Microsoft have released their latest updates on Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1. It’s full of some amazing updates, the biggest of which include AI using Microsoft CoPilot.

Below we have listed out some of the exciting updates from this release:

• Manage work orders in Field Service, invoice them in Business Central
• Usability improves for service and projects
• Define a Service Invoice Posting Policy For Various Users
• Block item, item variant or service item from use in service management transactions.
• Block a service item.
• Connect Business Central with Shopify B2B
• Simpler Shopify Connection
• Assemble to project
• Use standard terminology for project management
• CoPilot and AI innovation
• Map e-documents to purchase order lines with Copilot
• Create sales lines easily with CoPilot
• Get to insights faster with CoPilot-generated analysis tabs
• Complete bank account reconciliation faster with Copilot
• Create product information faster with Copilot
• Learn more about fields with CoPilot
• Governance and administration
• Achieve sustainable compliance with Business Central
• Use drag and drop to attach multiple files

 

Manage work orders in Field Service, invoice them in Business Central

Integration with Field Service is a powerful solution for managing work orders and consumption in Field Service and efficiently invoicing and fulfilling them in Business Central.

This integration streamlines the end-to-end process of managing service operations and ensures a seamless flow of information between the two systems.

You can easily create and manage work orders in Field Service, track the progress of service tasks, assign resources, and capture consumption details. When the service tasks are complete, the integration enables the smooth transfer of data to Business Central for further processing.

The integration also facilitates the invoicing and fulfillment of work orders in Business Central. You can generate accurate invoices based on the service activities performed and the consumption recorded in Field Service. This ensures timely and accurate billing, which improves financial management and customer satisfaction.

By integrating Business Central with Field Service, you benefit from a unified and efficient workflow. The integration eliminates the need for manual data entry or duplication, which reduces errors and saves valuable time. It also provides a comprehensive view of service operations and financials, which improves decision-making and operational efficiency.

Usability improves for service and projects

It has been made easy to complete several business processes in service management and accounting. 

The PowerBI and Project Details FactBoxes are available on the Project List page, so you can access project details from the list. The Power BI content that’s currently available isn’t changed. 

The Item Reference No. field is available on the following tables and pages:

• table 5902 Service Line
• page 5934 Service Invoice Subform
• page 5936 Service Credit Memo Subform
• page 5906 Service Item Worksheet
• page 5905 Service Lines

To give you better insight into the services you’re providing to your customers, you can add more columns to service documents:

• Quote No. on posted services documents, such as posted service credit memos and invoices.
• Bill-to Name and Sell-to Name fields are available in the service contract list.
• External Document No. in service documents, service orders, credit memos, invoices, quotes, posted service invoices, shipments, credit memos, and service ledger entries. This data is passed to general ledger entries. If an external document number isn’t specified, Business Central uses the original service document number when you post to the general ledger.

Also, you can add the External Document No. or Your reference columns to the project list.

Microsoft has announced the first wave of changes coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2024 Wave 1, mostly available from April 2024 through September 2024  

We’ve highlighted some of the key updates below: 

Define a Service Invoice Posting Policy For Various Users

You can use posting policies to restrict users from posting service invoices or require them to post invoices together with the related service shipment. To specify a posting policy, on the User Setup page, choose one of the following options in the Service Invoice Posting Policy field:

• Allowed (Default): Keep the current behavior, where you can choose the posting option, such as Ship, Invoice, and Ship and Invoice.
• Prohibited: Prevent people from posting invoices. Business Central shows a confirmation dialog that provides only the Ship option.
• Mandatory: Let people post invoices along with service shipments. Business Central shows a confirmation dialog with the Ship and Invoice option.

The setting affects the following documents:

• Service orders
• Warehouse shipments
• Service invoices
• Service credit memos

The following table describes the effects on different documents

Document	Option 1: Allow Displays a series of options	Option 2: Prohibited Confirmation dialog	Option 3: Mandatory Confirmation dialog
Service Order	– Ship – Invoice – Ship and Invoice	Do you want to post the shipment?	Do you want to post the shipment and invoice?
Warehouse Shipment	– Ship – Ship and Invoice	Do you want to post the shipment?	Do you want to post the shipment and invoice?
Service invoice	No options	Do you want to post the invoice?	Do you want to post the invoice?
Service credit memo	No options	Do you want to post the credit memo?	Do you want to post the credit memo?

