Discover the Exciting New Features in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management 2025 Wave 1 Release
The Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management 2025 Wave 1 release is bringing you many new features and functionalities that will enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and provide you with greater business flexibility.
Let's take a look at some key highlights from this release and explore how they benefit your organization.
Understanding the Wave Releases
Before we jump into the features, it's important to understand what a "wave" is. A wave is a collection of features that Microsoft intends to release over a specific period. There are two general time frames for waves:
- Wave 1: April to September
- Wave 2: October to March of the following year
Each wave consists of features introduced within one of two platform releases during that time frame. Note: Some of these features are available now but others are either in preview or still in development. Visit the official 2025 Wave 1 Release page for specific dates and timelines.
Let’s look at some of the top new features that are in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management 2025 Wave 1 Release:
New Cross-App Capability: Asynchronous Updates
One of the standout features in the cross-app category is the introduction of asynchronous (async) updates. Traditionally, table updates between finance and sales were performed synchronously, meaning they occurred in real-time. While this ensured data consistency, it also meant that users had to wait for updates to complete before proceeding with further tasks.
The benefits of asynchronous updates:
- Improved Workflow Efficiency: Large volumes of updates can be processed in the background, enabling users to continue working without interruption.
- Eventual Consistency: Tables can queue records to update, ensuring data consistency over time.
- Specific Table Application: Ideal for tables with frequent updates, such as pricing tables.
New Features in Dynamics 365 Finance
In the first release of 2025, Microsoft is introducing fresh capabilities that will extend your finance team’s capabilities by increasing automation, strengthening core financial processes, and improving business performance.
Here are some of the key new features for Dynamics 365 Finance:
Accounting Source Explorer Enhancements
Starting in September, the Accounting Source Explorer will support viewing transactions across multiple legal entities. This is a game-changer for companies with centralized or consolidated accounting functions, as it eliminates the need to switch between different entities to access transaction data.
The Benefits of the Enhanced Accounting Source Explore
- Time Savings: Reduces the need to flip between entities, streamlining the accounting process.
- Centralized View: Provides a comprehensive view of transactions across multiple legal entities.
New Ledger Journal Framework
The new journal framework in Dynamics 365 Finance is designed to address long-standing challenges with financial journals by significantly improving performance, flexibility, and usability. This introduces multiple things:
- A modernized general journal that supports multi-company entries within a single journal, allowing you to input vouchers for different legal entities without switching contexts.
- Voucher-level processing, which improves validation, approval, and posting efficiency. This includes a new “Voucher type” to enhance control over transaction lifecycles.
- Better visibility into errors and the ability to preview accounting entries before posting to address user pain points.
While existing financial journals will remain unchanged, this release marks the beginning of a broader transformation. Over time, additional journal types—such as those involving vendors, customers, assets, and projects—will be transitioned to the new framework. The updated model will also improve reversal processes, fix structural limitations like the “One voucher” issue, and introduce potential new journals, such as a bank transfer journal. These enhancements will streamline journal management capabilities and help your finance team modernize.
Financial Tags Expansion
Financial tags are receiving several updates in this release. They will now be enabled for purchase order invoices, allowing users to view information such as PO numbers and vendor names in the sub-ledger without relying on financial dimensions. Additionally, financial tags will be visible within the Accounting Source Explorer, providing a more comprehensive view of financial data.
How the expansion of financial tags benefits you:
- Enhanced Data Visibility: View PO numbers and vendor names directly in the sub-ledger.
- Comprehensive Financial Data: Financial tags will be visible in the Accounting Source Explorer, offering a more detailed view of transactions.
Ability to split assets and transfer assets between legal entities
Effective asset management is important in optimizing asset utilization, enabling predictive maintenance, driving data-driven decisions, and meeting regulatory compliance. In this wave release, there are two ways you can enhance your asset management processes:
- Split fixed assets: The enhanced Fixed Asset Split feature in Dynamics 365 Finance streamlines complex asset splits with greater accuracy and flexibility, offering exchange rate options, split previews, detailed audit trails, and cross-entity suppo
- Transfer assets between legal entities: This automates intercompany asset transfers by accurately copying financial data, reducing manual work, and ensuring compliant, seamless transactions across legal entities.
These enhancements will help you manage assets more effectively, helping your team to boost customer satisfaction.
Copilot Powered Reconciliation Agents
With this new feature, you can use AI to detect reconciliation issues, proactively notify users in real-time, and propose possible solutions. Copilot will also learn as it goes, analyzing historical data to automatically apply solutions to issues that have been fixed previously. This feature is in public preview and will come out in phases:
- • In Phase One, Copilot will be able to automatically detect subledger issues.
