Top 5 things you need to know about what’s new in Business Central – October 2020

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Transcript

Introduction

0:01

Welcome, Thanks for everyone for attending, today, our webinar on the Top Five Things: You Need to Know About What’s New in Business Central Wave 2 2020. Just before we start the webinar, just a few housekeeping rules. All attendees will be on mute and will remain for the webinar. Please use the question box to answer questions related to the topic, and all questions will be answered after the demo.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 webinars, such as if you can’t hear the audio or the presenter is going too fast, but please do note that a link to view the webinar recording will be sent to all attendees after the demo.

0:44

This is our monthly webinar of key areas of NAV and Business Central. You can sign up for as many as you like on our website. I’ll show you a list of upcoming webinars at the end of the session. We will also send out regular e-mails to register for the next one.

0:59

My name is Krissy and I will be facilitating the demo today. I’m an account executive here at TVision. I’ve worked here for nearly a year, and my background is 16 years in customer service and sales. Ian will be doing the demo today. And he’s a Support Consultant at TVision. He’s been working at TVision for four years and has been using NAV since 2000.

1:19

Today we will be showing you highlights of the new Business Central release. We can’t show you every new feature, but we will show you those we believe are most useful and applicable to the majority of companies.

1:31

So, these are the top five things about the new release of Business Central that we’re going to discuss and show you today. Write longer item references: as businesses are using online journals more and more, item references they use often long, such as GTINs or GYIDs that can contain 30 or more characters. You can set up an item reference between your item description and the description that your customer or vendor uses. When you create a sales or purchase document, you can put in the item reference number field to automatically add the customers or vendors items description to the document.

2:06

Check financial journals in background. On the general journal batch page, you can choose background error check to have Business Central validate financial journals, such as general or payment journals while you are working on them. When the validation is enabled, the journal check fact box, displays next to the journal lines, and will show issues in the current line and the whole batch. 

2:27

New copy journal functionality: you can copy previously posted journals if you want to post to the journal again. This can save you time if you frequently use them. This will also give you options to reverse the signs on the amount so you can use it to reverse previously posted journals.

2:44

New options for recurring journals, which gives you more control for the reversing dates of the accrual type journals.

2:51

Use Word document layouts to customise more outgoing customer documents: you can now export the document layouts for sales shipments and return orders. Simply modify the layouts in Word and import them back into Business Central to use next time you send a shipment or return order. Now I will hand out over to Ian for the demo.

The demo – Business Central Wave 2 October 2020

3:12

Hi, everyone. Please, I’ve got a window open next to me. So, if you hear traffic noise and it’s getting a bit annoying, just type something in the Chat box and I will close the window.

3:24

So today, we’re talking about what’s new in Wave two. So, I’ve got the latest Wave two version of Business Central in front of me, and it’s a real treat. If you’re working in finance, there are some nice finance features that have been added. So, I’m going to jump into those straight away, Krisy mentioned that line checking in journals, so I’m going to go straight into a general journal. And within the general journals. I’ll just wait for it to load. When I’m choosing my batches, you’ll notice that there are a couple of new options over here.

4:15

So, this is the first one we’re going to talk about, the background error checking. You can turn this on or off for each of your batches. The copy posted journal lines will be discussing that one in a moment, but again, it’s something that you can turn on and off. So, I have this turned on for both of my journals. I’m going to get into my default journal.

4:38

Now within my default journal, I can capture a line, and it’s going to give me notice, line by line if there is anything wrong with my journal.So, let me just add another line to this journal that I know is going to cause issues.Give it a new document number. Again, for account 31400, and I’m going to make this one for £555.

5:09

And I’ll add another line, again, for putting on 500, and already, I can see that there are problems with this journal on the side. One of those problems is going to be that it doesn’t balance, so let’s put it in this balancing amount and fix that one up. And as soon as I’ve done that, I can see now that there is only one problem with this journal.

5:38

Now, I want you to imagine that you had, instead of 4 lines, 30 at 40, or 400 lines and there’s something wrong.With this new functionality. I can start at the top. I can go down line by line. There’re no issues with this one, no issues. When I get to the line, the problem, it tells me it’s this line where the problem exists. I can hover and it will tell me exactly what the problem is, and it’s telling me it’s the relationship between this field and this field that has a problem. I either need to fill this in, or delete this. Let’s fill this one in. And as soon as I’ve done that and I move to the next line, suddenly, there are no further issues with this journal. I know I can go and post. I don’t have to wait until I’ve captured all the lines. Do a preview posting. I now get that feedback instantly after capturing the line.

6:36

So, this is going to be a real time saver for those long journals to try and find mistakes and try and get past those mistakes before they become posting errors. So that’s the first thing that’s in there for finance users.