Block item variant or service item from use in service management transactions

To block an item or an item variant from being used in service management transactions, turn on the Service Blocked toggle on the Item Card, Item Variants, and Item Variant Card page. You can also set this field on the Item Template page, and it will be copied to the items created from that template.

When an item or an item variant is service blocked, it isn’t available for selection on the following pages:

• Service Line (except for service credit memos, where you’ll see a notification that the item or variant is blocked, but allowed on this type of document)
• Service Item
• Service Contract Line
• Standard Service Line

If you manually enter an item number or variant code that’s blocked, you’ll get an error message that states, “The field contains a value that cannot be found in the related table.”

Additionally, if you have service contracts, service contract quotes, or service orders that include blocked service items or item variants, you can’t use the following actions:

• Lock or Make Contract on the Service Contract Quote page.
• Lock Contract, Sign Contract, Create Contract Service Orders or Create Contract Invoices on the Service Contract page.
• Make Order on the Service Quote page.
• Release to Ship or Post on the Service Order page.
• Post in the Service Invoice page.

Block a service item

To block a service item from being used in service management transactions, on the Service Item Card page, in the Blocked field, choose one of the following options:

• Service Contract: Block the service item from being used in service contracts and service contract quotes, but not in service orders or other service documents.
• All: Block the service item from being used in any service management transaction, including service contracts, service orders, and other service documents.

When a service item is blocked, you can’t select it on the following pages:

• Service Contract Line (if blocked for service contract, or all)
• Service Item Line (except for service credit memos, if blocked for all)

If you manually enter a service item number, you’ll get an error message that states, “The field contains a value that cannot be found in the related table.”

Additionally, if you have service contracts, service contract quotes, or service orders that include blocked service items, you can’t use the following actions:

• Lock and Make Contract on the Service Contract Quote page (if blocked for service contract, or all).
• Lock Contract, Sign Contract, or Change Customer on the Service Contract page (if blocked for service contract, or all).
• Make Order on the Service Quote (if blocked for all).
• Release to Ship, Post on the Service Order (if blocked for all. If service order documents contain multiple service items, and some are blocked and others are not, you can release and post non-blocked lines. Consider whether to turn on the One Service Item Line/Order toggle on the Service Management Setup page).
• Post on the Service Invoice page (if blocked for all).

You can also view the blocked service items by applying a filter to the following reports:

• Service Items (report 5935)
• Service Items Out of Warranty (report 5937)
• Service Profit (Service Items) (report 5938)

Data upgrade

This feature doesn’t require additional setup. However, if you upgrade your Business Central, be aware of the following data upgrade behavior:

• If you have items, item variants, or item templates where the Sales Blocked toggle is turned on, the Service Blocked field is also turned on for those records during upgrade. This ensures that the existing sales blocked logic also applies to service management transactions.
• Data upgrades only if you have at least one service item in your company, which means you’re using the service management functionality and need the data upgrade. If you don’t have service items, the data upgrade is skipped and the Service Blocked toggle is turned off by default for all items, item variants, and item templates.

 

Connect Business Central with Shopify B2B

 

The Shopify Connector now supports the latest features of Shopify’s B2B platform, such as companies, prices, payment options and more. These features allow you to manage multiple buyers and groups, offer different pricing and discounts, and streamline your B2B operations. You can easily synchronize your Shopify B2B data with Business Central and automate your workflows. This helps save time, reduce errors, and increase customer satisfaction.

To make sure that both the D2C and B2B flows are supported, the current customer synchronization flow focuses on D2C scenarios and a new flow is available for B2B customers.