- • Later, in Phase Two, Copilot will give you recommendations on how to address exceptions.
Enhanced Features for Supply Chain Management
For Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft is making enhancements to demand planning, manufacturing capabilities, planning optimization, contract lifecycle management, and more.
Here are some primary features:
Copilot-Powered Agents in Supplier Communications
When this goes live, you can use Copilot in D365 Supply Chain Management to enhance communication with vendors. This includes:
- Follow-up with vendors on purchase orders: The AI-powered agent will automatically draft ready-to-send emails. For example, it can ask a vendor about the status of a delayed order or remind them to confirm a purchase order.
- Speed up purchase order updates based on incoming vendor emails: The agent can automatically read your email inbox to analyze communications from vendors. It will find messages related to purchase orders and analyze them together with organizational data to identify both purchase order confirmations and change requests. It can then run automated tasks based on your own, user-defined rules.
This all essentially becomes an integration between Outlook, Copilot, and Supply Chain Management.
Enhanced Traceability with Tracking Attributes
The enhanced tracking attributes functionality boosts traceability by allowing stakeholders to capture and analyze detailed data tied to serial, batch, asset, or lot numbers. This enables quality, sales, and production managers to monitor specific activities, identify deviations, and make data-driven decisions more effectively. It also:
- Gives you access to a new extension to the Traceability add-in.
- Allows you to track specific data points against an activity or code, which is then associated with a serial or batch number.
- You can search for what batches or serial numbers are affected by a data point. For example, you can search for the temperature of a batch, pinpoint affected units from a particular production, or identify the operator who ran the machine during a production step.
A key difference between this enhanced feature and the existing Batch Attributes feature is that you have more granularity as to when and what data points you capture, as well as the ability to capture this information for serial tracked items.
Advanced Quality Management
Integrating advanced quality-management capabilities will foster continuous improvement, drive customer satisfaction, and help you mean regulatory and quality standards. It also does this while reducing the need to rely on third-party solutions.
Key features include:
- Optimized testing strategies like flexible sampling plans, skip-lot testing, quality-order creation triggers, sample management, instrument calibration, and acceptable quality limits (AQL testing).
- Approved customer lists
- Customer-specific certificates of analysis (COA)
- Support for electronic signatures
- Digitized manufacturing for precision and compliance features like electronic batch records, production dispensing, and more.
- Continuous improvement and risk mitigation: Including corrective and preventative actions (CAPA) management and enhancements to non-conformance.
- Enhanced user experience: Simplified entry of quality test results and new workspaces for quality management.
Bolstered Master Planning Features
Demand planning in D365 Supply Chain Management lets you and your team build strong and resilient planning processes. The wave 1 release enhances features in two key areas:
Planning Optimization:
- The Planning Optimization engine now supports lean manufacturing, catch weight, and step consumption scenarios.
Forecasting:
- Assortment planning: Forecast by allocating total demand across different dimensions, such as products, customers, or channels, based on a self-defined allocation basis.
- Time freeze: You can set up periods where forecast calculations that are set to run continuously won’t update their baseline forecasts when, for example, you may not want to close or open new production orders.
- Forecasts with signals: Now allows you to incorporate external signals and lets you choose between multiple forecast algorithms to adjust your forecast.
- Auto-detect seasonality: The system will run an algorithm to detect distinct seasonality patterns across different dimensions like products and locations without any additional setup.
Additional Supply Chain Management Features in Wave 1
Here are some other highlights from the 2025 Wave 1 release for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management:
- Integration with external CLM systems: Contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems allow you to streamline supplier contracts and purchase agreements with the source-to-pay process. In Wave 1, Microsoft is making these integrations more seamless.
- Better supplier relationship management: A unified dashboard and supplier portal improve supplier relationships through:
- Easier appointment scheduling with vendors
- The ability to track vendor performance
- Quick scheduling of supplier reviews
- Prospective vendor management
- New Vendor Portal: Unlike the previous vendor collaboration feature, this portal is built on Power Pages. This means your vendors won’t need a Dynamics 365 login and/or you will not need to set them up in your tenant, which should save you on licensing costs. It essentially supports the same functions that existed before, but it will now be accessible through Power Pages.
Talk to the Stoneridge Team to Stay Informed on New Features in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management
The 2025 Wave 1 release for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management is packed with exciting new features that can transform your business processes.
For personal assistance and expert guidance on implementing these new features, reach out to the Stoneridge experts today!
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