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Transcript

0:02
Hello everyone and thank you for attending today’s webinar just to begin with a few housekeeping issues suggestions. So all the attendees will be on mute and they will remain that way for the whole webinar. If you do have any questions, please do use the question box related to the topic and will answer after the demo if we run out of time or anything requires a longer answer than the question. We can talk to you offline about that afterwards.

0:29
Do you use a chat box for questions? If for example, you can’t hear the audio or if one of the presenters is going too fast. Finally, please note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent to all attendees after the demo.

0:46
So, this is the 19th and a series of monthly webinars on key areas of NAV and Business Central, you can sign up for as many as you’d like on our website and I’ll show you the list of upcoming webinars at the end of the session. We also send out regular emails to register for the next one.

1:03
My name is Danusia Jolliffe, and I’ll be facilitating the demo today. I’m the Marketing Manager here at TVision. I’ve worked here for nearly two and a half years now and my background is nearly five years in marketing. Ian we’ll be doing a demo for us today and he’s a support consultant here at TVision, and has been working here for three years now, but has been using NAV since the year 2000.

1:25
Before we start talking about the latest features of Business Central. I just wanted to remind everyone that what we’re going to be talking about today and what we’ll be showing you it’s about the new features in Wave 2 in 2019 Business Central for the Modern Client on premise, as well as the SaaS version. And we learned about the majority of these functional upgrades at the recent Directions EMEA event where the TVision team went along. Some of the main highlights will be shared shortly by Ian.

1:52
For those of you already on NAV, some of the features may not be new as you may already be familiar with them in NAV however, they were missing from the modern client and SaaS versions.

2:02
If you’re thinking about moving from NAV to Business Central than please note that the windows client is no longer available. It can be only access via the Modern Client for On Premise. And SaaS is only accessed via a web browser. And just as a reminder, all users on Business Center are named users, concurrent users are no longer available.

2:20
However, if you continue to pay the NAV Microsoft enhancement fee or BREP, as it’s also known for, get three named users for each concurrent user if you choose to move to Business Central on premise, and if you move to Business Central SaaS then Microsoft will give you a discount of 40% off the monthly subscription fee up to 30th of June 2021 – and I can give you a summary of this information if you’d like it. So these are the top five things about the new release of Business Central that we’re going to discuss and show you today. First of all multi-tenancy. You can now have up to three different tenants setup on your Business Central environment, which means that you can have three different databases.

2:59
Now, this is really great if you want multiple instances of Business Central for different country localisations, but do note that the tenants are all hosted in the region they are managed in. For example, if they’ve been set up in the UK, they’ll be hosted the UK. Secondly shortcuts, these keys are back and they’re missing from the modern client. Now, we do have a list of them and you can also create your own one, but if you drop me a line we can get that list sent across to you in a great PDF format.

3:28
Thirdly save views. This is really simple but a very useful save you action was not available, but filter views in previous versions of the modern client. There are now available to be saved wherever you want to store them for example on the roll center – and they will be available on any device that you use as you move from desktop to tablet to mobile.

3:48
Fourthly, customising screens. You now have the ability to move the tiles, actions, and analysis on the roll center and any other pages – and you can remove them or adding actions and you can bookmark your favourite screens. Lastly, multiple screens. You can now have new screens open on a new tab in your web browser and you can have multiple screens open at the same time minimising them, comparing them side by side. These are dynamically synchronized so they will all update if you change something one screen to another.

4:18
Now I’ll pass over to Ian, for the demo, and he can show you all about this.

4:27
Hi guys. Thanks for joining today. What we’re looking at on the screen here is the latest version of Business Central. This is the wave 2 2019 release. This when Danusia was saying the modern client, she’s talking about this view. So the one that looks like a web browser and all the features that were released or installed here by default.

4:53
So let’s jump in. A lot of things Microsoft have done in the background that you might not notice on the surface. So they’ve improved performance efficiency and improve compatibility between different types of devices. And also Microsoft are investing very heavily in artificial intelligence at the moment.

