Exploring the Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 release wave 2

The Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 2 brings many new features and enhancements designed to empower businesses with more efficient, streamlined operations. In this blog, we will explore key features and improvements in Business Central that users can expect to be rolled out between October 2024 and March 2025.

Business Central’s AI-powered assistant, Copilot, continues to revolutionize how businesses operate by integrating intelligent automation and conversational experiences directly into their workflows. The latest updates introduce new capabilities for AI in Business Central that make tasks faster, easier, and more intuitive across various business processes.

Key enhancements:

• Create Power Automate flows with Copilot: Copilot’s integration with Power Automate in Business Central allows users to build, refine, and manage automation flows through a conversational interface, streamlining business processes and boosting productivity.
• Create sales documents with Copilot: Copilot now enhances the creation of sales documents by accepting free text, files, or prompts to generate sales lines. This automation reduces manual data entry and speeds up sales processes, ensuring documents reach customers faster and with fewer errors.
• Accelerate bank reconciliation: Bookkeepers can now complete bank account reconciliations more efficiently with AI-powered transaction matching and G/L account suggestions. Copilot reduces the workload by automatically matching more transactions and providing intelligent suggestions for posting unmatched entries.
• Use AI to create product information: Copilot assists in creating and managing product information by suggesting data based on similar items. This capability accelerates time-to-market for new products and ensures accurate, ready-to-transact product entries with minimal effort.
• Conversational learning with Add-Ons: The new chat feature in Copilot enables users to interact with the system to learn how to use installed ISV add-ons. This enhancement transforms Copilot into a knowledgeable guide, helping users navigate new functionalities and improving overall efficiency.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 2 expands on the existing integration with Dynamics 365 Field Service by now covering service orders. This enhancement is particularly valuable for organizations providing regular maintenance and proactive repair services, offering a unified solution for managing service tasks, consumption, and financial transactions. The integration ensures seamless synchronization between the two platforms, allowing for more efficient management of work orders, consumption, and invoicing.

Key updates include:

• Service management integration: Synchronizes work order details from Field Service to service orders in Business Central, with real-time updates during consumption and invoicing.
• Item availability insight: Technicians and dispatchers can view real-time item availability in specific warehouses or technician trucks directly within Field Service work orders.
• Enhanced inventory planning: Allocated product quantities from Field Service work orders are included in Business Central’s inventory availability calculations, ensuring accurate planning.
• Simplified data synchronization: Integration table mapping synchronizes location data from Business Central to Field Service, streamlining warehouse and location management across platforms.

This integration enhancement helps businesses optimize operations and ensure that service and financial processes are closely aligned.

The Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 2 introduces several updates that significantly improve the integration between Shopify and Business Central. These enhancements are designed to offer greater flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency in managing e-commerce operations, from shipping fees and payment reconciliations to product data management.

Key updates:

• Export posted sales invoices to Shopify: This update allows posted sales invoices created in Business Central to be exported to Shopify, enabling buyers to view all their invoices within their Shopify account.
• Enhance payment reconciliation: The integration now supports tracking multiple payment methods for a single order in Shopify, such as gift cards and credit cards, with synchronized transactions in Business Central for accurate reporting.
• Enable locations in refunds: The integration now automatically uses the original return location from Shopify when processing refunds, reducing manual intervention and minimizing errors. This ensures accurate location data in credit memos, streamlining the returns process.
• Import & export product info using Metafields: Business Central now supports importing and exporting data stored in Shopify Metafields, offering a flexible way to manage additional product information.
• Flexible shipping fee mapping: Users can now map Shopify shipping fees to Business Central with more precision by selecting from different charge types—G/L account, item, or item charge. These new fields allow precise mapping directly to sales documents.

The latest updates to the Projects module in Dynamics 365 Business Central introduce powerful features that simplify project management, improve inventory control, and enhance usability, ensuring your projects run smoothly from start to finish.

Key enhancements:

• Simplified item replenishment: Create purchase orders directly from the Project Card page to ensure you have the necessary items for your projects. This process creates a purchase order for each vendor from which you purchase the items on the project.
• Integrated warehouse management: Now you can use directed put-away and pick locations within projects, enhancing inventory flow and warehouse efficiency. Specify default Location Codes on Project and Task Lines or enter them on Planning Lines, even for advanced warehouses.
• Improved usability: Usability enhancements include a Create Project Sales Invoice action on the Project Card page, enabling quick invoice generation. The Project List page now features actions like Assembly orders and the newly renamed Project WIP Cockpit for easier navigation and project management.

These updates are designed to streamline project management processes, improve inventory control, and make Business Central’s project management tools more intuitive and user-friendly, driving greater efficiency and success in your projects.

The latest release of Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces a powerful new module to manage subscription billing, enabling businesses to streamline recurring revenue processes and automate revenue recognition. With this new module, businesses can easily manage subscription contracts for various goods and services, such as hardware maintenance, IT support, and cleaning services. The module supports mixed contracts that combine both services and items with flexible billing schedules.

Key features:

• Simplified contract creation: Use templates to standardize recurring billing schedules and contract parameters, making it easier to create and manage subscription portfolios.
• Automated revenue and expense recognition: The module automates posting accruals to balance sheet accounts, ensuring revenue and expenses are assigned accurately across the correct periods in the income statement.
• Flexible billing options: Choose from standard billing schedules, usage-based billing, or fully automated billing processes, all integrated with deferral and revenue recognition features.
• Robust reporting: Access a variety of standard reports, including contract details, billing schedules, recognized revenue, and future billing projections. Most reports are also available as Power BI reports for deeper analysis.

