 30th of the new functionality in the Application section is see improved usability for warehouse and inventory.

Productivity increases when processes are easy, so Microsoft have improved the usability of several areas within inventory and warehouse management. For example, you can get help to create warehouse employees, and in several places data is easier to access and digest.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview:  Mar 2, 2024
General Availability:  Apr 2, 2024

Feature Details

Based on feedback from Microsoft’s customers, Microsoft have made it easier to complete several inventory and warehouse processes.

Carry item description to warehouse entries

When reconciling or auditing data, it’s useful to have the description of the item from the source document on the warehouse ledger entries.
On the Warehouse Setup page, you can choose the Copy Item Descr. to Entries checkbox so that when transactions are made at locations that require bins, the description text on lines of type Item carries over to the warehouse entries.

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This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 29th of the new functionality in the Application section is automate the reminders process in collections.

Make your collections more effective by automating the process of creating, issuing, and sending reminders to your customers. Automation can significantly reduce the time you’ll spend on this workload, provide a better overview of the process, and give you full control over each step.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview:  Mar 1, 2024
General Availability:  Apr 1, 2024

Feature Details

You can automate each step in the reminder processes. You can set up automated jobs to create, issue, and send (or print) reminders, and you can create custom email texts for each reminder level so your messages suit your business’s collection policies and practices.

You set up reminder automation on the Reminder Automation page, where you create the individual automations. You can combine the steps to create, issue, and send reminders, or you can create separate automations for each step if that’s better for your collections processes.

On the Reminder Automation page, you define the individual actions (steps) in the automations. You can set filters for reminder terms for the automation as a whole, and set additional filters for each action in the automation. You can also attach outstanding invoices attached as PDFs to the emails.

After you set up and start an automation, it’ll run until you put it on hold or stop it. If you want to control how the automation runs, you can open the Job Queue Entries page and set the recurrence to daily, or every Tuesday, for example.

On the Reminder Level Communication page, you can enter texts to show on the reminder on the Attachment Text FastTab, and body texts for emails on the Email Text FastTab. The texts let you tailor messages for each reminder level, which makes it more flexible and accommodates business policies for communicating payment requests.

When you send an email, the reminder is a report you attach to the email. You define the report that generates the reminder on the Report Selection Reminder/Finance Charge page, where you also select the report that holds the email body text in the Email Body Layout Name field. When you send emails to your customers, the texts on the Email Text FastTab is inserted in the report selected in the Email Body Layout Name field. The standard report has different text fields to contain this field (GreetingText, BodyText, ClosingText). If you prefer, you can edit this report to have more content. The layout of these reports can be managed and edited in the (searchable) Report Layouts page if you need to tailor them to your business needs.

Continue reading “New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1: Automate the Reminders Process in Collections”

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 28th of the new functionality in the Application section is allow lines with amounts of zero on recurring general journals.

Recurring general journals let you distribute and allocate recurring expenses and revenue in an effective way. The journals’ lines are saved from run to run, and you can modify them whenever you want before you post them.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview:  Mar 1, 2024
General Availability:  Apr 1, 2024

Feature Details

With this release Microsoft have made it easier to maintain recurring general journals that use the Fixed recurrency method but might have zero amount lines in some of the runs.

During posting, Business Central ignores the lines with zero amount and doesn’t post them instead of prompting you to add an amount or delete the lines. Deleting the lines would then mean having to add them again if they’re needed for future runs. The lines remain in the journal for the next run, where you can update the amounts as needed.

This makes it easier to maintain journals without having to maintain the list of lines needed in cases where they had to be removed for an individual run.

My Opinion

This is something I stumbled over doing training a little while ago, and is one which is a little hard to defend; it’s good to see that even small issues like this are being addressed by Microsoft.

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.

The 27th of the new functionality in the Application section is specify dimensions on posted entries applications with realized gains or losses.

When companies operate in multiple countries or regions, it’s important that they can do business and prepare financial reports using the dimensions they have set up for reporting.

Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: –
General Availability:  Apr 1, 2024

Feature Details

In the previous release, 2023 wave 2, the currency exchange rate adjustment batch job was improved to allow you to control the posting of dimensions assigned to the adjustment entries.

In 2024 release wave 1, the same concept applies when you submit payments to invoices in foreign currencies. The dimensions assigned to entries that are posted to realized gains and losses accounts are controlled by a setting on the Application FastTab on the General Ledger Setup page. The setting, Dimension Posting, offers three options:

• Source Entry Dimensions: G/L entries for realized gains and losses have dimensions values that were transferred from the application entry.

