Welcome and introductions
0:07
OK, welcome, thank you, everyone, for attending today. Just before we start the webinar, just a few housekeeping roles. All attendees will be on mute and will remain for the whole webinar. Please use the question box to ask any questions relating to the topic, and all questions will be answered after the demo.
0:25
If we run out of time, or if your question requires a longer answer, then the question will be answered offline directly. Use the chat box for questions related to the webinar, such as if you can’t hear the audio or the presenter is going too fast. Please note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent to all the attendees after the demo.
0:48
This is our monthly webinar on key areas of NAV and Business Central. Sign up for that for as many as you like on our website. I’ll show you the list of upcoming webinars at the end of this session. We also send out regular e-mails to register for the next one.
1:07
My name is Tiziana Giardina and I will be facilitating the demo today. I’m an account manager here at TVision, and I’ve worked at TVision for 2 ½ years and my background is 18 years: IT, sales, marketing, and partner management. Ian will be doing the demo today, and he’s a support consultant at TVision. He’s been working at TVision for nearly four years, and has been using NAV since 2000.
1:36
OK, so today’s Webinar is about role centres, which is the main entry point into NAV, Business Central. It is effectively a user’s home page showing KPIs and the roles specific navigation pane. Therefore, it is important that each role centred design is based on each user’s business role, taking into consideration the information and tasks relevant to the users during a typical work day. By the end of the webinar, we hope you will understand how to effectively use the role centres to streamline the staff’s day-to-day tasks.
2:15
So, these are the top five things we’re going to show you today about role centres. Firstly, exploring and navigating pages per role. Business Central now has the Role Explorer. This allows you to see all the options available on all the Role Centres to make it easier for you to choose the one that’s right for you. This will enable you to be more efficient in your day-to-day tasks.
2:41
Secondly, display actionable insights in role centres. Business Central finds interesting business facts in your company data and displays them as a newspaper-like headline in role centres. If you want to take a closer look at an insight, you can click on it. For example, if it showed you the largest sales invoice, you can click on it and see the details.
3:04
How to manage profiles and role centres. All users of Business Central can be assigned a profile that reflects their role. This gives them a starting point what their screen will look like when they’re first log-in. The end user can still customise this profile to suit their personal needs. If you’re an administrator, you can create, change, manage, and assign profiles.
3:28
Bookmark a link to a page or report on your role centre. Using the bookmark icon, you can add an action that opens a page or report from the navigation menu of your role centre. This lets you customise your menus and you can quickly reach your important content or business tasks.
3:48
Sorting, searching and filtering. Sorting and filtering make it easy for you to get a quick overview of your data. If you have a lot of customers, for example, you can solve them alphabetically by name, or from the largest to the smallest balance. This makes it easier for you to find information that you’re looking for.
4:08
Using the page search you can quickly find the item you’re interested in. This is a quick and easy way to reduce a long list to something more manageable. Filtering provides a more advanced, versatile way of controlling which records display on the list or are included in the report.
4:28
OK, so before the demo, I get an idea on how you use profiles or role centres in your business, so I’m just going to launch the poll. So, if you wouldn’t mind just submitting your answer, that would be great. OK, A few more seconds. I can see them coming in. OK, so looks like, that’s interesting, yeah, most of you have selected everyone uses a default role centre profile, or, looks like it’s 50/50, each user is assigned a suitable profile or role centre. OK, Brilliant. Thank you for that. So, hopefully, the demo will help you take that to the next level.
5:38
So now, I will hand you over to Ian.
Demo
5:51
Right. Thanks, Deetz. OK, guys, today we’re talking about role centres. So, if you used to NAV and I say role centres you probably know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about this Home screen that you get when you log into the system. Microsoft seems to be changing their language around this, and they’re starting to call this Your Profile.
6:12
So, they using pretty much interchangeably at the moment, Role Centre, Profile, or Role, all three words, they are actually talking about what your screen looks like when you login. So, first up, I’m using the latest version of Business Central. This is out of the box so there’s nothing on here extra.
