2024 Wave 2 Release Plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central: 10 Features to Get Excited About
If you have Dynamics 365 Business Central, you already know it’s a highly effective and adaptable solution that helps you streamline and manage your finance, supply chain, manufacturing, project, and service processes.
With the 2024 Wave 2 Release Plan, Microsoft is committing to enhancing these capabilities even further with several key investment areas:
- The Power Platform integration with Business Central
- Upgrades to applications
- Copilot and AI innovations
- Country and regional expansion
- Development
- Governance, administration, and legislation
- Reporting and data analysis
- Improving the user experience
This blog will outline the top 10 features our experts have recognized in the 2024 Wave 2 release plan and detail how they can help your business be more efficient and productive.
Power Platform: Auto-apply templates when you synchronize data with Dataverse
Businesses often enhance data synchronization between Business Central and Dataverse using templates that prepare the data for either application. This enhancement is a rule-based, automated selection of templates that streamlines integration, making it faster and more cost-effective.
Key Features:
- Template Selection Based on Criteria: For example, account data synchronized from Dataverse to Business Central's customer table can apply different templates based on criteria like domestic vs. foreign customers, adjusting settings like posting groups accordingly.
- Integration Table Mapping: On the Integration Table Mapping page, users can configure multiple templates and set filters for when each template should apply.
- Configuration and Priority Settings: Templates are managed on the Table Config Templates page, where users can add templates, define filters, and set priorities to determine the order of evaluation.
This allows for more flexible and efficient data synchronization without the need to extend integration solutions manually.
Application: Capture invoice and receipt data with Azure AI Document Intelligence
Businesses can streamline their OCR and document capture processes for vendor invoices and receipts using the native Azure AI Document Intelligence integration in Business Central. This enhancement benefits finance professionals and accounts payable departments by automating data capture and processing directly within the platform.
The new feature extends the functionality of the incoming document in Business Central, enabling seamless data extraction from PDFs, images, and other document types. A state-of-the-art OCR service, integrated with Azure AI Document Intelligence, recognizes and processes invoices and receipts, automating routine tasks for bookkeepers and accountants, and improving efficiency in managing financial documents.
Application: Integrate Field Service with service management
This integration provides a seamless solution for organizations involved in regular maintenance and proactive repairs, enhancing the management of service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions. It connects Field Service with Business Central, streamlining work order management, consumption tracking, and invoicing for service technicians, managers, and finance teams.
To enable the integration, activate the Service Management Integration toggle in the setup guide or Dynamics 365 Field Service Integration Setup page, adding table mappings for service documents and work orders. Users can map work order types to service order types and link to projects in Business Central. Data exchange between work orders and service orders includes key fields like Service Account, Billing Account, and item lines for products and services. When a technician marks a product or service as used, the consumption is synchronized with service orders, and updates are made to quantities during posting in Business Central. Posted service invoices can be sent back to Field Service, ensuring accurate data flow between both platforms.
Application: Manage subscription billing and revenue and expense recognition
Business Central now supports a wide range of subscription scenarios, allowing businesses to manage portfolios of services and items billed on a recurring schedule, such as hardware maintenance, IT support, and cleaning services. Mixed subscription contracts enable the sale of combined services and items, with templates simplifying the creation of contracts by standardizing parameters and billing schedules. Pricing management, future price updates, and automated accrual postings streamline financial processes, ensuring accurate revenue or expense allocation.
Key Features:
- Contracts for recurring billing of items and services.
- Flexible billing schedules for various recurring billing scenarios.
- Usage-based and automated billing options.
- Integration with deferral and automated revenue recognition based on billing schedules.
- Ability to update contracts, including parameters and prices.
- Standard reports on contracts, customers, billing schedules, recognized revenue, and future billing dates and amounts, with many available as Power BI reports.
Application: Reconcile payment transactions in Shopify with invoices
Integrating Business Central with Shopify allows businesses to manage online sales and payments efficiently through gift cards, credit cards, and PayPal. With the 2024 Wave 2 release, this integration offers further enhancements in:
- Transaction Management: Payment details from Shopify are saved as transactions, which can involve multiple payment methods per order. These transactions sync with orders and are viewable on the Shopify Orders page in Business Central.
- Processing Payments: Business Central offers multiple options for handling imported payment transactions, including a feature that handles cases with multiple payment methods, such as partial payments using gift cards or store credits.
This will help you ensure payment transactions are synced with orders, creating accurate customer and general ledger entries. This will simplify accounting and reporting processes.
Copilot and AI Innovation: Summarize any record with Copilot
Copilot can now enhance productivity in your organization by providing quick and detailed summaries of records in Business Central, including data from custom tables. This saves users time by simplifying complex information into a few sentences, giving them a better understanding of their data. This will help you make more informed decisions without having to sift through extensive records.