5:15
So this welcome screen where it’s giving you insights from last month, and if you go to your intelligent Cloud insights, this stuff that the Cortana Intelligence is picking up, that’s where they’re making a lot of enhancements in the background. You can see they’ve now got beautiful cash flow forecasting which the artificial intelligence can do for you. But what I’m going to concentrate on today is the stuff in the foreground that you’ll be able to see. So one of the first nice new features that’s been introduced with this release is the ability to cancel issued reminders or issue finance charge memos that you may have done for your customers that wasn’t possible before.

5:55
So I’m logged in here as a member of the sales team. Looking through my menus I can’t actually find anything for issued reminders and finance charges. So I’ll use the search button or Microsoft are starting to call this the ‘tell me’ button nowadays, and I’ll search for issued reminders.

6:26
And remember you don’t have to type in the entire thing in the search. Just the first few letters of each word usually gets you that.

6:33
So if we look at some issued reminders on my system, usually when you create reminders or finance charges you did it in bulk and you might make a mistake and you create one that “whoops I shouldn’t have done that” you can always come to this list of issued reminders. That’s the one that I didn’t want to issue and I do get the option to cancel this, so it’s with a click of a button I can cancel just the one we’re looking at.

7:02
I can leave this blank and cancel all of them. I can do it by customer number or posting date. Or add more filters.

7:11
Say, okay, and it has been canceled and there’s a little tick there now that shows me it’s been canceled. So when I’m doing my printouts on my emailing I can add a filter that says don’t send ones that have been cancelled. It’s as easy as that and it’s exactly the same procedure for issued finance charge memos it simply search for it get the list. Click on the one you don’t want and cancel.

7:39
So nice new feature that. Another really nice feature that’s been missing in NAV and Business Central, are the descriptions that get posted on to the general ledger. So I’m just going to show you in the purchases and payable side. Once again, it’s not on my menus. So I’m going to go and search for purchases and payables setup.

8:10
And one of the options that has been added is to copy line description to general ledger entry. You can turn that on or off. Nice little box. Just remember it’s there and at the moment we have it turned off.

8:26
There’s the same thing in the sales in receivable setup. I’m just going to show the purchases and payable side. Let me go and find a purchase order.

8:41
And all this, just choose one of them. This one’s a nice one.

8:54
There’s only really two lines there, no I’ll choose a better one than that.

8:58
And this one here.

9:03
Okay, so only this purchase order I have placed an order for some paper for my scanner. It’s going against the GL account, now with that option turned off if I post this document and we can simulate posting not doing a preview, and we can see exactly what would be posted to the general ledger. You can see the description that comes through with every line. It just says order number 10624.

9:32
But you can imagine if this purchase order was perhaps your credit card statement, people have been hiring cars, booking hotels, paying for meals, buying flowers for customers Etc. There might be a hundred or more lines down here. Every one of them gets posted with that same generic description.

9:51
But if we go back to that purchases and payable set up and you’ll notice that I keep searching here, and I’m doing that for a reason, so please bear with me, you’ll see why just now. If I turn on this option and you can see it’s saved my changes now, we start getting that clue that something has happened, and I go back into that purchase order.

10:19
Very quickly, we will see the difference. So it was this one.

10:25
I’ve still got my paper for the scanner. If I pretend to close this.

10:30
And look what gets posted to the general ledger. Suddenly now the description of the line starts coming through on the general ledger accounts. That’s going to make it a whole lot easier for your people in finance and accounts to go through things and see what exactly was this invoice 106024? I can’t remember. Now you’ve got a nice description that helps you see what’s going on in your system.

11:00
As I say, exactly the same button is available on your sales and receivable set up. Instead of posting an invoice number, you can post the line descriptions of what you’re selling.

11:11
Another nice new feature that has been added. Let’s go and have a look this time at a sales order. It can happen that let’s have a look at this one.

11:26
We’ve got an existing document with four lines on here, but what’s happened in the background since I created this document I went into the system and I blocked this item. As we’re out of stock or there’s a quality issue or something, but I went to the item master and I ticked this item as being blocked. Very useful. If I now try and create a new purchase order or if I try and create a credit memo where I’m going to use a copy document function etc.

11:56
There’s now some logic that happens in the background that checks to see if items have been blocked.

12:07
So let me include the header. Say Okay.

12:14
It’s giving me one warning.