6:33
This is what you would get on your first install. One of the nice features that’s being added on Business Central, wasn’t available on NAV, is the Role Explorer, So I’m logged in here. I’m not sure if I’m logged in as an accountant, or a business manager, or something like that. They’ve now given us this button here, the Role Explorer.
6:59
And if I click on this, it takes me through, OK, I’m logged in as the business manager. And this is showing me all the menu options that are available on my Home screen. So, from that home screen that we were just looking at these are all the actions that I should be able to find: finance, cash management, sales, etc.
7:23
If we go back and have a look, it does make sense. There’s my finance, cash management, sales, purchasing, etc with those same options inside those menus. So that’s what it’s showing me. If I want to get to something, I don’t want to stop clicking through the menus up here, I can use my Role Explorer. It’s like expanding all of my menu options. I can see everything, and I can click from here. It works the same as my homepage.
7:55
But one of the nice things about this, I can also explore other people’s roles. So, I’ve been given business manager, perhaps it’s not a nice fit for me. I’m seeing things on my screen that Yeah, I like the finance stuff, but that sales stuff means nothing to me. Maybe that’s a better role that I could use. So, if I click on Explore All, this shows me all the different roles that are available on my system. There’s a manufacturing role: sales and marketing role, finance role, administration role.
8:29
I can have a look through them, and I can see what menu options they have. So, just out of interest, if I look at this purchasing role, I can explore this one, these are all the main menu options that somebody with the purchasing role would get. And I can still click on these items here, they might not be on my menu. But as long as I’m allowed to go and look at units of measure, I can click on that and it will take me through to units of measure. It still works for me.
9:01
If I have a look here and I find something that looks a nicer fit for me than what I’m currently using, I can, from my Home screen, pretty much from any screen actually, from my home screen, I can change my settings. I can go to the My Settings button and instead of having the role of business manager, I can choose one of these other roles.
9:30
And if I took manufacturing manager, for argument’s sake and I said OK, my home screen would change to screen most suitable for a manufacturing manager. There we go, it’s talking about production orders and planning, and warehouse management and things like that. And the finance stuff, that’s disappeared.
9:56
So, I can, myself, without having to ask an administrator, or a super user, change the look and feel of my home screen by choosing a different role. And, again, once I’m on my whole screen, we come to this whole idea of actionable insights. So, this is the home screen for manufacturing guys. It talks about production orders, planning, warehousing, operations, things like this. Things that would be important to someone in manufacturing. And everything that you see on this screen, underneath the menus, everything below that, It’s actionable insights.
10:41
So, if I see any numbers in here, if I looked at full-time production orders, if there was a number, then I can drill on that number and get down and see those production orders and decide what to do about. This was full of zeros. So, let’s move back to one that we know as nice information in it. I’ll go back to My Settings and I can change as many times as I want. I’ll go back to the business manager. That looked like a nice role centre.
11:15
And we can see some of these tiles, how they work. So, on the business manager’s homescreen, it gives me some headline information. Again, you can click through on any of this, and every tile tells me something. So instead of having to log onto the system, go check the sales quotes, go check the Sales orders, go check the sales invoices. Go check the purchase orders, purchase invoices, log onto the payments, check those. It brings it all to me on one line, I can see how many documents of each type at all.
11:51
And I can see 2, 4, 9. I’m happy with these numbers. I expect them. Oh, Outstanding Vendor Invoices is at 14. Something’s needs my attention. I can click on that number. It takes me through. I can deal with what I am seeing, chase someone to process their payment, or whatever needs to happen.
12:15
So, everything I see is an actionable insight, e-mails I’m sending, approvals that I do, timesheets that I must submit and approve. And this is fully customisable, so if there’s something on here that means nothing to me, I want to take it off. I can do so. Or if there’s something missing, I can add it on myself. I would do that by going up to the Personalise button on my settings and you will notice my screen changes slightly. I’ve got this menu bar at the top, when I hover over something, I start getting these little red arrows appearing.