This new module allows businesses to focus on growth while reducing the administrative burden of managing recurring revenue streams.

The latest updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central introduce robust features for managing and reporting on sustainability metrics, particularly greenhouse gas emissions. These enhancements help businesses integrate environmental data with financial processes, supporting better decision-making and regulatory compliance.

• Record greenhouse gas emissions using purchase invoices: Track and reduce your carbon footprint by recording emission data directly in purchase invoices, streamlining environmental reporting and enhancing productivity.
• Report sustainability entries with financial reports: Include sustainability metrics in financial reports to boost transparency and accountability, strengthening corporate reputation and supporting informed decision-making.
• Track sustainability certificates for items and vendors: Record and manage sustainability certifications for products and vendors to make eco-conscious purchasing decisions and align with environmental standards.
• Navigate the sustainability manager role center: Access key environmental metrics and compliance data quickly, allowing for real-time monitoring of sustainability initiatives and focusing on strategic improvements.
• Achieve sustainability scorecards and goals: Set and track specific sustainability goals with customizable scorecards to monitor progress, enhance operational efficiency, and align with regulatory incentives.

The latest updates in Dynamics 365 Business Central offer robust tools for reporting and data analysis, enabling deeper insights and more efficient decision-making:

• Ad hoc analysis: Perform detailed ad hoc analysis directly on transactions from fixed assets, projects, and service management. Leverage out-of-the-box queries for ledger entries and related tables, making it easier to group, summarize, and pivot data without running predefined reports.
• Embedded Power BI reports: Access a comprehensive suite of Power BI reports embedded within Business Central. With new reports available across finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, and projects, you can analyze key metrics and KPIs effortlessly.
• Advanced settings in the Power BI connector: Advanced users can now refine their data integration using new parameters in the Power BI connector. Adjust settings such as AcceptLanguage for preferred language responses, ODataMaxPageSize for efficient data retrieval, Timeout for managing request durations, and UseReadOnlyReplica to enhance performance by offloading read operations.
• New reports and demo data for financial reporting: Utilize new demo reports and data to enhance financial reporting capabilities. With five new standard reports, plus additional row and column definitions, you can create over 25 customized reports to better visualize and analyze your financial data.

The latest release of Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces a streamlined approach to IRS 1099 submissions. This new feature allows businesses to submit 1099 Tax Forms directly to the IRS electronically, removing the need for preprinted forms. Instead, Copy B of the forms is sent to vendors as plain paper substitutions. This integration simplifies the reporting process and ensures that all forms are handled efficiently and accurately.

Using the IRIS platform, users can take advantage of API integration with the IRS, a capability built upon the 1099 feature introduced in the 2024 release wave 1. This functionality supports a guided setup and reporting process, making it easier for businesses to comply with tax regulations. The new feature streamlines tax reporting, reducing administrative tasks and enhancing overall efficiency.

To ensure uninterrupted productivity, Business Central allows for background processing of tasks, reports, and batch jobs. If a background process fails or isn’t scheduled correctly, prompt notifications can help you address issues swiftly.

• Subscription to external business events: Set up notifications for job queue processing issues by subscribing to external business events. These events trigger alerts when:
  • Job queue processing fails after multiple retries
  • Job queue processing fails to schedule
• Power Automate integration: Use Power Automate to catch these business events through the “When a business event occurs” trigger. Choose from built-in templates or create custom flows to:
  • Notify users whose credentials are used by the job queue
  • Alert notification recipients configured in the Business Central admin center
• Automation options: Additional job queue APIs enable automated responses to issues by restarting or rescheduling the job queue, ensuring continued operation.

This feature helps maintain operational efficiency by providing timely notifications and automated solutions for job queue processing problems.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces enhanced capabilities around e-document management. In this release, users can share e-documents with various applications using APIs, allowing users to access documents in their preferred tools. The integration with Power Automate and the e-documents app streamlines document sharing across different communication channels, improving efficiency and accessibility.

• Integrate with Power Automate: Use APIs to share e-documents with other applications and communication channels, leveraging Power Automate to send documents as BLOB files.
• Attach PDFs to documents: Include PDF attachments when sending electronic documents, such as invoices, to enhance transparency and streamline auditing. Business Central now encodes these attachments in XML files.

In addition to the new features and enhancements highlighted above, the 2024 Release Wave 2 of Business Central includes the following updates:

• Archive service management documents: Automatically archive service management documents with audit trails and version control for better data management and historical tracking.
• Capture invoice and receipt data with Azure AI document intelligence: Streamline document capture using a new integrated OCR service powered by Azure AI Document Intelligence to process invoices and receipts more efficiently.
• Add invoice and receipt documents in bulk: Import multiple invoices and receipts quickly, either manually or automatically from sources like SharePoint folders and emails, to improve processing times and accuracy.
• Suggest number series with Copilot: Use Copilot to quickly create and update number series for various document types, enhancing setup efficiency and reducing manual configuration efforts.
• Summarize records with Copilot: Get concise summaries of any record to easily understand and manage data, including support for custom tables and integration with other data fields.
• Drag and drop on file upload dialog: Attach multiple files simultaneously using drag-and-drop functionality, enhancing file management and accessibility in Business Central.
• Resize columns without personalization: Adjust column widths on any list page, even when UI personalization is off, allowing for quicker and more efficient data viewing and entry.

With the 2024 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Business Central, there are numerous enhancements designed to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and boost productivity. To fully leverage these new features, explore the updated functionalities in your Business Central environment, and assess how they can be integrated into your existing workflows.

If you have any questions or need assistance in implementing these updates, contact Rand Group for expert guidance and support.