Increase User Productivity in Dynamics 365 Business Central with These 10 Tips
There are constantly evolving ways for you to increase user productivity in Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Here are 10 tips you can use to accomplish that!
1 - Leverage New and Existing Features
Your Business Central system comes equipped with many features that make work easier for you and your users. While it would take too long to go into every single one of them, some of the main ones that increase productivity include:
- Change Log - This allows you to monitor specific fields within a table, changes within BC that your users make, and updates to your system
- Monitored Fields - You can set up an alert tied to a particular field value or category. This feature is similar to Change Log but it makes it easier to notify users if something changes
- Workflows - Workflows outline the administrative steps, processes, and tasks your team has to go through to get a job done. You can also use them to monitor field changes
2 - Cut Time Off Your Day with Document Sending Profile
Setting up and leveraging the Document Sending Profile on a customer/vendor record sets a default value for processing documents. This could include:
- Printing Documents - You can customize whether or not you want the printer dialogue box to come up. If you print the same documents every day, you can skip the dialogue box to speed your day up.
- Sending Documents via Email - This feature allows you to customize email sends to clients or potential clients right from Business Central. You can set up contacts, add attachments (such as receipts), or send mass emails without having to navigate through email settings
3 - Make the User Experience More Friendly With the Power Platform
Microsoft's Power Platform works seamlessly with many of its software solutions, including Business Central. The main three areas of the Power Platform that can help you in Business Central are:
- Power Automate - While Business Central workflows are good to manage the flow of a document or master record created or modified, Power Automate can take it a step further. It leverages connectors to give you more options with your workflow, including:
- Letting you post directly to a Teams channel to notify your team of an event or update
- Notify customers when an order has been shipped
- Automate many other processes
- Power BI - Power BI makes it easy to identify data sets and put them into visually appealing reports and graphics that you can include in presentations to your team, prospects, and clients.
- Power Apps - You can use Power Apps to create applications that you and your users can run on desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. These apps can make it easy for users to interact with their BC environment for scheduling updates, reports, and much more
4 - Personalize Your Pages in Business Central
Leveraging the role center and its personalization creates an easy-to-use group of settings for your users. Enhancing and tailoring your system to help your users be efficient will increase productivity and happiness as a result. Taking advantage of this lets users change their roles, takes care of decluttering your system, and allows you to change and personalize menus and pages to suit the needs of your team.
The kicker is you can make all of these changes right from the front end.
Additionally, you can addFactboxes to various pages to make information and data easy to find for your users. Factboxes can be personalized so your team only sees the data that is relevant to them or the job they are doing.
5 - Allow Users to Take Advantage of the Job Queue
This feature automates the process of editing jobs and tasks for you and your users. It allows users to create their own job entries, run error checking, update their status, and log their hours.
6 - Run Integrations with Other Software Solutions
Business Central has a lengthy list of integrations with other software solutions. Running these integrations can consolidate the software solutions you need to help your business run in one central location and can help establish automation. This helps with repetitive daily tasks like uploads, downloads, journal entries, and much more.
7 - Use Extensions
Extensions can add some great functionality to your Business Central environment. This includes:
- Custom fields
- Page Modifications
- User Interface improvement or cleanup
- Productivity boosters
- New features
Extensions can also add new functionalities to your system such as Doc Extender, which lets you drag and drop attachments when sending emails out of Businses Central.
8 - Test Everything in Your Sandbox
Whether you are upgrading, adding extensions, or analyzing whether the new features are right for you or your team, it is always important to test it. While the testing in your sandbox takes time, it allows users to get comfortable with their Business Central environment.
Additionally, you can also copy data from your live environment and copy-paste it into your sandbox. This means when users are learning how to navigate their environment they can work with actual data sets to get the full experience. You can also access the pre-release version of environments to ensure you and your team understand it before it goes live.
9 - Focus on Functionality During Implementations
Oftentimes when a software solution is implemented, functionality takes a back seat. This happens for various reasons including the size of the implementation and the budget of the project. At Stoneridge, we encourage you to keep functionality in mind during implementation, and we can help you document the functional features you ask for, even if you need to shelve them for a bit. Once implementation is complete, we encourage you to go through functionality ideas that might have been shelved and revisit them at a later time.
Some functionality features that often get overlooked include:
- Banking ACH and Reconciliation - ACH Payments eliminate checks, save time when doing back reconciliation and eliminate the possibility you'll have to reissue a check. We encourage doing daily bank recs to ensure they don't pile up at the end of the month, and this process helps you do that.
- Fixed Assets - This could be worth looking into for some companies.
- Cash Flow - Cashflow is a system that incorporates AI and looks at all open transactions and budgets. This is something you will want to test in your sandbox environment before using it live. Cash Flow can be used with Accounts Scheduled.
10 - Continue to Improve
Having users who are well-trained is never a bad thing. With Business Central, it is always evolving and the training often needs to continue. That doesn't mean you have to put your staff through long learning sessions every month, but hosting smaller "lunch and learn" type events to go over small details could go a long way. You can cover topics like keyboard shortcuts, data entry, and user personalization.
You can also facilitate ways for users to learn from each other.
Other ways to keep improving your Business Central system include:
- Posting Preview - You can preview your posts, reports, and other documents before they actually go into the system.
- Change Management - This includes systems updates, role changes, and establishing criteria for when and how your organization needs to change in order to best run your Business Central system
- Process Reviews - Take a look at your systems and get feedback from people in your organization to make sure your processes are running smoothly. This can be done quarterly.
- Paying attention to Release Notes - Make sure you and other users in your organization are aware of new features that can help the team become more efficient. Fun fact: Stoneridge runs webinars on release notes when they come out.
Questions?
Stoneridge Software has a passionate team of experts who can help you with all of the tips detailed in this blog. Please contact us if you have any questions or want to know more about how to optimize your Business Central experience.
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