Want to learn about the new functionality and features coming to Business Central in the 2022 release wave 1 update which launches in April 2022? Watch our 30 minute webinar to find out more.
The update contains a wide range of new or updated features that will most affect the user experience of Business Central. These features include application enhancements, improved integration with Microsoft 365 and improved user interface.
Transcript
9:42
Welcome, everybody, and thank you for attending today’s webinar all about What’s New in Business Central, as part of the Microsoft Dynamics Wave one 2022 update.
9:52
Much of the focus is around working smarter and the multi-layer multi-player experience.
9:59
Where using Teams gives you data-driven team decisions. Where One Drive helps you share and co-author files in the cloud. Where Outlook helps you to respond to business inquiries faster. And Excel helps you analyse and edit data.
10:11
My name is Danusia Jolliffe and I’m the Marketing Director here at T Vision. And I’ve got about 20 years’ experience across various sectors.
10:19
As usual, I’ll be facilitating the session today, and as always, I’m joined by our amazing consultant Ian.
10:27
He’s been here for about five years as well, just like me, and has a really detailed and specific knowledge of BC and looks after our clients to help them get the most out of the system.
10:38
So a few housekeeping items before we get started. Please do use the question box or chat function to ask any questions throughout. So, I’ll be keeping that up and letting you know when you ask these questions at the time, or if you’re purchasing a longer, more detailed answer. We can do that offline with you directly.
10:58
A link to watch on demand will be sent out afterwards for you to share with your colleagues.
11:05
Here, we’ve got a high-level list of the areas which have changed, actually, that came from 270 community ideas.
11:13
And, this is how BC users can make a suggestion, and if enough people comment and like that suggestion it’s scheduled for an addition to an upcoming release, and that’s the power of the Business Central community.
11:23
So, the majority of changes today we’ll be talking about is finance, but Ian will also mention several other areas in passing, for example, Shopify, Outlook email, and GDAP, global delegated admin privileges, and those allow specific access to areas of your BC instance, and only those areas. So, we can’t touch anything else, other than what you gave us permission to do.
11:47
And lastly, within reporting, we’ve done a webinar recently on that one.
11:51
So, you can watch that on demand on our website. Now I’ll be monitoring the questions and comments box. Over to you.
12:02
Thanks, Danusia
12:05
So, we are looking at the latest version of Business Central, I installed the updates that we’re going to be talking about with only a few days ago. So I’ve been playing with them.
12:18
It’s really important.
12:19
You’re going to get an e-mail at some point in the near future from Tessa Deeks and she’s going to tell you, when you’re going to have access to this functionality and you can get onto your test system. You can have a play with that new functionality. Make sure that it works for you.
12:37
Let’s see if there’s anything there that you want to apply to your business.
12:41
So, if you do get those e-mails from Tessa, please look and do the testing, just to make sure that everything’s 100% correct.
12:51
So, as Danusia mentioned, there’s a lot of new stuff in this release. A lot of it is finance-related. So, I’m going to going to spend most of my time talking about finance.
13:02
So one of the things that has been changed is the ability to delete and then accounts on your Chart of Accounts.
13:12
So you’ve always been able to do this, but now you get some control over how this happens.
13:18
And if you look at your general ledger setup, you’re going to notice that there are a couple of new fields that get added with this upgrade. Down here, you can lock deletion of GL accounts. So you can make it possible for people to delete the GL Account. As I say, in the past, it was possible.
13:38
As long as the account has a zero balance, and there was nothing in the current financial year post, it’s an account, you could delete it.
13:45
Now, you can block that completely.
13:49
Or you can put a date formula in that and say, nobody can delete an account until and you could put it in five years in the future.
13:58
It’s not going to prevent you from deleting an account, but it is going to give you a warning and say, you shouldn’t be deleting this account much better to just disable deleting of accounts completely unless you really, really want to delete them, then come in, switch this to enable, and then turn it off again.
14:19
When you do get your test system, please, and on your live system, make sure this is turned on. It’s a nice security feature, and it’s well worth having.
14:30
The other thing to notice is Microsoft’s changed the way that they’ve allowed dates. So, if you type in a two-digit year, so for instance, the first of the first.
14:43
I just put in the 20. It’s going to assume, I’m talking about 2020.
14:50
If I put in a date of 50.
14:57
It’s come back to 1950, So, you put in a two digit you, anything new from 50, it’s going to think it’s the 19 hundreds, anything less than 50, it’s going to assume it’s in the two thousands. So, just be aware of that when you’re typing in.