12:18
You’ll notice that blocked item, it didn’t copy it across. In older versions, it would have copied it across ignoring that blocked. And if I look up here, it tells me there’s an error occurred. I can click in it for the details and it tells me this item has been blocked. That’s why it hasn’t copied it across. So it saves you the embarrassment of copying something across, and then finding out when you try and post, oop that items blocked and I can’t actually post this document.

12:48
It tells you in advance now, it stops you making that kind of mistake. Right, now you will notice that I was jumping around a lot using the ‘tell me’ button to access certain pages, and that can be a real pain. So even though I’m perhaps working in the sales team, maybe I need to do something with purchase orders. And will be really nice if I had a menu option somewhere instead of searching all the time.

13:16
So a new feature that’s been added, if I go search for those purchase orders.

13:23
I now have the option to bookmark this page.

13:28
As soon as I click that it tells me that it’s been added and if I look on my front screen suddenly, I have a new menu option available to get to purchase orders. So any screen within the system if you’re going to it quite often, you can bookmark it and it will appear as one of the options on your home screen menus. If you’ve got something there that you don’t actually want this to be part of your menu anymore. You can see that it has been bookmarked.

13:58
You can just remove that bookmark.

14:01
When you get back to your home screen, you will see that menu options gone. So your end users can start customizing their screens to look the way they want. This is a little bit like the shortcut key, shortcut menu, in older versions of NAV, very nice. Very quick easy to use everybody can customise their page to work what it needs to do.

14:28
What’s also been added is the ability to resize Columns. Now those of you used to using NAV – you could resize columns but in the previous versions of the web client what we’re calling, the modern client, that wasn’t there it is now being added. So you can resize it by dragging and dropping, you can resize by double-clicking, just like you do in Excel, double click there, and it makes it the correct size to fit everything in that column.

14:59
And these changes, so if you bookmark a page, if you resize the column, anything like that, the system will remember your changes. So next time you login it will still be there and it will also remember across all your devices. So if I’m working on my laptop in the office, I add a menu option. I resize some columns, I go out onto the road and I pull out my Apple iPad. I log in, that menu option will be there.

15:28
The column will be resized, so it remembers for you rather than for your device. So you always get the same experience. Which again is very nice.

15:40
The way that filtering works has been enhanced. So for this again, I’m going to go and search and there’s another reason I’m searching you’ll see just now. Let’s have a look for some employees.

15:56
Okay. This is a list of all the employees at my company. I have the ability to filter this list. I can click on the little filter button up here to show and hide my filter pin. And what’s very nice, some shortcut keys have been brought back so that now if I want to do my filters, I don’t have to let go of the keyboard and go and grab the mouse.

16:25

I can press for example Shift F3, brings up my filter view, Shift F3 turns it off. On any page I can press Ctrl, Alt, F1 and it takes a second but it brings up this little page inspection. It tells me which table I’m looking at in my system.

16:48
So anybody who’s using Jet or Power BI, it tells you where this information is held so you can go away and build your reports on your external Reporting System knowing which table. It tells me all the fields that are on this row. I’m on Annette Hill. It’s got all the information that I’m seeing plus all the information that is hidden in the background that I’m not necessarily seeing on this screen. And some of these fields are optional Fields.

17:20
So with a name job title phone number I can type them in but there are some Fields where you choose from a drop-down list. I’d like to know which one of those fields are options, so I can hit search and I can search for option.

17:37
So these are the three fields for each employee, which I can select from a list. For gender I can select male/female, status – active/left, whatever it might be. So again, that’s a nice handy little feature for finding your way around your system.

17:58
I’m going to filter this page. I want to list of all the female employees.

18:05
So I can add a new filter. I know from when we looked it up in our page inspection that that’s held in the gender field. Not the sex field. So I can scroll down here and I can start looking for gender, or I can type it in over here and it finds it for me, and I can select I just want to see female. Or I could select I just want to see people who don’t have a gender.

18:32
Or I just want to see the males, or I can set multiple options and say show me male and female, but for this filter, I’m just going to show the ladies.

18:43
I also want to filter it by their start date. So I’m very interested in all the people who we have employed in the past 12 years. For example. Perhaps we have a special bonus for people who’ve been with the company for less than 12 years or something. I can start putting in Dynamic filters here. I’m going to filter by employment date.

