Watch our webinar to to find out more about the new and updated features coming to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in October 2021 and find out how these enhancements could help you and your business.

Transcript

Welcome and Introduction

0:03

Good afternoon, everybody, And thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, all around What’s New in Business Central, for the October 2021 Wave 1.

0:14

My name is Danusia Jolliffe and I’m the Marketing Manager here at TVision and I’m joined today by Ian who you all know, who does a lot of our webinars? I’ve been Marketing Manager here for nearly five years now.

0:28

Oh, I’ll just put my camera on.

0:31

So, yeah, I’ve been here nearly years now, and I’ll be facilitating today. So, I’ll be keeping an eye on the chat. If you have any questions or comments, please do mention them, then I’ll stop here Ian as we’re going along just to ask questions for you. So Ian has been here just under five years now. Is that right? Just over. So a similar time to me and he’ll be giving you the demo today all around what’s going on in terms of the new functionality.

0:58

So, in terms of our agenda, what we’re going to be talking about today is the update that came through, or that is coming through now, in October. So, it comes in four areas, really. And we had an internal meeting here at TVision, and everyone in the business joined, so that we can also learn what was coming through for you, the clients. So, first of all, application changes. So, we’re going to talk about some of the updates that been the most requested areas for improvement, such as finance and supply chain.

1:27

Then in the area of modern clients, it’s around the improvements for the portfolio with a focus on usability, accessibility, performance, and stability, Then thirdly a bit around, better with Microsoft 365, so there’s better integration with Excel, and also, further improvements around the support for collaborative processes in Teams. So you can bring, for example, Business Central Pages into a Teams channel.

1:54

Then, lastly, a little bit around the Power Platform, so, that’s about and improving the integration with the Microsoft Dataverse and the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, there’s an awful lot of sort of small, changes I guess that’s come in all throughout. Last time there were really the main ones. This time there are so many there was this webinar is scheduled for half an hour Ian could probably tell us a little bit more and spend at least a couple of hours talking about it.

2:19

So, what we’ve done is we’ve gone through the changes and worked out the ones that we think would be most valuable for you, our clients.

2:27

So, next up, I’m passing across to Ian and he’ll talk about some of the selected functionality. If there’s anything that comes up and you’d like to ask some questions, just pop it in the chat, and I’ll ask as we are going along. Over to Ian.

Demo

2:31

Hi, guys. So I have the latest version Wave 2 2021, with the changes that are going to be going live over the course of October, November, and December. All of these changes, if you want to read about them and find out some more, Danusia’s going to send you the link.

3:03

It’s also included in the presentation, but it basically gets you to Microsoft’s website. You can have a look at an overview of the changes, and as you can see, there is an awful long list of things that have been changed, So I’m going to try and keep it as narrow and as focused as possible.

3:26

I’m going to focus on these Application changes, because they’re the ones that you can see. But there are some changes in the background, the Better with Microsoft 365. And in that as an instance, to integration with Teams. There is enhancements with the integration with Excel, and with Outlook, and you can read up about those changes.

3:50

There are also anybody who is using the Power Platform so that Microsoft Flow, Microsoft Power Automate, power apps, Power BI. Again, some enhancements have been made there in the integration on the functionality between Business Central and those applications. As I said, I’m going to focus on the application changes.

4:17

But before I start talking about them, let me tell you what happens in the background here. So, we have a look at your admin of your system. And you can see from my system here, I’ve got some production databases and I’ve got some sandbox databases.

4:32

I’m in one of the sandboxes. I’ve loaded this latest version. So I can test it before I implement it in my production database. Now, all of you should be receiving a message from Nicola, the Support Manager, telling you that we’ve put it in your sandbox for you to go and have a look. So you can test this new functionality yourself. And it is important that you do test that functionality.

4:59

We also schedule can when these updates go into your production database, and we can pick any date basically from the 28th of October till the 13th of December. We don’t want everybody to go live on the same day because then if there are problems, obviously that’s a lot of problems to fix it once. So we’re going to try and stagger you and we’re going to try and put some kind of schedule. But if you have a particular date that you prefer, by all means, let us know and we’ll schedule you for that date.

5:29

And if you would like to come and manage this yourself, drop Nicola a line, and she will show you how you can get to this screen, and how you can see what version you’re on, and when you’re going to be updated.