15:13
two digits, yes, I think, is going to be rolled out across the entire Microsoft platforms, even Excel and things like that, it will use that logic.
15:24
Another thing that’s changed for anybody who’s doing intercompany transactions, there’s a couple of new options that are coming.
15:31
They haven’t been enabled yet.
15:35
But I will just show you.
15:38
You’ll notice, when I search for Intercompany set up, you now get two identical options.
15:45
If you click on the new one that hasn’t yet been enabled, it just kind of gives you an error message.
15:51
If you do get the error message, search again, choose a second option, it gives you the current setup.
15:57
The new setup’s going to let you choose which journals to use in the related company.
16:03
When you send an auto accept transaction, which journal does it go to, that company, Not just into the default journal, for purchases and sales, so you get those two extra options.
16:17
It’s not enabled yet, but it is coming.
16:21
Now, a really nice feature is anybody using jobs, and you’ve probably had some frustration when you’ve got jobs, where there’s different cell to this bill to this.
16:33
And if we now have a look at jobs, we have the ability to choose different ship to and bill to customers on a job, So I’ll just choose any one of these samples.
16:47
And in the past, you just chose your customer up here.
16:51
So, this was for the School of Fine Art, but she now gets some more options Down the list, where you can say, who is the customer is going to be paid the invoices, and where are you delivering the stuff, to? So, you might be delivering the things to the school of Fine Art, but maybe the invoice is going to X, Y, Z, consulting.
17:15
Or the other way around X, at School of Fine art might be pay the bill, but you’re delivering this stuff to one of their subcontractors, XYZ consulting.
17:24
To do the work, you can now split that out, which is a really nice addition.
17:32
By default, both of these will fill with whichever customer you chose, but you can go down there and you can change them if you want to.
17:41
Very nice for you guys who are doing kind of job postings.
17:48
Another nice little tweak is when you’re printing bank statements.
17:53
So, if we go to our bank accounts, I set that up as a short cut. Did I? Yes. So, I’ve set it up as one of my shortcut menu.
18:05
And when you look at one of your bank accounts, whether in the list view or whether you’ve drilled into the lists, you do get the option to print statements.
18:17
I’m never quite sure where these things are hidden in the history.
18:25
And of course, I couldn’t find it.
18:31
No!
18:35
Oh, trust me, it’s, they’re somewhat, I’m not going to waste your time looking for it. But there’s now an option for all of the bank reconciliations that you’ve done with a particular bank, it will list them there.
18:46
You can print them, so you can print one is going back in time and the way that those printouts of presented, it’s showing a little bit more information than it used to.
18:55
It kind of shows you what’s being checked off against watch which will help you if you’ve got a problem with the reconciliation to go back and look at, it’s a nice little tweak that I think some of you will find useful.
19:11
Another nice little tweak is the ability to block certain postings.
19:17
So on your general posting setup and your vet posting set up, let’s just take a look at the hosting setup.
19:27
You might have changed the way that you set things up. Perhaps you’ve got to affect posting set up, but she’s no longer sell it. On my system here, I’ve got some of these blank, and I don’t like people using them.
19:40
So I can just come and I can lock these setups.
19:43
What’s going to happen if somebody tries to close the transaction using a blank business hosting group?
19:51
It’s going to stop them, and they’re going to get an error, and it’s going to say that something needs to change in the event posting setup.
19:59
In the past, to stop people using them, I would have deleted the GL accounts over here, which would have given them an error. But this is much nicer. My setup is still there.
20:10
And if I need to go back and do an adjustment or a correction to something that was previously posted, I can unlock this one. I can go do my correction. I can come back and block it. I don’t have to remember which GL accounts, etc.
20:26
The same can be done for your general posting setup if you want to block people.
20:31
So you don’t do export orders anymore on your general posting setup. You can block all of the export group to stop people posting export, it looks. So that’s another really nice feature.
20:45
Then we have a feature which we’ve created an extension for some of our clients to do this. It’s now become a standard feature within BC.
20:55
So, you have a situation where, on your company information page, you put in a bank account.
21:03
When you print sales invoice, or a statement, it puts your company’s bank accounts at the bottom. It gets it from that company information. But sometimes you’re sending out to overseas clients and you don’t want them to use a bank account. You will need to use a different bank account.