   Note

  The application entry is usually the payment entry—for example, when you apply and post payments in journals—but can also be an invoice or credit memo if you select them as the applying entry from the customer/vendor ledger entries.

• No Dimensions: G/L entries for realized gains and losses won’t have dimensions values.
• G/L Account Dimensions: G/L entries for realized gains and losses have dimensions values that were transferred from the realized gains and losses G/L account’s dimension settings source entry.

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

There is typically three main ways that configuring a new company in Business Central is accomplished. I’m not so much talking about the creation of the first company, but if you’re configuring a multi-company system and want to ease setup of the many companies required.

The three ways, which I have used and/or seen used are:

• Configuration Packages.
• Template, which is sometimes called a Gold Build.
• Master Data Management.

With the configuration package approach, the first company is populated and configuration packages used to export and import data between one company and another. This option is maximum flexibility as you can choose which configuguration packages are used. It is also sometimes used to provide a basic configuration of the first company being created.

The template approach is where one company is configured as a template with the settings and any common master data, but no transactional data whatsoever. When a new company is needed, this company is copied to a new one and settings unique to the new company (such as the Local Currency) are configured.

Master data Management is the newest of these options, introduced in release 2023 Wave 1, it allows tables and fields to be synchronised between companies. It can be used for both the initial setup and the ongoing syncing of data (such as if a unified chart of accounts is in use). This feature, despite it’s name, allows the syncing of both setup and master data.

There is no one-size fits all approach and they all have potential downsides.

The template approach can sometimes fail if the template is not kept up-to-date; master data can fail, quite horribly, if the wrong tables and fields are synchronised (never sync the id fields for example).

I’d be interested in hearing which approach, and why, people use if anyone would like to share.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Deleting a company in Business Central is quite easy to do; this is of course a double edged sword.

If the wrong company is deleted from an environment, can it be restored? The short answer is, no, the deletion of a company is permanent.

The best that can be done is to do a point in time restore of the environment, which will get you that company back, but restores the entire environment, so you may need to repeat all of the data entry and processing done between the time the environment was restored too and the time you stopped processing.

This is another of those areas where it would be good to see some enhancements to allow the point in time restore to be done for a single company.

I figure the current process is the nature in which Business Central stores the company data; each company has a set of tables prefixed with the company name and all are stored in one database, which is the environment.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

One of my early thoughts when starting to work with Business Central was how to refresh a sandbox environment. It’s all very well to create one, but at some point you’ll want it to reflect the up-to-date production environment, so that any testing or development you do is against how the system is now being used.

This is one area where I think Business Central could do with some improvement; you cannot refresh an environment.

Instead you need to delete the current sandbox environment and create a new one with a copy of production.

This seems a little ore work than is needed and will also mean that you will need to make any necessary adjustments to user logins and permissions to make sure only the right people have access to the sandbox.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

If something catastrophic happens with your Business Central system, then it is possible to do a point in time restore of the environment; this does seem to be limited to the environment level rather than the company level.

This is a feature of how Business Central stores the data for companies; basically an environment is a database and the tables for all of the companies are in the database, prefixed with the company name.

You can do this by logging into the Business Central admin center, select the environment and click the Restore button:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Restore an Environment to a Point in Time”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you delete an environment, it is first soft deleted for a fourteen day period in which you can restore it, after which it is permanently deleted. If more than fourteen days old, you will need to open a service request with Microsoft.

To restore a soft deleted environment, access the Business Central Admin Center and click the Restore deleted environments button to see the environments which are available for restoration.

I have an IESandbox environment which can be restored; you’ll notice below, that it has a year and time appended to the name. This happens automatically when an environment is deleted, to make sure that every deleted environment has a unique name.

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This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When you sign up for a Business Central trial, a production environment is created for you; if you sign up in other ways, you will have to create the first environment yourself.

You can also create sandbox environments with a copy of production or the CRONUS sample company data.

Through time, you will end up with a few environments; commonly I deal with clients who have production, development and testing environments on the system. At some point you will need to delete an environment, which is fairly easy to do.

To do this, log into your Business Central admin center, which you can access by clicking the settings cog in Business Central and then Admin Center.

Once in the admin center drill into the environment you want to delete and click the Delete button:

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