5:44

So as I said, I have the changes on this one. And the first thing I want to speak about is the tours and teaching tips. So when you login, and you want to change company, or change your role, this screen still looks the same as it has before.

6:04

You have the option to turn on, or turn off, teaching tips, and I would recommend if you’ve got a new team member who’s new to Business Central, or somebody who wants to learn more, turn this option on for them. And then when they come in, they go to a screen that they haven’t been to before. For instance, items. Because I have those teaching tips turned on.

6:28

It pops up this little, oh, huge description. Would I like to learn more, and take a tour? And if I click Take a Tour, it’s going to take me around the screen and show me where I can turn on information boxes. I can filter my views over here and give me a basic idea of what’s going on.

6:48

And the learn more will obviously go into a little bit more detail. And I’ll get them until I’ve taken the tour. Then it says, Oh, you’ve done that. If they annoy you, you can turn them off. For me. I don’t want them but as I say, if you’re going to new team member, turn those on.

7:04

And Microsoft have put a lot of effort into updating those and enhancing those so that they’re a lot more useful than they used to be in the past. Well, worth having a look.

7:14

Just as a side note, if you’re interested in learning more, go and have a look at Microsoft Learn.

7:21

There are literally hundreds of free courses on there around Microsoft products including Business Central. There are about 50 videos you can watch on various things in Business Central to learn how to set up items, vendors, bank accounts, et cetera. It’s a learning resource that we use internally and it’s free. Go and have a look at. Under Microsoft Learn it’s not just the technical side of things, there’s also sales, all different areas that you can learn about within Business Central. Absolutely everything and you will find something that’s relevant to perhaps you or somebody else in your business as well.

7:56

Fantastic. Thanks Danusia. Right, next thing I want to speak about is anybody who’s using account schedules.Account schedules, if you do use it, it’s where you produce your financial reports. And there is a fantastic update that’s happened on account schedules. Let me show you.

8:18

So you can create your own here, I’ve created one called a Profit and Loss, Which was basically a copy of the income statement. I haven’t changed anything here. Let’s just go ahead and have a look at this overview. And it’s still sitting at the default. I’m seeing the net change. Nothing very exciting. Yeah.

8:39

But what I have done is I’ve created a new column layout called multiple budgets. And this is fantastic. I can now view two different budgets against my actuals. So in my case, a budget and a revised budget. And you can imagine, the beginning of last year, you might have had a budget, then lockdown happened, and you very quickly had to create a new budget.

9:06

It would have been nice to have the two of them there to compare against. And it’s really simple to set up. Let me show you how simple it is.

9:17

Basically, I’ve got the three columns. The first one is Budget. The second one is revised Budget. I’m just basically tell it over here, which budget do I want to use in each column. It’s as simple as that you can have as many budgets as you want, so you could have your pessimistic budget, your optimistic budget and the budget you actually give to the board of directors, and you can compare against all three to see how you’re doing in reality. That one’s really nice.

9:46

There are some changes that have been made on bank reconciliations. Now in the last wave update, they made some big changes to the bank recon that they’ll let you undo a posted bank reconciliation, which I thought was absolutely fantastic.

10:05

This time, the changes are a little more subtle. There are a few of them. The two I’m going to speak about. On this side, you get your bank statement, or what the bank says is going on in your accounts, and this side, you get Business Central.

10:21

What it says is going in your accounts, and you match them off one against one. What might happen in reality? And we have some clients who actually do this, someone buys something from you, £500, and they pay you with two different credit cards, £250 each, but you just record that is one payment of £500 in Business Central. Your bank shows it as two separate entries because they received two separate payments.

10:48

The system will now let you match up two entries on one side to one entry on the other side. In the past, it was always 1 to 1. This 2 to 1 is now fantastic. Makes your reconciliation, a lot easier.

11:01

What they’ve also done is when you finish matching everything off and you’re always left with bank charges, interest charges, overdraft fees, whenever it might be that the bank’s going to charge you. And you go and process your journal to put them into your system. When you post that journal, this BC will automatically match them against each other. You don’t have to manually match them, which was something you had to do in the past.

11:29

That’s a smaller change, but it is really nice. Ian, someone’s asked the question that you mentioned wave updates, but they’ve heard about hot fixes. Can you just explain the difference quickly? Right, Yeah. So a wave update is basically, it’s all these good ideas on improving the system, making it better, and they come out twice, one at the beginning of the year, and towards the end of the year.