21:21
So, some of you guys, you’ve got an extension that we’ve written for you that does this. If you’ve got that extension carry on using it, it does still work.
21:31
And if you try and use this new functionality, our extension is actually going to override that.
21:35
And it will still be using the extension anyway. But, if you want to stop doing this, you don’t have this extension yet.
21:43
You can go to your bank accounts, and for any of your bank accounts, let’s say your bank account that’s in euros.
21:55
I can say that this is the default bank account for this currency.
22:01
So, now, if I looked at it or, if I issued the sales invoice or a customer standard, for example, in Euros, it would actually print this bank account details on that invoice instead of the default one.
22:18
So, this is a really nice feature, As I say, if you’re using an extension, please carry on using it. It will still work.
22:27
The next one is another way and we’ve got a few clients who also want to this functionality.
22:35
And again, if you’re already using it, please carry on using it, and that is consolidating customers and suppliers.
22:43
So, for some businesses, you might have somebody who’s a supplier to your business, and they’re also a customer of your business. And it’s really nice at the end of the month, instead of them paying you and you pay them if you could consolidate those two together, whatever the balance, you just pay them the outstanding amount so you can write off the difference between those two accounts. So, if I go and have a look at my customers.
23:13
And I think it was Trey research that I set up.
23:19
And it’s both a supplier and a vendor.
23:23
And I can see that the balance that they owe me as a customer is 2200. And I owe them, 6079.
23:35
That’s really useful.
23:36
Just having that information on one screen, but it goes even further.
23:42
If you go to a payment journal, you get a new function.
23:48
That way you can net off those two things against each other.
23:52
So, on a payment journal where you had the options up in the ribbon to suggest spending dependence, you now have an option to net off customer and vendor balances.
24:07
That will go through the system, and if you’ve got a vendor who’s also a customer, it will take off what they owe you, and suggests that you pay the templates to that. That’s a really neat feature. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the vendor, or can you apply that across your whole instance? So, there is a little bit of set up that you need to do.
24:32
So, even though I haven’t set up any of these other customers as vendors as well.
24:37
So if I just clicked on School of Fine Arts, You’ll see those fields are available. Here.
24:44
It doesn’t show anything, because, there is nothing to show you, this field is zero, and it’s not drill.
24:51
Drill down this, you would have to go to the contact for each customer or vendor.
24:58
So in Trey Research, I went to raise content and I said, set Trey research up as a vendor as well as a customer.
25:09
OK. Yep.
25:10
So a little bit of setup, but it’s a really nice feature, really easy to use.
25:16
Um, another nice feature on the finance, guys, I love the deferrals.
25:24
So, the idea of deferral. You pay something or you receive some money up front, but it’s for a 12 month period. So you pay the rent and events.
25:32
You want to go to your books as 12 separate transactions, instead of just the one transaction that you pay it.
25:39
So, you use a deferral for that, in order to use that, posting, it needs to be able to post into those future periods. And perhaps you feel reluctant to open up those posting dates so broadly for people.
25:53
Maybe that’s stopping you use deferrals or maybe you’re lumping all of that work onto one person, instead of letting other people do it.
26:00
There is a beautiful new feature on the general ledger setup, and on the user setup, look at the general ledger setup.
26:09
And, again, it’s a couple of new fields. So, you’ve got your standard allow posting from to. Then you can allow deferrals to post in a broader date range.
26:22
So, in this system, everybody can pull closed for the month, that, for the others they can post for an entire year.
26:32
And, on the user setup, you can do that, as well, if you’ve got one person that you want to override these defaults, giving you that extra control, it might make deferrals more attractive to you.
26:44
Or you might be able to spread that workload across more people instead of dumping it all on one person.
26:51
Next one is, it’s a really interesting one, this is something that’s been available in the US versions of Business Central, and that’s even for quite some time, and it’s now being made available to us here in the UK, and this is the idea of a Bank Deposit.
27:10
And you would use a bank deposit when a check is deposited in your bank account, but it’s full of multiple things, And I set up a new bank deposit.
27:25
And I can say, which bank account money is being put into saying to my checking account, what is the total of this deposit? It was one thousand pounds.
27:38
I could put it in my default dimensions, then, down here I can start saying, well, this deposit was for probably not for a GL account, is probably for a customer.
27:50
say, which customer it was who deposited this debt and co-operation for argument’s sake.
27:57
And I can put it in some text here to say, you know, this was a deposit for something.