Feature Highlights:
- Concise Summaries: Copilot generates brief textual summaries of records, highlighting key data points and related fields, making it easier to grasp the current state of your data.
- Interactive Assistance: Users can interact with the summary to explore highlighted fields, view related records, or chat with Copilot for next-step guidance.
- Customization: Developers can enhance these summaries with additional insights using AL code.
Microsoft is heavily investing in Copilot for Business Central in the 2024 Wave 2 release.
Country and Regional: Start using integration with IRS for 1099 submissions
The latest release of Business Central introduces a new feature for managing IRS 1099 tax forms. This feature integrates directly with the IRS, allowing businesses to submit 1099 forms electronically through the IRIS platform without using preprinted IRS forms. Instead, Business Central prints Copy B as a substitute on plain paper and sends it to vendors, streamlining the tax reporting process.
Feature Highlights:
- Direct API integration with the IRS for submitting 1099 forms.
- Supports the new 1099 feature introduced in the 2024 release wave 1.
- Guides setting up and reporting 1099 forms to the IRS.
This integration simplifies compliance by automating 1099 tax form submission and reducing the need for manual handling of physical forms.
Governance and Administration: Manage environment updates more flexibly
The new release provides administrators with greater flexibility for managing updates, offering extended periods for major updates and optional minor updates. This allows businesses more time to prepare for and schedule updates during less busy periods.
This includes
- Extended Major Update Periods: Major updates now have five months, allowing for thorough testing and preparation. Resellers can manage updates throughout the year, developers have extra time to ensure app compatibility, and customers can meet specific testing needs.
- Optional Minor Updates: Administrators can now choose when to implement minor updates, with a new setting allowing them to opt out of monthly updates if needed. The default monthly update schedule remains unchanged.
- Shortened Grace Period: The grace period for the next major update is reduced to one month. During this period, updates are mandatory and cannot be postponed; incompatible extensions will be uninstalled if not updated by the end of the grace period.
These changes will help you manage your update schedules more effectively to reduce disruptions.
Governance and Administration: Manage per-tenant extensions in admin center
This new feature simplifies and accelerates the management of per-tenant extensions (PTEs) by unifying the user interface and API. This streamlined approach allows your administrators to deploy and maintain extensions more efficiently across various tenants.
Legislation: Regulatory Updates
Regulatory updates ensure automated compliance with regulations set by government agencies. This ensures peace of mind for you and your users and lets you focus on the core aspects of your business without having to worry about changing requirements.
Here are some highlights from this set of upgrades in the release:
- Sustainability scorecards and goals: Achieving sustainability goals enhances reputation, operational efficiency, and compliance, driving growth and competitive advantage while users track progress with scorecards and specific emission targets.
- Enable internal carbon fee calculation: Encourage carbon emission reduction by setting up internal carbon fees, and motivating business units to find cost-saving, sustainable solutions.
- Sustainability manager role center: The sustainability manager role center improves operational efficiency by providing quick access to key environmental metrics, compliance data, and emissions information, enabling managers to monitor and adjust sustainability initiatives in real-time.
- Purchase carbon credits: Purchasing carbon credits helps companies meet mandatory emission reduction targets when operational reductions are insufficient; the feature allows users to designate items as carbon credits, specify their value, and automatically post emission reductions and costs in purchase documents within the Sustainability Ledger Entry table.
- Record greenhouse gas emissions: Recording greenhouse gases through purchase invoices allows businesses to track emissions directly in financial records, streamlining data entry, enhancing sustainability decision-making, and meeting regulatory requirements while also improving brand reputation and resource efficiency.
- Report sustainability entries with financial reports: Integrating sustainability metrics like greenhouse gas emissions into financial reports enhances business value by demonstrating transparency and accountability, with a new totaling type allowing users to combine financial and sustainability data such as Emission Fees, CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions in reports.
- Track sustainability certificates for items and vendors: Tracking sustainability certificates for vendors and items helps demonstrate your commitment to eco-friendly practices, with the ability to record and filter these certificates by details such as name, area, standard, issuer, and value, ensuring easy access to important sustainability information.
Want to Learn More About the New Features in 2024 Release Wave 2?
Get in touch with our team! These new features, among many others, are set to go into public preview and general availability in the coming months. Our team is studying these features to help you implement them and use them to improve your business.
Under the terms of this license, you are authorized to share and redistribute the content across various mediums, subject to adherence to the specified conditions: you must provide proper attribution to Stoneridge as the original creator in a manner that does not imply their endorsement of your use, the material is to be utilized solely for non-commercial purposes, and alterations, modifications, or derivative works based on the original material are strictly prohibited.
Responsibility rests with the licensee to ensure that their use of the material does not violate any other rights.