11:53

We now call them Wave one and Wave two, that used to be called summer and winter. Forgetting the people in the Southern Hemisphere had a different summer not so that’s why they changed the name. But hot fixes keep coming up all the time. So if somebody picks up that there’s an error in the way that the system is calculating VAT in the English version, sorry, the UK version, then Microsoft will apply a fix very quickly, and they’ll release that for everybody as soon as they have it. You don’t have to wait for the Wave update.

12:26

Good question.

12:29

Preview posting, there have been some changes on the way Preview posting works. I’m sure everybody uses Preview Crossing now, but if you go to general ledger setup on the new update, there is an additional field down here for posting preview type. I’ve set mine to extended. By default, it is set as standard, which is the old-fashioned way of doing it. With this, if you find a transaction to post, let’s find a Sales Order to post.

13:04

And, yep, let’s take this one.

13:07

And if we do a preview posting, the preview posting starts looking slightly different to the way it did before. So, now, I get a summary of what’s going to go into the GL instead of it just telling me that there are five entries in the GL, it shows me these other entries. And on any one of these, I can drill down to get some more detail because there are two lines on this order. There are two direct costs that are being posted.

13:37

Sorry, that’s inventory movements. There are also two direct costs that are being posted, so I can look at it in a summary version, and I can look at it and drill down in a more detailed version. If I don’t like this view, I can change it to a flat, less interesting version. But it’s got the same information. So I can choose to look at my preview posting in a slightly different way and perhaps get a better idea of what’s going on much quicker.

14:08

There are also some changes that have come through on the exchange rates. So if you are doing transactions in foreign currencies, most of us are dealing at least with Europe, if not, with the rest of the world. And you probably run the adjust the exchange rate routine regularly, monthly.

14:30

There are some new options that have started to appear here. In the past, you could do either your banks or everything. Those are your two choices. Now you can choose, I just want to do my customers, not my suppliers, not my bank accounts. And I do want to update my additional reporting currencies. And you can pick and choose which ones you want. You’re not forced to do everything.

14:54

And if you travel a little bit further down, if you’ve chosen banks, you can choose which bank. If you’ve chosen to do your customers, you can choose which customers.

15:04

I haven’t tested these filters at the bottom yet, but this is very nice, if you  for instance, for suppliers, if the exchange rate starts going really crazy against one of your suppliers currencies, you can come in and revalue against that supplier. And just to make sure you’ve got enough forward currency covered in your bank, et cetera, to know that you’re going to have enough money in the right account at the end of the month.

15:33

Another really important one is your templates for creating new customers, vendors, items. So on this system, I’m looking at Sales orders, let’s go look at customers.

15:49

It’s as good a place as any. So you might be using this functionality already when you create a new vendor, item customer, you can set up that you have predefined templates which fill in some of the fields for you and give default values.

16:08

Microsoft have enhanced this functionality so there are more fields now that you can pre populate and give default values. And this is one of those areas where if you’re using this, it’s really important when Nicola says go into your test system and make sure it’s working. Test, creating a new customer. Just to make sure it doesn’t interfere with what you’ve already set up. It shouldn’t, but it’s a good idea to check.

16:37

Another one, which I think is really nice as well, on the sales side and on the purchasing side, I think it’s on purchasing and payables set up. If I’m wrong. I will have to hang my head in shame. Documents, default line type. So if you always sell items, you can set this here to default to item. So the first time you come into a purchase order, it will default to an item line, not to a general ledger line. And some new user, the first time they login, it will default to whatever you put here.

17:24

So it would usually be for a lot of our clients. If you’re selling items, item. For clients who are selling services, GL account, probably. Fixed asset. Not a wise idea to set that as your default, but it just makes it a little bit quicker for your end users, when they’re capturing. It’s going to be the right one for them the first time they come in.

17:48

Those were the kind of my top picks out of that list. But as I say, it was a very long list of things. I would encourage you just to scan some of the headings and see if there’s anything that’s interesting.

18:01

There is one other change which has been made, which I want to just give a caveat to any of Bevica customers. Bevica is our wine industry solution and there’s a change that Microsoft had made to the base unit of measure, and we are strongly advising any of our Bevica clients, do not use this functionality just yet until have tested it thoroughly ourselves.