Export Customers To Shopify is removed. The Connector won’t export all existing Business Central customers automatically. Instead, on the Shopify Customer page, use the Add Customers to Shopify action. On the request page, specify the Shopify Shop and filters if you want to export a subset of customers. The Connector checks whether a customer with the same phone number or email address already exists in Shopify. If it finds a match, it maps it to a customer in Business Central. If it doesn’t find a match, it creates a new customer.

You can also open the Shopify Customers page by using the Customers action on the Shopify Shop card.

Company B2B

There are several new actions in the Shop Card page:

• Related > Companies
• Reset Companies Sync action

The B2B fields work in a similar way as their counterparts for the Customer D2C synchronization:

• Can Update Shopify Companies
• Default Permission on Contact that is assigned to the contact linked to the company. Possible options are: No permission, Ordering only, Location admin
• Company import type
• Can Shopify Update Companies
• Auto Create Unknown Companies
• Auto Create Catalog: If for exported company you want to create a catalog automatically. You can assign a catalog manually from a list of Shopify catalogs.

There’s a new entity representing Company, for which we added the following objects:

• Company Table
• Company List
• Company Card
• Main Contact Factbox
• Company Location Table

New actions allow you to add or synchronize a company to Shopify.

The Add Company to Shopify action and report do the following:

• Create a customer and company in Shopify
• Add a customer as the main contact
• Add location ‘Main’ (this is subject to change)
• Add a catalog, depending on your settings

The Sync Company action and report which, depending on the synchronization direction, either updates the company in Shopify or imports a company to Business Central. In the latter case, the Connector does the following:

• Retrieves the company, main contact, and location and map Company/Customer, updated (if allowed) or create (if allowed).

For catalogs, we’ve added the following:

• Catalog Table
• Catalog List
• Price synchronization settings for each catalog. These settings are similar to the price settings in the Shopify Shop card FastTab.
• Hyperlink to Shopify Admin to review and manage products included in the catalog.

You can import catalogs from Shopify, assign them to companies, set price calculation settings, and trigger a price update for catalogs.

Orders

Imported orders use the D2C customer or, if available, the B2B company information to look for a mapping of bill-to and sell-to customers.

Simpler Shopify Connection

Business Central has teamed up with Shopify to help our 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. The seamless connection between the two applications synchronizes order, stock, and customer information to ensure that merchants can fulfill orders faster and better serve their customers. The joint effort furthers Business Central’s commitment to connecting data that can help businesses adapt faster, work smarter, and perform effectively.

It’s easier to get the Shopify URL

The Connector requires a URL in the following format: https://.myshopify.com/. However, after Shopify introduced Unified Admin it hasn’t been as easy to get the URL for the store. Therefore, we’ve reintroduced simplicity. Just copy the URL from Shopify Admin, such as https://admin.shopify.com/store/, and the Connector converts it to the required format.

Skip blocked or sales blocked items and variants.

When you want to export many items and variants, there might be some that are blocked. You can’t include blocked items and variants in price calculations, so they aren’t exported. The Connector now skips those items and variants automatically, so you don’t need to filter them on the Add Item to Shopify request page.

Shopify Shop shows important fields when FastTabs are collapsed.

The values of the following fields display, even when a FastTab is collapsed:

• Shopify URL
• Enabled
• Sync Item
• SKU Mapping
• Customer Price Group
• Customer Discount Group
• Customer Import from Shopify
• Default Customer
• Shipping Charges Account
• Process Type

New stock calculation method

Because many businesses use extensibility to implement the same stock calculation, we decided to make it standard functionality. The Free Inventory method is simple and efficient. The method takes the current inventory and subtracts what’s reserved from inventory. It ignores expected receipts or demand.

Decide whether fulfilment synchronization should trigger a notification.

Send Shipping Notifications lets you control whether Shopify sends a notification when posted shipments synchronize to Shopify. The notification might be useful, for example, if your company sells services.

Guide users on item synchronization

Often, the first task people use the Connector for is to synchronize products and items. To make that synchronization easier, a notification in Shopify Products suggests the following actions based on your settings:

• Sych products, if your shop is configured to import products from Shopify.
• Add Items, if you manage products in Business Central.