19:10
There we are. And I’m going to say anybody who was employed from 12 years ago, which is minus 12y for 12 years back from today, up to and including today, now I can be lazy and instead of typing ‘Today’ I can just type the ‘T’. I’ll do it in full. I’ll type ‘Today’ as soon as I tab off that field it figures out what those dates are. Today’s dates are 23rd of the 10th 2019.

19:41
It’s figured out when was 12 years ago for me. And I can see that Linda is the only person who’s been taken on in the past 12 years.

19:51
If I find this view very useful, I can save it. So let’s save that, and we’ll call it ‘12 years Ladies’ perhaps.

20:06
And that view is there next time I log in.

20:10
It will be there for me. I can just click on it. It will apply that filter and it will use today’s date to figure out 12 years ago up to and including today. So we’ll save filters, very powerful very useful. You can imagine all the sales orders that are open or all the time sheets that require approval – customers who are not on hold, you can save those filters. Any time you come in you can just choose which view of the table you want to see.

20:48
And again the shortcut keys are very useful. There are quite a lot of them available. And we do have a very nice little picture of all of them. If you drop an email to Danusia, she’ll send this through to you or give you a link where you can find it.

21:12
Those filters that I showed you you can do the same logic when you’re running a report. So let’s run a report. And again, let’s look at employees. There’s an employee birthday list. It’s one of the reports, so you can use that same logic. So if you want to list of all the ladies who’ve worked here for more than 12 years, you can add your filter or gender.

21:41
Choose female, you can at your filter for employment date.

21:48
And you can choose let’s go for 15 years in the past minus 15 years up to and including today it will figure out for you. When you preview the report.

22:03
The preview has been nicely enhanced now so all versions of NAV where you got this screen, you can either zoom in or zoom out two different sizes. You can now set it to fill up your screen horizontally vertically, you can manually zoom in zoom out send it to a printer or download the file as a PDF to your desktop.

22:30
So the filters work both on the screens and on reports. Another really nice feature that was missing from previous versions of Business Central. Let’s say you’re in your sales orders.

22:44
You’re busy typing away you’re capturing a sales order. You’re halfway through and someone comes along and they ask you a question about inventory or something else – previous versions of Business Central, you have to go out go back to your main screens find the answer for them and then come back in here. We now have the option to open this page in a new window. If I click on that, I get a new window sits here.

23:10
This is the order that I was working on. I can drag that to one of my other screens and I can come and work on something else over here and answer a colleagues question etc. etc. When I finished with them, I bring that back I can finish capturing my order and reviewing this and when I’m done I can just close. You’ll notice on every screen that I open, it’s got the word ‘demo’ up in the top corner.

23:40
That’s another new feature their calling the ‘company batch’, again that was available something similar on NAV. Now it’s been added to Business Central, if you go and look at your company information page, you can give each company a four character name so you know which company you’re working on and you can now work on two companies at the same time opened in separate Windows. That’s quite allowable.

24:11
Another nice feature. And again, I was using that Search tool or the ‘tell me’ button, perhaps if I keep looking at employees and employee birthdays. Maybe I’ve got the wrong home screen here, the wrong Roll Center. There’s a nice Explorer up here where I can look at all the different roles in the system.

24:35
So if I click on this it tells me about my role as a sales order processor. These all the menu options that I have available to me. I can click on any of them and it will take me there, but what I can also do, I can go and explore other roles. So I can see there’s an Administration role, a Finance role. There’s this Human Resources role. Woo that talks about employees. I can explore this role. I can see all the menu options that go with this role.

25:05
And I can see, ah, it lets me get to employees and the employee birthday list etc. Maybe this is the Role Center that I should be using. If it is, it is a very simple matter me to come up to my settings.

25:26
And this is a screen where I can choose to work on a different company if I want to, but I can also change my role Center, and I can change myself to be part of the human resources role Center and I have those Human Resources menus available to me. I’m not going to do that, but it is possible.

25:45
What’s also possible is the ability for you to create a new role, from scratch, without having to write any code. So if you’re the super user for your customer for your company, you can go to profiles, you get an option saying ‘profiles (roles)’ in brackets.

