Microsoft has announced the first wave of changes coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2023 Wave 2, mostly available from September.

Most features can be previewed now, users just need to create a new Sandbox as the latest version.

The new features are officially available next month and will automatically be applied to customer systems as soon as they are rolled out.

This update see a massive shift in changes around the warehouse and user personalisation. All of which are making the product much more user friendly and much simpler to adopt out of the box.

We’ve highlighted some of the key updates below:

Add more columns to pages for better insight – Description 2

The Description 2 field has been made available throughout more of the system and will give users that extra bit of data they need. It’s available for personalisation in the following pages:

• page 651 Handled IC Inbox Purch. Lines
• page 649 Handled IC Inbox Sales Lines
• page 643 Handled IC Outbox Purch. Lines
• page 641 Handled IC Outbox Sales Lines
• page 647 IC Inbox Purchase Lines
• page 645 IC Inbox Sales Lines
• page 639 IC Outbox Purchase Lines
• page 637 IC Outbox Sales Lines
• page 517 Requisition Lines
• page 5746 Posted Transfer Rcpt. Subform
• page 5759 Posted Transfer Receipt Lines
• page 5758 Posted Transfer Shipment Lines
• page 5744 Posted Transfer Shpt. Subform
• page 5749 Transfer Lines
• page 5741 Transfer Order Subform
• page 30 Item Card
• page 31 Item List
• page 5858 Get Pst.Doc-RtrnShptLn Subform
• page 6648 Get Return Shipment Lines
• page 6653 Posted Return Shipment Lines
• page 6651 Posted Return Shipment Subform
• page 6657 Return Shipment Lines
• page 5853 Get Pst.Doc-RtrnRcptLn Subform
• page 6638 Get Return Receipt Lines
• page 6663 Posted Return Receipt Lines
• page 6661 Posted Return Receipt Subform
• page 6667 Return Receipt Lines
• page 7383 Invt. Movement Subform
• page 7385 Reg. Invt. Movement Subform
• page 7397 Posted Invt. Pick Lines
• page 7393 Posted Invt. Pick Subform
• page 7355 Internal Put-away Subform
• page 7396 Posted Invt. Put-away Lines
• page 7391 Posted Invt. Put-away Subform
• page 5769 Whse. Receipt Subform
• page 7336 Whse. Shipment Subform

Availability overview helps you calculate quantities in your warehouse

This new feature gives the ability to access availability of items in your warehouse from source documents such as sales orders, production orders, assembly orders or jobs. This information is in real-time.

This feature adds a picking log which let’s you review the item that weren’t included in pick documents and you can take the necessary actions.

This one no doubt will have more changes in the future depending on user feedback.

Configure how to handle different warehouse operations

This is a significant change now allowing you to define different warehouse operations for Production, Assembly and Jobs. This is an exciting feature enabling some new options when thinking about warehouse processes. Microsoft have provided the following explanation:

Technical details

You define warehouse handling on the Location Card. The existing Require shipment, Require pick, Require receipt, and Require put-away fields are now used only for warehouse handling for sales, purchases, transfers, and service operations. Warehouse handling of internal operations, such as production, jobs, and assembly, is now controlled by the following new fields:

1. Production consumption (Prod. Consump. Whse. Handling):
2. No warehouse handling
3. Warehouse Pick (optional). This is for compatibility with existing behavior.
4. Inventory Pick/Movement. Movement is for flushing scenarios.
5. Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
6. Production Output (Prod. Output Whse. Handling):
7. No warehouse handling
8. Inventory Put-away
9. Assembly consumption (Asm. Consump. Whse. Handling):
10. No warehouse handling
11. Warehouse Pick (optional). This is for compatibility with existing behavior.
12. Inventory Move
13. Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
14. Job consumption (Job Consump. Whse. Handling)
15. No warehouse handling
16. Warehouse Pick (optional). This is for compatibility with existing behavior.
17. Inventory Pick
18. Warehouse Pick (mandatory)

Directed Put-away and Pick

Controls aren’t editable if you enable Directed Put-away and Pick. If you turn on the Directed Put-away and Pick toggle, the following values are assigned automatically:

• Production consumption: Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
• Production output: No warehouse handling
• Assembly consumption: Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
• Job consumption: No warehouse handling. Note that jobs are not supported for locations with Directed Put-away and Pick.