Extra checks reduce the risk of errors.

• Check whether the selected currency code is assigned an exchange rate. If the rate is missing, it explains the use of the field.
• Check whether Business Central is part of fulfilment services in Shopify, and instruct users to enter a SKU Mapping.

Assemble to project

Assemble to project helps you improve inventory management by assembling to order only when it’s required and enable other ways to customize projects.

When you enter an assemble-to-order item on a project planning line, an assembly order is automatically created. The assembly order is based on the project planning line, and its lines are based on the item’s assembly BOM. The quantity of components on the assembly BOM is multiplied by the order quantity. The Assemble-to-Order Lines page shows details about the linked assembly order lines. The details can help you customize the assembly item. As in sales, you can’t directly post linked assembly orders. The created assembly order is reserved for the project, and Business Central synchronizes item tracking between project planning lines and assembly orders. The feature integrates with warehouse management features to make assembly and shipping easier and ensure that the workflow from project assembly to delivery runs smoothly.

Assemble to project supports the following warehouse configurations:

• No warehouse handling: Use a project journal to post full or partial usage. The output and consumption of components post automatically for the assembly order.
• Inventory pick: Use an inventory pick to post full or partial usage. The output and consumption of components post automatically for the assembly order.
• Warehouse pick: Create and register warehouse picks for components, and then use a project journal to post usage. Business Central verifies whether the consumed assembly components were picked. The output and consumption of components post automatically for the assemble order.

You can also use the Explode BOM action in the Project Planning Lines to convert the product into a set of components.

The following are known limitations:

• The Quantity to Assemble to Order field isn’t available for closed projects.
• For warehouse pick scenarios, the Quantity to Assemble to Order can be either zero or equal to the quantity. You can’t mix assemble to order and assemble to stock on a project planning line. You must create separate project planning lines.
• Assemble to order does not affect billable parts of a project. An assembly is included on sales invoices, but not its components. You can’t edit the Quantity to Assemble to Order field for Billable lines (not Budget+Billable).
• Order planning and the planning worksheet aren’t affected because the job is the input for planning. The planning engine considers the assembly as demand.
• You can’t enter a negative quantity in the Quantity to Assemble to Order field.
• You can’t undo an assembly.

Use standard terminology for project management

For a long time now, Microsoft has referred to project accounting features as “jobs,” which has caused confusion in our community because that’s not the term that people who work with project accounting expect. Microsoft is happy to announce that they are addressing this legacy problem. To clarify the true nature and purpose of the project accounting features for various types of businesses, Microsoft is replacing the term “job” with “project” in the user interface and documentation.

For example, entities such as job tasks, job journals, and job planning lines are now project tasks, project journals, and project planning lines. The renaming won’t break existing integrations and customizations because we’re only updating the captions in the user interface and the terms in our documentation. We aren’t touching the names of the underlying table and field objects.

CoPilot and AI innovation

Introduce Power Automate Copilot integration with Business Central

Copilot is the AI-powered work assistant that boosts creativity and improves productivity for small and medium-sized organizations.

This feature integrates Copilot in Power Automate with Business Central, so that you can start creating automation flows based on natural language. When such flows are opened in Power Automate for further refinement, you can take advantage of the Copilot experience in Power Automate.

Copilot in Power Automate allows open-ended and conversational experiences while authoring flows that use your Business Central data. You can ask questions and get assistance to improve and change those flows. Copilot stays with you in your flow and helps you build, set up, and run an automation on your behalf through a comfortable chat experience. Copilot takes your input and provides either documentation, links, or answers in the Copilot chat pane. But most important, it makes changes to the structure of the flow based on your natural language description.

This feature helps you streamline business processes and improve productivity by shortening the path to automation.

Map e-documents to purchase order lines with CoPilot

As procurement processes become more digital, the e-documents feature in Business Central plays a key role in automating the vendor invoice reception and processing. Copilot can assist in this process by improving the mapping and matching of vendor invoices to purchase orders. 