26:07
From here it gives me a list of all of the roles that are available on my system, which ones are enabled which ones are disabled, and what I can do. I can create a new role.

26:24
I just need to give it a name. We’ll call the demo.

26:33
Demo all sorts of fun and I can customize the pages that go with this. I can also choose whether this one is available for my users to see in that role Explorer once it’s created. Let’s customize the pages for this new role, and it’s opened up a new window.

26:55
Give it a second, so this is what it looks like. I want to change it slightly – Power BI reports. Let’s remove that, perhaps I want to add a new menu option for employees and search for that.

27:17
Employees I’ll bookmark that so it appears, and there it is, I can add and take away menu options add takeaway areas. I can go into each individual page and hide and show fact boxes when I’m finished. I simply say done I can close this screen.

27:39
And now if I went into that Explorer I would see in all of the roles, there’s this new role called demo, which people can have a look at and they can set as their home screen. As I said all of these features follow you around from device to device if you make a change on one of your machines, it follows you to your other machines. And also keep an eye on that artificial intelligence. That’s where Microsoft are putting a lot of their effort.

28:16
In future releases were expecting to see a lot more in these intelligent insights and the insights from last week.

28:23
I’ll hand back to Danusia.

28:26
Thank you Ian, I hope everyone enjoyed the demo there. We did have a couple of questions that came through was that was being done. So one question, which I’m sure a few people would like answered actually, is so is old NAV no longer being updated then?

28:44
So basically, old NAV, as long as you are paying your annual subscription to Microsoft and you’re on a version that is five-year-old or less. So that’s about NAV of 2015. They will still provide updates.

29:03
So if something happens with Brexit next month, and there’s a new requirement for recording exports, Microsoft will create that functionality and they will give it for free to everybody who’s on 2015 or later – includes NAV and Business Central. If you’re on an older version, you’ll either need to upgrade or will need to custom write that code for you. So NAV is still supported as long as you’re on a supported version.

29:34
Also I had a few people asking me to send the shortcut keys information so I can do that for you.

29:41
And then the third question that we had was is there a comparison available somewhere that you can look at to find the differences between the functionality of Business Central and NAV? There are places where you can go and have a look, you can go and have a look on Microsoft’s website, some of those documents, they don’t make for light reading because they list everything even the stuff that’s in the background perhaps that is of no interest to you and changes that they might have made to improve GST reporting in India, things like that.

30:15
If you drop us a line if you speak to the Danusia, Karen or your consultant, they’ll be able to tell you the stuff that is applicable to you that you might find interesting. They’ll tell you what’s changed between the different versions.

Great. Thank you Ian. So if you just move over to the key takeaways now then, so we hope that what you’ve learned today will either assist you if you’re already using the latest version of Business Central, or could help you move or convert to Business Central in the near future. So we spoke about multi-tenancy with the three tenants pro-environment.

30:52
Then obviously the shortcut keys, and when we’re at Directions one of the consultant Cindy said that in her session, everyone was really really pleased to hear that these are coming back. It’s very useful and much quicker to use the keyboard and the mouse at times.

31:09
In terms of the saved views, this is clearly going to save you time with any of your regularly used preferred filters and as Ian showed us, they can also be dynamic. In terms of screen customizations, this will improve efficiency and productivity giving you a shortcut to those screens again that you’re using regularly. And then in terms of multiple screens, the key thing here I think is, that if you ever find yourself interrupted in a really complicated task, now you can open a new screen to look at something else without losing a place as where you were, and likewise you can have everything synchronizing as you’re going along.

31:47
So we hope you found the webinar interesting and informative. As I mentioned previously, it’s just another one in our series of monthly webinars, and you will be receiving the invites to register for the next one and there are reminders on the website also and in our newsletter, do sign up for it, or I can forward the details to you. And a link will be sent out to this video recording of the webinar for you to share with your colleagues, and it’ll also be available on our website as a webinar on demand.

32:16
So this is a final message. Thank you for attending this webinar, when I close the session a survey will appear feel free to respond with feedback or suggestions of other topics that we could be doing.

If you have any other further questions or comments do feel free to email me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk — Thank you very much for attending. Cheers guys.

You can view another of our webinars in the series here. Alternatively click here to learn more about Business Central, or get a quote with our Estimate Generator.