Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations 2024 release wave 2: What you need to know

The 2024 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) introduces a host of new features and enhancements designed to streamline financial processes and optimize supply chain management. In this blog, we’ll dive into the specific enhancements within the D365 F&O applications, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (SCM), that users can expect to be rolled out between October 2024 and March 2025.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 in Dynamics 365 Finance introduces immersive homepages and redesigned workspaces that significantly enhance financial period-end processes and accounts payable (AP) tasks. These updates utilize AI and Copilot to streamline workflows and improve efficiency. For financial period-end tasks, the new immersive experience offers comprehensive visibility into end-to-end workflows, enabling users to pivot on data across legal entities and receive AI-driven insights into task efficiency and improvement recommendations. The redesigned workspace supports period-end task management with features like automated task completion and validation based on organizational rules, all while maintaining a detailed audit trail and improving notification systems.

For accounts payable clerks, the immersive homepage centralizes critical information, including the status of autonomous invoice processing and a daily work summary. AI-guided worklists highlight invoices needing attention, such as those with exceptions or pending approval, allowing AP clerks to focus on strategic tasks and optimize their efficiency.

Key features:

• AI-driven insights: Provides recommendations and insights to improve task efficiency.
• Centralized dashboards: Offers comprehensive overviews and focused views for task management.
• Enhanced workflow: Supports task automation and validation with detailed audit trails.
• Improved notifications: Enhances communication and task management.

The latest updates to Dynamics 365 Finance introduce several advanced features for Copilot to streamline financial processes and improve efficiency with AI. These enhancements include capabilities for defaulting financial tags, correcting receipt matching errors, and summarizing batch logs. Additionally, Copilot now assists with handling vendor invoice exceptions and creating dimensions and cubes in business performance planning. By automating the plan-act-analyze process, organizations can significantly enhance their agility and operational efficiency.

Key enhancements:

• Default financial tags: Copilot assists in creating and managing rules for defaulting financial tags across various transaction entry points, reducing manual input errors and enhancing data accuracy.
• Receipt matching error correction: Copilot simplifies error correction for vendor invoices by consolidating actions into a single interface, reducing the need for extensive navigation.
• Batch log summarization: AI-driven summaries of batch logs provide users with clear insights into outstanding issues and failures, streamlining troubleshooting and support.
• Vendor invoice exception handling: Copilot helps AP clerks efficiently manage and rectify invoice exceptions, including receipt matching and workflow errors.
• Dimension and cube creation: Copilot offers guided recommendations for configuring dimensions and cubes based on existing Excel spreadsheets, speeding up the planning process.
• Automated plan-act-analyze process: Automate key planning actions such as budget commitments and new product creation, enhancing responsiveness and reducing manual workload.

Dynamics 365 Finance introduces significant improvements to the bank reconciliation process, enhancing efficiency and reducing manual work for cash management clerks. These updates streamline the reconciliation process, helping businesses maintain accurate financial records and improve cash management.

Key enhancements:

• Advanced bank reconciliation report: The redesigned report now features detailed headers and bodies, including fields for company and bank balances, reconciled and unreconciled amounts, and transaction details. The report snapshot is saved when marking the bank reconciliation worksheet as reconciled, ensuring consistent data retrieval.
• Matching rule enhancements: New functions include automatic posting of vouchers, customer payment journals, and vendor payment journals, along with automatic settlement of open customer invoices with bank statement lines, improving automation and accuracy.
• Automated cash application: Automate the generation of customer and vendor payment journals from the bank reconciliation worksheet, and post vouchers with a redesigned user experience. This automation helps in settling open customer invoices efficiently.

These advancements in Dynamics 365 Finance provide better automation, reduce manual effort, and enhance overall financial management.

The Business Performance Analytics Reporting Hub in the 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Finance centralizes access to essential reports such as Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, and Sales Transaction Details, greatly enhancing efficiency and collaboration within organizations. By integrating seamlessly with Power BI and Excel, the hub facilitates secure sharing of reports, automatic data refreshes, and precise access control. This centralized platform streamlines the reporting process, supports data-driven decision-making, and fosters operational excellence. Users can easily craft new insights and manage report access, ensuring that the right information is available to the right people in real-time.