In the initial release of the e-document app, Microsoft introduced fundamental scenarios for e-documents for the entire sales process. However, there’s a need for enhancements and automation in handling the received documents, especially in the context of purchase processes. Copilot refines how you manage e-documents in the purchase process, particularly with respect to purchase orders. The e-documents framework lets you specify the type of purchase document to create for each vendor when you receive e-invoices from them. Previously, the only option was to create a purchase invoice, either as a document or a general ledger journal.

You can now update an existing purchase order in Business Central with the information received in the e-invoice.

Identify purchase orders

First, you can identify the purchase orders that you can automatically match.

Map lines

New mapping functionality lets you automatically match on e-invoice lines with purchase order lines. Copilot also provides additional matching intelligence to improve the matching.

After they’re matched and mapped, Business Central updates the matched purchase order with the relevant receipt information to ensure the right quantities are received on the order lines.

Create sales lines easily with CoPilot

The introduction of Copilot in Business Central adds a significant enhancement to the sales document processes. It expedites the creation of sales documents and minimizes time spent on repetitive tasks and lookups. With its ability to accept various input methods, including free text, files, or prebuilt prompts, Copilot understands the input and can use it to create sales lines.

Copilot can suggest and assist with creating sales lines on sales documents like Sales Quote, Sales Order, and Sales Invoice based on structured input or natural language. This drastically relieves the user of manual input and drives operational efficiency.

Versatile input methods: Copilot can accept various input methods, including free text, files, or prebuilt input prompt suggestions. This flexibility allows users to interact with the system in a way that is most convenient for them, further enhancing efficiency.

Intelligent processing: Leveraging advanced AI capabilities, Copilot understands the input provided and uses it to suggest sales lines. This intelligent processing eliminates the need for manual data entry, reducing the likelihood of errors, and saves time. Additionally, Copilot can suggest sales lines based on sales recency and frequency of the given customer of the sales document.

Get to insights faster with CoPilot-generated analysis tabs

 

There are several ways that Copilot can speed up your analyses:

• Create: Starting from any list in Business Central, put Copilot to work by providing keywords or a description, indicating the columns, groups, pivots, filters or sorting that you want to use to present fields from the table. Copilot uses AI to understand your desired layout, and helps you refine and build upon the generated analysis when you provide more keywords. Copilot also suggests a name for your new analysis tab.
• Update: Quickly adjust an existing analysis tab by expressing your desired changes in natural language.
• Explain: Copilot summarizes the information presented in the analysis tab as a concise sentence—a useful reminder or quick overview whenever your coworkers share analyses with you.

This feature can be accessed from the specific list page that you want to analyze. Copilot can work with most fields that are already present on the list page and corresponding table, including summing up totals, but cannot create new fields or correlate data across tables.

Complete bank account reconciliation faster with CoPilot

The bank account reconciliation feature in Business Central has been enhanced with:

• AI-powered transaction matching that complements rule-based matching and further reduces the remaining unmatched transactions that require review.
• AI-powered G/L account suggestions where Copilot suggests the most likely ledger account to post any residual transactions to and offers the opportunity to remember a specific transaction description for the next reconciliation.
• Built-in demo data for evaluation companies that makes it easier to experience and demonstrate this Copilot capability to others. Demo data is available in English with 23.1 and other languages with 23.2.

Create product information faster with CoPilot

Copilot can significantly reduce this effort and accelerate the time to market for new products to meet customer demand.

Since product (item) information in Business Central is spread out across several tables, creating and managing this information can be a time-consuming task. The effort involves looking up information based on existing items, pasting values, and ensuring the new product is ready to transact. Creating variants, dimensions, units of measure, and other item-related information also takes time that delays market readiness for new products.

Copilot can help you create item-related information based on similar items. To begin with, Copilot can suggest the following item-related information:

• Variants
• Units of Measure
• Substitutions
• Dimensions

When you manage a product and work with the pages that manage this information, Copilot offers assistance by suggesting the data. Powered by AI, Copilot finds similar products (items) and suggests meaningful data for the related tables.