18:31

And that is the idea that you can have rounding on your units of measure. So for products, as you know, you can have different units of measure. It might be measured in pieces and in six packs and in cases and in kilograms. And on those units of measure.

18:52

And where do I find units of measure. I’ll have to search for it, which is bad. Sometimes it’s not typing. I’m failing.

19:13

Units of measure on the screen. And if I put it in a pack of six which was six space units or I can set off the rounding amount here.So if I receive 5/6ths of a case which works up to 4.9 bottles, it would actually round it to five bottles. We think this is fantastic functionality.

19:41

But, again, for all our Bevica clients, please don’t try this until we’ve tested it against the Bevica extension. Claudio will let you know if there are any problems with that function  interfering with Bevica.

19:55

But for our other clients who aren’t using Bevica, please have a look at that. It might help you avoid strange decimal point errors with your items. That’s it for me. I’m going hand it back over to Danusia.

Questions

20:22

Got a couple more questions. So if somebody has Making Tax Digital, how does that impact, or does it impact? So Making Tax Digital, it stays the same. That is one. It’s listed as one of the changes on that Microsoft page, about crediting and taking away authority or authorisation.

20:34

And it’s not something that you will going to end up using once you’ve set up your connection with HMRC, you are going to leave it working. You’re not going to turn it off and turn it back on again for any reason.

20:47

But if any change in the future does happen with the way that Making Tax Digital works, Microsoft in the next Wave update, they will update the system for us. It’s part of the core functionality of the system. And that’s one of the things the Wave updates do to that new functionality is introduced in those. So your system will updates if anything does change.

21:12

Just a couple more. Danusia mentioned dataverse at the beginning and in the explanation of the four areas that there were improvements in, and can you give a quick summary, Ian, of what that is how that impacts and affects people?

21:25

Yep, so, the dataverse, it’s the whole Microsoft 365 idea of Excel and Outlook and Business Central, and Microsoft CRM and all of these applications working together. Microsoft are starting to put together in the background, a database of all of your customers.

21:49

So that they appear in your Outlook, in your Business Central, in your CRM. And all three can access them and work with them, instead of having three separate databases. So that whole dataverse is all of your information from all your different sources all put together in one place, so that you can start accessing it from whichever application you want to use. Be it Power Apps, Power BI, BC, or Excel. That’s basically dataverse.

22:21

One more question around Jet. We use Jet. Will there be any changes? Do we have to do anything?

22:32

OK, Jet You don’t have to do anything, and Jet continues to work, your reports continue to work. Microsoft haven’t changed any of the fields that added some new fields that changed the way that some of the postings might work in the background to make them go faster. But they’re not changing the data you are accessing through Jet reports.

22:57

Occasionally, Jet Reports do release an update to their system, and if you do use Jet Reports within Excel in Jet Reports, you can always click on help, and it will tell you there’s an update available. You’re entitled to install it as a licensed user.There’s no cost involved in that.

23:17

And if the version of Jet that’s on Business Central starts getting too old, we will update it for you on Business Central. It’s not a problem. It still works!

23:30

All right, that’s all the questions we’ve got just now. But, if there’s anything else that anybody would like to know, do e-mail us at the end, I’ll mention the e-mail address, or get in touch with Ian directly. So, thank you so much for that demo of selected functionality. So, what we suggest you do now, is have a look at the functionality for yourself. As I said at the beginning, while we have done this in 20, 25 minutes. I know there’s an awful lot out there. And actually, we could have done this webinar over a couple of hours. So, all of the changes are here, in this document, and also mentioned, the URL. So you’ll be sent a copy of this webinar, as usual, and so the link will be in there for you.

Close

24:13

So in terms of the next webinars, we’ve got coming up, just a quick summary, we’ve got Jet Reports, Pagero and also Tasklet Factory. So, we’ll send out a summary of what these webinars will cover, as usual to our mailing list, and then in April next year we will have the next What’s New in Business Central update. Anything that you’d like to sign up to, you can go to the webinars and events URL.

24:38

So, in summary, I’d just like to say thank you for attending today, and we hope you found some of those changes useful. And that you can start using them very soon. You can find the webinar on demand, as I’ve mentioned, and also register for anything coming up the webinars and events URL. And if you do have any questions, just drop them through to marketing@tvisiontech.co.uk or get in touch with Ian and we can help you. Thank you so much everyone.