With a redesigned report interface and prebuilt reports covering key areas like financial performance and vendor transactions, the reporting hub eliminates the need for multiple report versions and reduces error risk. The hub’s fine-grained security model simplifies compliance and protects sensitive information, allowing administrators to set detailed access controls. By leveraging the Business Performance Analytics Reporting Hub, organizations can unlock deeper insights, improve transparency, and enhance strategic planning, driving sustainable business growth and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making.

Key features:

• Provide actionable insights: Utilize advanced reporting and visualization tools to transform raw data into clear, impactful metrics. This enables tracking performance, identifying trends, and making strategic decisions to improve operational efficiency.
• Analyze business data in Excel: Integrate Business Performance Analytics data directly with Excel to leverage familiar tools for custom analyses, pivot tables, and charts. Automatic data refresh ensures that analyses are current, enhancing real-time decision-making.
• Refresh data frequently: Increase data refresh frequency to provide timely and accurate insights. Support for multiple updates per day and future incremental processing will enhance reporting accuracy and operational efficiency.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 for Business Performance Analytics introduces enhanced data models designed to optimize financial and asset management processes. These updates aim to streamline operations, improve accuracy, and support strategic decision-making across various business functions. The new features in these data models offer more granular insights, improved data integration, and enhanced reporting capabilities, enabling organizations to manage their assets and financials with greater efficiency and precision.

• Acquire to Dispose: Enhances asset management by streamlining processes from acquisition to disposal, offering accurate tracking, valuation, and financial visibility.
• Record to Report: Provides detailed financial data for custom reporting and dimension-based analysis, improving the accuracy and timeliness of financial statements and supporting strategic decision-making.
• Procure to Pay: Optimizes procurement processes by streamlining reporting, ensuring accurate payment processing, and providing insights into spending and vendor performance.
• Order to Cash: Streamlines sales reporting and analytics, ensuring accurate invoicing and payment processing while delivering comprehensive visibility into sales performance and customer behavior.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 introduces a range of additional updates and enhancements not listed above, providing users with new features designed to improve functionality, efficiency, and overall user experience.

• Improve bank account lifecycle management: Additional features for managing bank accounts, including approval workflows for account changes, protected fields for modifications, and comprehensive auditing capabilities.
• Automatically clear bridged transactions: Automation of clearing bridged transactions during bank reconciliation, reducing manual processing and improving efficiency.
• Enable financial tags for purchase order invoicing: Use of financial tags to track subledger data, reducing performance issues and providing customizable fields for transactions and financial documents.
• Reverse posted purchase order invoice: Automatic reversal of incorrectly posted purchase order invoices, simplifying the correction process and resetting purchase order statuses.
• Use document types for financial journals: Introduction of document types in financial journals to improve transaction identification, enforce rules, and enhance reporting.
• Make payments in advance with prepayment sales invoices: Streamlined invoicing for advance payments, optimizing cash flow management,and ensuring accurate reconciliation with final invoices.
• Increase the length of invoice numbers: Extended length for invoice numbers to accommodate unique business needs and processes.
• Start planning quickly with templates: Quick start templates for financial planning, enabling users to set up planning experiences rapidly with their data.
• Create drivers and formulas in business performance planning: Enhanced driver-based planning capabilities for generating financial outcomes and scenarios without manual setup in Power BI.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 introduces several AI updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, leveraging Copilot, the AI tool designed to enhance user experience and operational efficiency.