Not only does this assistance reduce the time it takes to create a product, but it also ensures that your products are ready to transact faster than ever before.

Learn more about fields with CoPilot

The introduction of the Copilot-powered chat (see link here) feature in Business Central has changed the game for how people learn and interact with the product. Copilot explains and guides people to learning about Business Central concepts and how to accomplish tasks, based on Business Central’s extensive online documentation. This significantly reduces the time it takes to get unblocked or ramp up your Business Central knowledge.

This Copilot experience can be initiated by asking a question in the chat, or by other UI elements that trigger the chat functionality based on an action. One such action is to click a link in a tooltip. Today, the Learn more link in a tooltip opens the Help pane which shows page-level help. In this release, the Learn more link is replaced by an Ask Copilot link that triggers the Copilot chat pane to open and automatically post in the chat on the user’s behalf, asking about the meaning of the field in question. By doing so, field-specific help is only one click away, which makes it much easier to understand the value and impact of fields and settings.

By leveraging Copilot’s ability to understand and digest large volumes of text, potentially scattered across several learning articles, you get summaries, key paragraphs, and links to maximize your understanding of the field, which dramatically decreases the amount of time spent searching for information. As a result, the set-up of Business Central and implementations can now be done more rapidly, because learning is just one click away.

Governance and administration

Allow customers to consent to Microsoft Support accessing their data

In the Power Platform admin center, administrators can create lockbox policies that apply to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 environments so that our customers can review and approve or reject access requests from Microsoft engineers in response to a customer-initiated support ticket, or a problem identified by Microsoft. With 2024 release wave 1, lockbox policies in the Power Platform admin center now apply to Business Central environments as well.

Customers can choose to enable lockbox on their Microsoft Entra tenant to:

• Increase security and privacy of their data in the cloud.
• Have more visibility and control over who accesses their data and for which purposes.
• Comply with regulatory or organizational requirements for data access governance.

Achieve sustainable compliance with Business Central

This feature enables you to collect and report on your sustainability activities. The solution is the foundation that will be used for compliance with the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other ESG standards.

Microsoft is introducing a groundbreaking feature focused on sustainability reporting. This new, easily extendable functionality lets you record and report on a wide spectrum of sustainability information, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative aspects, and forward-looking and retrospective data. You can also leverage the feature to actively reduce emissions, making it a valuable tool for small and mid-sized organizations seeking to comprehensively report on sustainability initiatives.

This feature ensures compliance with the European Union’s CSRD, which requires companies to report on the sustainability of their activities. The CSRD introduces a heightened requirement for reporting, impacting approximately 50,000 companies in the European Union—more than four times the number covered by the previous Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), which the CSRD supersedes. However, the solution will be built to ensure that ESG compliance aligns with other standards.

You can use Sustainability Journals and Recurring Sustainability Journals to record data, based on the Chart of Emission Accounts. You can use different emission groups, subgroups, and formulas to make the collection of emissions as easy as possible. This feature also has Sustainability Entries where data is recorded and used for reporting. It’s important to understand that Business Central supports other emissions besides carbon footprint.

You can benefit from streamlined business processes and enhanced productivity, irrespective of your current stage in the sustainability journey. The initial release lays the foundation for future expansion and automation, promising ongoing advancements in the functionality.

Use drag and drop to attach multiple files

Drag and drop functionality to attach multiple files to Business Central records makes it easier to manage files.

One can conveniently drag multiple files at the same time to attach them to records in Business Central. Select multiple files, and then just drag them to the drop targets.

This improvement is particularly beneficial if you often work with multiple files and need to associate them with a specific record. The ability to attach several files at the same time eliminates the need to manually upload files one-by-one, which provides a more efficient and user-friendly experience.

Some exciting stuff for users in most departments. There wasn’t enough space to list everything here however you can get the full release plan from Microsoft here.

If you want to learn more or need help with Dynamics 365 Business Central, then why not contact us to speak to an expert.