Upgrade

Depending on the state of the Require shipment, Require pick, Require receipt, and Require put-away fields, the new fields are initialised as follows:

1. [Require Ship = False, Require Pick = False] or [Require Ship = True, Require Pick = False]
   1. Production consumption: Warehouse Pick (Optional)
   1. Assembly consumption: Warehouse Pick (Optional)
   1. Job consumption: Warehouse Pick (Optional)
2. [Require Ship = False, Require Pick = True]
   1. Production consumption: Inventory Pick / Movement
   1. Assembly consumption: Inventory Move
   1. Job consumption: Inventory Pick
3. [Require Ship = True, Require Pick = True]
   1. Production consumption: Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
   1. Assembly consumption: Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
   1. Job consumption: Warehouse Pick (mandatory)
4. [Require Receive = False, Require Put-Away = False] or [Require Receive = True, Require Put-Away = False] or [Require Receive = True, Require Put-Away = True]
   1. Production output: No warehouse handling
5. [Require Receive = False, Require Put-Away = True]
   1. Production output: Inventory Put-away

Do financial consolidations across environments in multicompany setups

No more files for consolidations between environments using multi-company setups. Previously you always needed to handle this via files and this would lead to additional time for a user, this could have been automated. However it’s possible to setup a direct connection so to speak, so no need to worry about those files anymore.

Edit in Excel on item journals and warehouse worksheets

A long awaited change that will no doubt help in those situations where someone has made a mistake and you need to process a large amount of stock adjustments. Obviously this should never but you never know.

The Edit in Excel option has been added to the following pages:

• Item Reclassification Journal (page 393)
• Physical Inventory Journal (page 392)
• Production Journal (page 5510)
• Output Journal (page 99000823)
• Consumption Journal (page 99000846)
• Requisition Worksheet (page 291)
• Planning Worksheet (page 99000852)
• Warehouse Item Journal (page 7324)
• Warehouse Reclassification Journal (page 7365)
• Warehouse Physical Inventory Journal (page 7326)
• Pick Worksheet (page 7345)
• Put-away Worksheet (page 7352)
• Movement Worksheet (page 7351)
• Bin Contents (page 7374)

Identify and track items easier with item references

I was actually asked about this a few weeks ago by a client and no doubt I’ll be sending this over to them. Anyway this change is essentially introducing the Item Reference field into more pages throughout the system. The pages to be included are:

• table 83 “Item Journal Line”
• page 40 “Item Journal”
• page 392 “Phys. Inventory Journal”
• page 393 “Item Reclass. Journal”
• page 286 “Recurring Item Jnl.”
• page 5803 “Revaluation Journal”
• page 99000773 “Capacity Journal”
• page 99000846 “Consumption Journal”
• page 99000823 “Output Journal”
• page 99000778 “Recurring Capacity Journal”
• page 99000850 “Recurring Consumption Journal”
• page 99000827 “Recurring Output Journal”
• table 5878 “Phys. Invt. Record Line”
• page 5882 “Phys. Invt. Recording Lines”
• page 5881 “Phys. Invt. Recording Subform”
• table 5876 “Phys. Invt. Order Line”
• page 5877 “Physical Inventory Order Subf.”

Improved processes in warehousing and inventory

This one is actually made up of several changes all adding some nice functionality making things easier. It’s the little things that matter right. Anyway here’s how the Microsoft documentation has described this:

Create warehouse employees during testing and presale

Each user who performs warehouse activities must be set up as a warehouse employee and assigned to a default location. This setup filters all warehouse activities on the location so that the warehouse employee only performs activities at their assigned locations.

During testing or presales activities, you might find scenarios where Business Central checks whether a user is set up as a warehouse employee. If the warehouse employee record is missing for the user, but the user has the right permissions to become one, Business Central will suggest that you create a warehouse employee without interrupting your flow.

On the Warehouse Employees page, you can add a location for the user. Alternatively, you can choose the Add me as warehouse employee action and select one or more locations. The page is filtered for the current user, so the User ID field is filled in automatically.

For users who don’t have permission to add warehouse employees, Business Central will stop the flow and notify the user that a warehouse employee record is missing. They’ll need to contact their administrator to get unblocked.