6:52

And the second thing is, the ability to copy posted journals. So, remember, one of the options that we turned on was the copy to posted Journal lines. So, because I have that turned on and I’ve posted journals from my home screen, I can go and have a look at posted journals, and I’ve got my posted general journals here. 

7:23

Now on this screen, I can see this line, one document number, one register number. This was a journal that was posted because it’s on one line that tells me it’s one of those journals where you’ve got the balancing account on the right-hand side. Let’s just have a look, and there it is. I’ve got one account on the left, the other account on the right.

7:46

And you can also see it was the same thing for this next one. But then here I can see there are 1,2,3 lines with the same document number. And I can actually see number 845. There are dozens of lines. This was all posted as one single journal. Now it may be that I want to repost some of these lines. Perhaps these three lines here. I would like to reverse them or repost them. So, I can select more lines, choose these are the three lines that I’m interested in. And I can copy selected lines to a journal, and then we’ll copy these lines to the journal where I tell it to go, and it gives me some options while I’m copying. 

8:31

I can also say, copy the entire register. Then it would copy everything with number 845. I’m going to do that, copy a nice, big, meaty, journal. I’ll copy everything. I get the option to choose a new posting date. I get the option to choose a new document number, if I wish. I also get the option; do I want to reverse the signs. So, if I’m going to reverse this entire journal, I could just do that. And it will create me a journal with the signs reversed.

9:02

I think I’ll leave it like that.I say OK. Do I want to open the general journal that I’ve just created? Yes, please. And you will see, there are the four lines that we started with earlier, and here are all of those lines that it’s copied from a previously posted journal, with all the signs reversed, so I can undo that journal. So, this functionality, to repeatedly post the same journal again and again, or to reverse a journal that has been posted in whole, or in part, is a fantastic function.

9:42

The next one, again, is a nice finance tool that I want to show you guys, and that’s some options with recurring journals. So again, let’s go and do some search. Recurring journals and I want recurring General Journal. Now, if you’ve never used recurring journals before, you maybe look to them and thought they weren’t for you, there are some new features in here with the previous Wave and with this with Wave.

10:17

So, with this Wave, if you’ve chose any of the reversing type journals, so fixed variable or balance so that’s the type of journal you would use for an accrual. In the past you would have posted something with this type of journal, recurring method, and it would automatically reverse that journal on the first day of the next month. You now have some control over when that reversing happens. So instead of reversing on the first day of next month, I could put in a formula that says find the end of the current month, add 25 days. So, if I posted this today, instead of reversing on the first of November, it would reverse on the 25th of November . So, I get that control. If I know I’m doing’s accrual and the invoice will only arrive at the end of next month, I can actually reverse the accrual at the end of next month. So that’s a nice, powerful tool.

11:20

In a previous wave release, there was the ability to apportion a line percentage wise. And you could choose which GL accounts, which departments, cost centres, other dimensions, and you could allocate on a percentage. That’s something that we didn’t show you last time. I just thought I’d slip that in there as a bonus.

11:45

But, again, finance wise on the journals they have some really nice features with the checking, the copying a posted journal, and the options now on recurring journals.

11:58

But it’s not just finance. People working in inventory and warehousing, operations, logistics. There is a very nice feature if we go look at our items on the system. And it’s with those reference numbers for items. So, it may well be, let’s just have a look at this ATHENS desk here. It may well be that we’re selling this ATHENS desk. That’s perhaps we’re going to sell it on e-Bay or Amazon or one of the other online portals.

12:29

One of the options that we get is, I think it is in the related tab, Item references. Yes. So, if I was to post this item on something like Amazon, you end up with an item number like this on Amazon and e-Bay and it’s a long, I think it’s 32-digit numbers. You can now attach these 32-digit reference numbers. And you can make it for a customer. So, it could be Amazon, and it could be for e-Bay. It could be their unique reference number for this item.

13:07

Internally, I’m still going to refer to it as 1896S. When I speak to Amazon, I’m going to refer to it with this number. If you do trade with, especially military organizations, something like the South African National Defence Force, or the Ministry of Defence, they have ridiculously long item numbers. That can go up to, I think, 48 digits long. You can now include these very long item numbers. So, when you produce purchase orders, sales invoices, things like that, you can include the vendors and the customers, their unique item number, which makes trade a lot easier, smooths our payments, smooths out delivery. And I think this is a very nice feature. I remember you can also include your barcodes and your GTIN numbers here as well. 13, 15-digit barcode numbers quite comfortably.

14:09

And finally, is a really nice feature, which not enough people use, I think and it’s you now have the ability to customize your output documents yourself using Word. And this is fantastic.