12:57
So, let’s say on this Payments section I’m not interested in this Average Collection Days. I can hit the little arrow next to it and say hide this from view. I can scroll down a little bit further. I can hide an entire section if I want to. I can hide this. I can move this and drag it and drop it somewhere else. I notice that there are some things here greyed out, so they’re available to me, but they are not being shown. So, if this is of interest to me, I can select it, and I can show it, and again, I can move things around.
13:37
I can make my Home screen look the way that I want it to look, I can customise it so that I see the things I am interested in. So, I’m going to click done. I’ve only made one change. I just took away the number of days of debt. I’ve got a screen that makes more sense to me, and it’s easier for me to use, and lets me get my job done quicker.
14:07
But what about from the other end? What if I’m an administrator, and I want to make sure that my users are getting the best role centres that they can get to do their jobs? So, there are quite a few tools on the system that, as an administrator, I can use.
14:25
So, if I go up here and I search for role centre. And this is where we see the language that Microsoft is starting to change. The first thing that pops up is profiles, or roles. It’s what we used to call role centres, that’s what they’re calling it now. So, I can go into profiles, this is a list of all the profiles that are available on my system. While I’m in here, I can look at any of them, and let’s have a look at this human resources. That sounds interesting. If I ever look at this, yep, it gives me some names.
15:08
It tells me whether this is enabled for people to choose it. It will show up in the role explorer, remember that those three little lines that we see on the home screen. Whether this is the default profile for people who don’t have one set, what do they get by default? They don’t get human resources.
15:26
And I can disable personalisation to stop users with this profile, from changing things if I wanted to. So, this is an interesting profile, perhaps, But I want to tweak it a little bit. I’ve seen what it looks like. I’ve tried it myself. I want to change the way it looks. I can go to this profile and customise it myself as an administrator. You’ll notice it’s opened a second tab up here.
15:56
So, now I’m logging onto the system with Human Resources, and there’s really nothing on this menu, except for employees and setup. What I can do, while I’m in here, I can choose to add fields. I can go to any of these menu options. I can open them, once it’s open. I can change the way that it looks here. So, I’ll change it to a list view. I’ll change columns, etc. I’ll make all the changes to this profile that I want to make. And then I will say done. It’s completed my customisation.
16:46
I can close that. I’m back here, now I’ve got a human resources role centre that’s been customised a little bit when I give it to my employees. What I can also do, I can copy an existing profile, and the copy, I can change and I can leave the original here. So, I might have a finance profile that allows me to personalise it.
17:08
I might have a second finance profile, which doesn’t allow personalisation. So, when the auditors come in and I give them that second one, that they only get what I want what I want them to have so they can’t personalise anything.
17:21
So, I can set up profiles, I can change them, I can create new ones. I can manage profiles in that way. What I can also do is manage my users, and which profile they are getting and that is under user personalisation.
17:40
So, user personalisation. I can see these are the users who log into my system. This is the profile that they get when they log in. So, everybody’s logging in as a business manager, except poor old Andrea, he’s going to log in as an order processor.
17:59
So, I can go and assign and say this person over here called Ian, that’s not me. I’m logged in as an admin. So, Ian over here, I want to change them when Ian logs in, I want him to log in with inventory manager or something else.
18:17
I can choose which language he gets. I know that that’s English United Kingdom. Usually English or English is what’s chosen here but if Ian was French. I could give him a screen in French. Then when he logged in all those menu options have changed to French, which company does he get to see by default? I can change that here, as well.
18:38
So, I can set up for Ian which profile he gets. It could be one of those profiles that I’ve created, it doesn’t have to be an out-of-the-box profile.
18:48
What I can also do, if I have allowed people to customise their profiles, and it’s got to be a bit of a mess, I can come in and, again, I can talk about the use of personalisation. And there is a list of personalised pages. So, I can see on this system, let’s me, Demo Admin, I have personalised all of these screens, in some way, I’ve added columns or taken columns away, or changed the order of something.
