In our recent blog, A first look at Business Central 2021 Wave 2 Updates, we took an overview look at the 2021 Wave 1 Update and researched all the new or updated features that would most affect the user experience of Business Central. In this blog we narrow our focus and look at what the team here at TVision Technology think are the top six application improvements to look out for in the most recent Business Central update (October 2021).
1. Improved onboarding with expanded coverage of in-app tours
The 2021 Wave 2 update brings continued improvements to the Business Central onboarding experience. Microsoft have added more teaching tips and have increased the coverage of the in-app tours so that they cover more types of controls.
2. Additional flexibility for new templates for customers, vendors, items and employees
Business Central includes templates that users can employ when creating customer, vendor, item or employee records. These templates have very handing for ensuring that posting and reporting are correct.
With this update, users can now use the capabilities of configuration templates with the new templates for customers, vendors, items and employees. This include the ability to add any field, and to save and apply templates from customer, vendor, item and employee lists.
For example, a user can use personalisation on the Customer template page to add a Credit limit field to a template. Users can also save a specific customer, vendor, item or employee record as a template by using the Save as Template action.
3. Improved Account Schedule capabilities
To help users get started more easily with account schedules to create custom G/L reports, Microsoft have added several new templates for account schedules. These documents – Analysis, Revenue and Cashflow account schedules – are available in demonstration and trial (set up data only) companies. But they can also be adapted to your company’s chart of accounts.
In addition, there is a new Budget Name field in Column Layout that will allow users to filter by Budget Name. As a result, users will now be able to create account schedules that report on for example actual versus forecast budget figures.
4. Further improvements to bank and payment reconciliations
Some of the big changes in the 2021 Wave 1 Update were linked to bank reconciliations, and adding the ability to undo posted bank reconciliations. The Wave 2 Update includes further changes to bank and payment reconciliations but these changes are a little more subtle.
The Payment Reconciliation Journal has been improved with the following:
- Separate number series.
- Posting preview.
- Ability to reverse the G/L register posted through the Payment Reconciliation Journal.
The enhancements to the Bank Reconciliation Page include:
- Bank ledger entries can now be filtered so that only ledger entries after the statement’s ending date are displayed.
- When applying auto-matching, the user can decide to either not overwrite any of the already matched entries, or to overwrite all.
- Many to one matching is not possible, so many bank statement lines can be matched against one bank ledger entry.
5. Extended Preview Posting option
The 2021 Wave 2 Update includes a new Extended Preview Posting option. When the extended preview is turned on, a user can choose to preview a posting using the Preview Posting action. Then from the Posting Preview page, users can group entries by choosing Show Hierarchical View.
6. More control over currency exchange rate adjustment
For companies who operate in multiple countries or geographical regions, it is important they are able to do business and run reports in more than one currency. As a result, businesses need to periodically update currency exchange rates in Business Central. With this update, users are given greater control over how they adjust exchange rates. It is now possible to run exchange rate adjustments for selected customers, vendors or bank accounts using the Adjust Exchange Rates batch job.
Watch our webinar
Watch our recent webinar on demand, which includes a demo of these six Business Central 2021 improvements. View it now here: What’s New in Business Central – October 2021 update to find out more.
How can TVision help you?
TVision is one of the largest and most experienced providers of Business Central and NAV in the UK. If you want to know more about Microsoft Business Central and how it can help improve your business processes, please feel free to contact us to arrange a demo. If you are already using Business Central but would like better support and advice than you are currently receiving, please contact us for an informal, no-strings attached chat on what TVision could do for you.