Key updates include:

• Tailored conversational help with Copilot: Admins can now customize Copilot’s help and guidance by indexing specific business information. This ensures that the support provided is not only precise but also relevant to your company’s unique processes and customizations. Custom help content in formats such as PDF and Microsoft Word can be added to Copilot Studio, enriching its knowledge base and delivering a more personalized support experience.
• Enhanced demand planning with Copilot: Copilot now supports demand planning by allowing users to explore shifts, trends, and anomalies in demand data. It presents results in natural language, helping users interpret complex data intuitively. With Copilot cursor prompts, predefined questions guide users to delve into specific data points or forecasts, providing insights into trends and anomalies with clear summaries and visuals.
• Seamless conversations with Copilot follow-up questions: The new follow-up questions feature allows users to extend their inquiries with a single click. Copilot generates a list of likely follow-up questions based on previous queries, enabling users to quickly access additional information. This feature, integrated into the Copilot sidecar, streamlines the learning process by offering related questions and insights, making it easier to navigate and utilize Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management effectively.
• Trace and solve quality issues with Copilot: Copilot enhances quality assurance by swiftly summarizing all relevant information when issues arise. By integrating with the Traceability add-in, Copilot collects details from manufacturing activities and component batches, helping identify abnormal activity, delays, and item lifecycles. This rapid analysis aids in resolving quality issues quickly and improving overall manufacturing performance.

The 2024 release wave 2 in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances capable-to-promise (CTP) calculations, enabling businesses to provide accurate delivery dates. This update considers on-hand inventory, production capacity, and transportation times, evaluating both materials and resources to determine precise delivery dates for sales orders. CTP calculations can be performed for any sales order line, accounting for all components and capacities needed for fulfillment.

With accurate confirmed ship and receipt dates, businesses can:

• Provide exact delivery dates to customers in real-time.
• Assess the impact of product changes, such as color or design, on delivery dates.
• Determine how changes in order quantities affect delivery timelines.
• Adjust line quantities to meet delivery deadlines for make-to-order products.

Master planning is a complex process that involves an array of factors, requiring input from multiple stakeholders, including supply planners, production managers, and material managers. Effective collaboration is crucial for ensuring smooth operations, as all contributors need access to the latest, accurate information while preparing and reviewing supply plans.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 enhances collaboration by continuously recalculating master plans and refreshing them after each edit. This ensures that all planners and stakeholders see up-to-date, optimized planning results as they work. Master planning processes, typically scheduled to run overnight to minimize system strain, are now designed to operate in parallel with other system functions. This allows for real-time recalculations throughout the day without impacting overall system performance.

With these improvements, businesses can:

• Ensure all team members have access to the latest, fully optimized plans
• Continuously update and review plans in response to issues such as material delays or machine breakdowns
• Maintain optimal use of materials and capacity with real-time recalculations
• Minimize delays and enhance coordination across teams by having fresh, accurate data available throughout the day

The 2024 Release Wave 2 in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management introduces powerful enhancements to demand forecasting and planning, offering deeper insights and improved capabilities to optimize your supply chain and financial outcomes. These updates streamline the forecasting process by enabling more precise data filtering, improved model selection, and dynamic demand allocation across various dimensions. Incorporating external factors like inflation rates and weather conditions into forecasts helps create more accurate and realistic demand projections.

The improvements facilitate better data management and analysis, allowing you to export and integrate data seamlessly with other systems and platforms. Enhanced grid views and real-time calculations support more effective decision-making, while advanced features like time fence rules and bidirectional calculations improve the accuracy and reliability of your forecasts. By extending Copilot’s analytical capabilities and allowing custom logic and transformations, these updates ensure that your forecasting process is both flexible and responsive, ultimately leading to more informed planning and better alignment with your business needs.

The 2024 Release Wave 2 in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management introduces enhanced control over recalculating weighted averages, allowing for more accurate reporting and improved efficiency. Users can now choose to include or exclude specific types of transactions, helping ensure compliance with regional regulations and enhancing report accuracy.

Key features of this update include:

• Item model group option: Choose recalculation settings for specific item model groups.
• Include transactions without financial closure: Opt to include transactions that haven’t been financially updated in recalculations.
• Focused Application: These options apply only during recalculations and do not affect the inventory closing process.

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations support partner to highlight new Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features that your organization could utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as planned after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management 2024 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.