19:23
I can see that this Ian character. He’s changed the way that he sees his contacts. If he’s messed it up somehow, and he can’t get it back to the way it should be, I can actually manage that for him and I can delete his customisation. So, the next time Ian logs in, now, he’s back to the default view of whatever he should be seeing rather than what he has customised.
19:47
So, within that management, we’ve created roles, we’ve modified a role, we assign a role to a user, we can change which roles users have, and we can clear up the customisation or he way they’ve made their screens look, if we need to.
20:03
Another way that either an end user can customise his own page, or as an admin, if you were customising a role centre for someone else. You could find something that’s not on your menus. So here on I have nothing to do with jobs in any of my menu options. I go find jobs, either through the role explorer, over there, or through the search here. I find jobs, yeah, this is the screen I want a shortcut to this screen. It should be on my menus. I can bookmark this screen.
20:43
The moment I go back to my home screen, Jobs has now appeared as a shortcut option up here. And if there’s something up here that I don’t want to see, chart of accounts, perhaps it’s not something I want to look at. I can, from the chart of accounts page, turn off the bookmark, and now it will disappear from my menus when I go back to my home screen. Chart of accounts is gone, now Jobs is there, so I can customise the way my menus are laid out, as well as what is laid out here. And as an admin, I can do that for a profile as well.
21:26
And then pretty much the last thing I want to speak to you about is your role centre into doesn’t just cover this home page. It covers all the pages behind this. So, if I go look at my items, I am seeing the items the way that a business manager looks at items by default on my system. I can customise this page myself. When I go out, it saves my customisations. As an admin. I can customise this and it will save it for everybody in the company.
21:57
If I’m just doing it, not as an admin. I’m doing it only for myself.
22:03
So, within this page, there are lots of things I can do. I can personalise this page, add columns, change the order of columns, for instance. That will be remembered next time I’ll log in, what I can also do. I can, Deetz was mentioning if you’ve got a long list, you can change the way that the list appears. So, by default, it’s ordered by item number. I can go order it by description instead, if I want it either ascending or descending. I could arrange it by unit cost, from the most expensive, to the least expensive, or vice versa. I can make this look anyway I want it to look.
22:48
So, I’ve got this list of information, I’m looking for something, I know it’s got Athens in the title but I’m not quite sure. I have my Page search option up here. I just start typing what it is I’m looking for, A, that’s good enough. I can see everything that has Athens in its title. And the final most advanced way, I can change the way that this looks. Let me turn that off.
23:14
I can use the filters. So here are my filters here. If you don’t see the filters, you can turn them on more pressing the filter button. And let’s say, I just want to show all of the items here that have a W in the item number. Perhaps I’m in charge of those items, and I’m really interested in seeing them. I’d say where the item number starts with anything, and it has a W in it somewhere. Now I’m only seeing items with W in the Title. So that’s a nice, easy way of chopping down my list. Look what I can do, I can save this view. So, I can call this my W items. It is now saved.
24:05
The next time I come in to look on the page, I am going to have the option of either showing all the default it shows all of the items. Or I would have my filtered view what I could see the W list. So especially if I’ve got a nice complicated filter on then you know, all the items with the W where the cost is more than 5000 and the stock is greater than zero and it’s in pieces or bottles, I can save that. So, the next time, I just click on this and this is also stored with my profile.
24:49
It’s always there for me, and as an administrator, if I put it there for the profile, it’s there for everybody that uses that profile. Finally, just because I want to steal a little bit of thunder. Don’t forget this search button up here. Microsoft call it the Tell Me button. Whenever you’re looking for something on the system without using any kind of personalisation, simply, what is it that you’re looking for if you’re looking for jobs, type jobs. If you’re looking to find out, how do you depreciate fixed assets, how to depreciate fixed assets?
25:32
You can ask the question and that will even give you help pages where you can understand how re-valuing fixed assets depreciating fixed assets works within the system and it takes you to any page that you’re allowed to see on the system.