14:26

So, it has been available for some documents in previous versions. It’s now been extended to include sales shipments and sales return orders. But let’s go to Report layout section. And I’ll show you how this works.

14:46

So, in my report layouts, I’ll see a lot of my reports or RDLC. There’s nothing you can do with RDLC reports unfortunately. But if we have a look here, I’ve got my sales shipments number 208. It’s RDLC. I can’t modify this one without asking a developer to log into the system and modify it for me. But if I scroll a little bit further down, when I start coming to the one thousands, I start noticing somewhere around here, of course, because I’m now looking for it, I can’t see it.

15:33

There we go 1308, my sales shipment is also there. But this time, it’s a Word document. So, I can highlight this row, process and I can see there are custom layouts for this report. I have two different custom layouts, and they are of type Word. So, I can choose one of them. And if I want to change it, I can say Process, nope, sorry, Layout, Export Layout. That’s going to give me a Word document here. I’m going to open that Word document.

16:14

And this is the report. These are the fields that are appearing, the customer’s address, my company’s address, the line items, et cetera. And if I activate my developer ribbon and I show the XML mappings. I can, it’s not pretty I will admit, I can see these are the fields that I can put over here. That builds the customer address, company information, document numbers, customers order numbers, etcetera.

16:52

And with a right click, I can start saying Insert into my document.I can insert text. I can insert pictures, tick boxes, et cetera. When I’m happy with that, any changes that I might want to make, changing fonts, etcetera.I can save it, I’m back on this screen, I get the option to import my new layout, update the system. And then I have my new, customised document layout Without having to pay, without having to get developers involved, or wait a few days, you can do it instantaneously yourself.

17:33

It’s a really nice feature. If you are interested in that feature, please, please, please, test in your sandbox environment first, don’t do this straight away on your live system. Test it in your sandbox, just to be 100% sure. And if you need help on exactly how that works, please have a chat with our consultants, and they will help you out on that.

17:54

OK, that’s all I wanted to show you, Those nice financial features on the journals with the checking, the copying and the recurring options. Those long reference numbers to enable your web transactions, item numbers for Amazon and things like that and that nice Word layout that lets you customize a lot of your documents yourself.

18:18

That’s what I wanted to show you. Krisy, did anybody have any questions while I was busy there?

Questions and Answers

18:24

Yes, we’ve got when can I expect to see these additions? OK, that’s a nice, easy one. So, they’re being rolled out at the moment, so you should be seeing them within the next 30 days or so.

18:40

You should have received something from the support desk telling you when they’re available. You can ask for them as quickly as possible, if you wish, or you can ask to defer them until the latest possible moment, but you should see them within about 30 days.

19:03

OK, and does the copy journal pick up all the dimensions that you originally used, even if not a global dimension.I will be honest, I have not tested with more than two dimensions.That is something afterwards I will test it with a non-global dimension, and I will send the response to you via e-mail who over it was that asked that one.

19:20

Anything else, Krisy? Yup, last one. I’m interested in journal checking. Am I able to test it before we implement? Yep. Yep, you can test any of these features. So, as I said, you should have received something from support telling you that these things are available.And, on your Sandbox, we will have already enabled these new features.So, if there are any that you are interested in, give us a shout, we will point you to the documentation that explains how it works, and on your sandbox, you can ever go and turn it on and turn it off and see what it does for you before it comes to life. Anything else. Brilliant, thank you Ian. I’ll now hand it back to you, Krisy.

20:02

So, we’d like to leave you with the key takeaways, which we hope could assist you.

20:06

For more detailed information, take a look at the list, new and enhanced features on Microsoft Docs website. If you are on Business Central SaaS version, then all of these new features will be available to you in your scheduled updates.

20:19

If you are on On-premise Business Central or NAV, you will need to upgrade or re-implement in order to receive these features.

20:27

Are any of these new features enough for you to consider moving to the latest version of Business Central? Again, another reason to move to the latest version is that the latest standard functionality of Business Central could replace some of the existing NAV development or customisations you have.

20:41

We would also recommend looking back through previous what’s new documents for the versions in-between the one you have and the latest one. These can also be found on the Microsoft Docs website. Of course, if you’d like to have a more detailed discussion about what is new in Business Central or moving to the latest version, then please feel free to contact us.

21:00

We hope you found this webinar interesting and informative. We shall be sending out e-mails soon to register for the next one. And we shall also put a reminder about the webinar in our newsletter, as well.

21:10

Thank you for attending the webinar. Once I close this session, the survey will appear. It would be great if you could respond with some feedback. If you have any further questions, please feel free to e-mail them to me at marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk.

21:23

Thank you very much.