Create item journal lines based on the actual contents in a bin

On the Item Journal page, you can use the Get Bin Content action, and then specify filters to calculate the contents of bins and create a journal line for each bin content. The line includes information such as the bin number, item number, and quantity.

All fields on item template are considered when you convert a catalog item

Catalog items are items that you don’t manage in Business Central until you sell them. When you use the Select Catalog Item action to add a catalog item to a line on a sales order, blanket sales order, or quote, the catalog item is converted to a regular item.

You can use templates to standardize settings when you create new records. For example, templates help ensure that settings for posting and reporting are correct, so that productivity isn’t interrupted when people enter data. With this release, all fields are used when converting catalog items, including the Critical, Include Inventory, or Indirect Cost fields.

Suggest the next step for sales and production orders

A new feature designed to help with the reservations of stock. This was always something that needed to be extended to cater for more specific scenarios. There is still room for improvement I say but these new changes are certainly welcome.

The new feature offers new page called the Reservation Worksheet, so you can reserve stock on bulk. No more having to open each individual document.

Once reserved, Business Central will no show on documents the status of the reservation and what the next step is. This is all about helping users to reduce mistakes, as they’ll know what is happening next.

The Microsoft documentation has listed out a few scenarios and details about how to use this new feature.

Scenario: A sales person or production planner wants to check the status of a demand document and take the next step, such as post consumption or create a warehouse document

The new Reserved from stock field helps them understand whether they can ship or pick for a specific order or order line.

For lines, the Reserved from stock field is available on FactBoxes. For example, for sales orders it’s available in Sales Line Details.

The Reserved from stock field offers the following options:

• Full: The outstanding quantity is completely reserved from on-hand inventory.
• Partial: The outstanding quantity is partially reserved from on-hand inventory.
• None: The outstanding quantity isn’t reserved at all, or it’s reserved from other source documents such as purchase orders.

To get information about the status of the entire document, check the Reserved from stock field that we’ve added to the Statistics page for the document.

The Reserved from stock field can have one of the following values:

• Full: Reserved from stock on all lines is set to Full.
• None: Reserved from stock on all lines is set to None.
• Partial: All other cases.

Scenario: Documents that are ready for processing move to the next stage automatically

The following combinations are already available:

• The Default Quantity to Ship set to Blank on the Sales and Receivables Setup page.
• The Sales Reservation Avail. report that updates the quantity to ship on sales documents that are reserved from inventory.
• The Batch Post Sales Order task that can run through documents and post shipments only or also include invoices.

The same combinations are available for purchase return orders and the Purchase Reservation Avail. report.

Now, we’ve also added the Reserved from stock field to the following pages and reports:

• On the Create Inventory Put-away/Pick/Movement report, the Reserved from stock filter is on the request page so that Business Central creates inventory picks only for lines where the quantity is available in inventory.
• On the Create warehouse pick page that you open from the Pick Worksheets page, the Reserved from stock filter is on the request page.
• On the Create warehouse shipment page, we’ve added a new report that you can create shipments in bulk, or schedule them using the job queue. We’ve also added the Reserved from stock filter to the request page.
• On the Calc. Consumption page that you open from the Consumption Journal page, we’ve added the Reserved from stock filter to the request page.
• On the Job Calc. Remaining Usage page that you open from the Job Journal page, we’ve added the Reserved from stock filter to the request page.

Scenario: Make or cancel reservations in bulk

Because the whole process depends on reservations, we’ve added a new Reservation Worksheet page that can help you reserve and cancel reservations in bulk.

The Suggest stock allocation action allows you to either reserve for a specific type of demand, document, location, or item or start from the supply side and allocate only received goods.

Complete bank account reconciliation faster with Copilot

This one isn’t available for preview until November but it’s worth a mention. You can now use the Microsoft AI Copilot to help make bank account reconciliations faster.

Although we can’t preview this yet what Microsoft have said is the following:

• AI-powered transaction matching that further improves automation and reduces the remaining unmatched transactions that require human oversight.
• AI-generated explanations for how remaining transactions could be matched, making it easier for bookkeepers to complete the account reconciliation task by simply reviewing and approving matches.

There is a lot more on the way and too much for a blog post, however we’ve picked out the best of bunch for most customers. There maybe other features that may benefit so why not check out the full release plan here or contact our team to discuss.