25:50
OK, so don’t forget that, that tell me button. Really important. OK, Deetz, while we were busy, did any questions come in? Yes, there was a couple of questions. If anyone has got any questions from the demo, if you can just submit them now using the question box. Give you a few seconds to do that, but during the demo, we did have a few questions Ian that came in for you.
Questions
26:17
Does Microsoft release new role centres? That’s actually a very good question.
26:24
Microsoft can release new roles centres, and they do tweak the role centres. And there’s nothing to stop Microsoft creating new role centres in the future so, as they add new functionality to the system, they will probably add a new role centre to go with that functionality. But, as I said, if you can’t find the role centre that suits you, or you’re an admin, and you can’t find a role centre that suits your employees, you can always take an existing one, make a copy, turn it into your own that might even be better than something that Microsoft releases. But if they do release them, you will see them if you go into the search for role centres or certain profiles, and you will be able to see.
27:10
OK, excellent, OK, another one: I don’t want my users to change their role centres, they might see something they’re not supposed to see. And can I stop them? OK, yeah.
27:23
Now, I’ve heard this question before. It’s always a worry that you’ve got some confidential information. You don’t want your users to get to it. And with some other software systems, the way you manage that is you hide those menu options from the users, so they just can’t get to that information. That’s not the logic that Business Central uses.
27:46
So, Business Central, I can see all of the menu options. But it’s not my profile or my role centre that lets me see things and stops me seeing things. That’s my user profile. So, when you set up a user, you say this user is allowed to post journals, this user is allowed to raise purchase orders. This user’s got no access to the general ledger, for example.
28:13
Their Role Centre here, it might have an option for chart of accounts. For some reason, if they clicked on it, they just get an error message, Nope, sorry, page is closed, you are not allowed to see this. So, you don’t manage their access by managing their profile or their role centre, you manage the access by managing the user profile.
28:34
And remember, if you don’t want your users to fiddle with these role centres, there was an option where you can turn on and off personalisation when we drilled into role centre such as you can always play with that, do we have time for one more?
28:54
And there is a question there about changing the default. I’ll tell you I’m not sure exactly what the answer is. So, the question was, if a user changes their role centre, how does the administrator know, is there an automatic change alert, or does it have to be manually set? To be honest, the one place that you would see that is in the user personalisation. So, you don’t get an alert to say that somebody’s done this, but you could go and search for user personalisation. And I’ve spelled that very, very wrong, Still managed to find it.
29:35
And I would see here that Ian is logging in as shipping and receiving, if he changed that, I would see that change here. If he changed himself to an order processor. I would see order processing here. So, I can go and investigate myself but there’s nothing that pops up an error message to me that says somebody’s fiddling. I see there’s a couple of questions that are coming in. Deetz so I’m not going to get to these emails. We will respond to your other questions after the webinar.
Five key takeaways
29:56
Thank you. OK, so we’d like to leave you with some key takeaways which we hope will assist you exploring existing role centres. So, you can start by exploring alternative role centres yourself, by trying to change role centres on My settings, you can easily test existing roles to see which Role Centres suit you best. If you want to build customised role centres, you can benefit by originating from one of the existing ones in order to save time.
30:40
Actionable insights: You can customise your home page to look the way you want to show you the information you’re interested in when you login. This gives you actionable insights you can act upon straight away.
30:54
Managing your profiles and role centres, if you’re an administrator, you can assign your users a suitable default and if there is nothing suitable, you can always create a bespoke profile.
31:05
Bookmark – if there is a page in Business Central you need to get to regularly but it’s not on your role centre, then you can add a bookmark.
31:13
Sorting, searching, and filtering. If you have a long list, you can use the sort, search and filtering capabilities to make it more manageable and remember that you can save that view and as always, if you would like some help with anything that we have covered today, please do contact us.
31:32
We hope you found this webinar interesting and informative. We shall be sending out an e-mail soon to register for the next one. We shall put reminders about the webinars in our newsletters as well. Thank you for attending the webinar. Once I close the session, a survey will appear. It will be great if you could respond with some feedback. If you do have any further questions, please feel free to e-mail them to me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk. Thank you very much.