28:04
I can put it in a document number and I can say how much of this was that it pulls it for that same customer, there was paying an invoice, perhaps. I could say which invoice, this is 44800.
28:20
Bounce it off, I can post, that’s going to post separate transactions in your customer ledgers and in your general ledger for all these different things.
28:30
But it’s going to appear when you’re doing a bank recon as a single number.
28:36
So, you’re doing your bank recon. It’s really easy to do you recall, because that thousand balances with a thousand on your bank statement.
28:44
In your system, in the general ledger, it’s being split up into its component parts.
28:49
So, you can look at it both ways as a lump sum or as individual payments.
28:55
So, this is a nice feature that you might want to start using.
29:01
Maybe something interesting for you and you can leave those things because it’s open if you’re not sure exactly what was it for, you didn’t receive remittance advice. You can leave it open when you get a remittance advice, you can go back to a new setup. That’s what it was for, the details, and post.
29:18
So, that’s another new feature. It’s worth having a look at.
29:23
Another really simple little feature is bulk releasing and re-opening documents.
29:30
So, um, I’m stuck on the sales side. I’ll stay with sales, So, I think, folks, let’s have a look at those.
29:39
I hope I have some on the system.
29:42
Yes, I think.
29:44
So, I’ve got a whole host of documents. Yeah, I might have a procedure that in the morning, I look at my documents, and I release the levels from yesterday that we release it.
29:55
So, I can come here, and now, I can select Tool.
29:59
And it’s this one and this one, this one. And I can click Release. And it will now release them in bulk.
30:09
And it will tell me, I’m selected four, it’s going to release all of them. Yes.
30:16
And it’s done the job.
30:18
And I can come back to this now, I can say, Whoops, I make a mistake, to re-open them, and accidentally try and re-open these ones that are already open.
30:28
And if I say Release, reopen.
30:32
It tells me I selected four, but it’s going to skip two of them because they’re already open, so just gives me that little visual cue that maybe I’ve done something wrong.
30:43
But now I can do these bulk processes. Maybe I release all yesterday’s sales orders for the White House in the morning. I can come in, I can do it. Instead of one model.
30:55
How are we doing for time Danusia? Yeah, good, good, alright. So that is a lot of financing stuff, that I’ve spoken about this other stuff as well. All of the inventory side.
31:05
If you’re doing any kind of manufacturing, and you have non inventory items, demand Forecasting module has been updated. that now you can start focusing on inventory items as well.
31:20
You have mentioned, there’s a Shopify connector.
31:23
It is now built into Business Central, to hook up to your Shopify web presence, where you have a web store.
31:31
And it is, I think, Microsoft has either bought all that bought shares, and then integrating the two of them.
31:39
So, that Business Central is going to have a web shop front end built-in, which is, again, fantastic if that’s what you’re interested in. There is the option of, when preparing reports, you can now share the file on One Drive, as well as Excel, etcetera, which is also nice.
32:02
Danusia, she mentioned global delegated admin privileges. And this is nice, this is where, maybe you’ve got an IT firm that looks after most of your IT and TVision are just looking after your Business Central SaaS.
32:19
You can now give us access to your Business. Central SaaS Management only on the Microsoft side.
32:28
Does not allow us to look at your other stuff, e-mail, set up your domain, set up your SQL Server setup, et cetera.
32:36
32:39
Now you can say, Oh, we’re allowed to look just at your BC stuff, and we can manage that for you. And you can deny your IT providers from looking at your BC stuff. They can just look at the e-mails and the domain controllers, et cetera.
32:53
So you can split that out.
32:55
So, anybody who’s reluctant to give TVision access, because we can see things we shouldn’t you now have the ability to give us access to just what we’re supposed to see, which is really nice. Other little things that they’ve done reporting on, account schedules, they now have by default, 15 columns.
33:14
That allows you to put in 12 months, plus a total column.
33:18
Row number plus description on screen, which is an improvement on the 13 than it used to be.
33:27
When you go and you find documents that navigate from the old NAV terminology to see related transactions, there’s now more details that you can get when you’re doing that. Find documents.
33:41
Yeah, and then there’s things that might not be so relevant to you, but it’s that much stuff. Continuing to advance things, so, if you’re doing business in, I think it’s Czechoslovakia.
33:55
There’s now a whole raft of extensions that are being launched to comply with the law, and also at least updates for a lot of countries around the Mediterranean and North Africa if you’re doing business in those countries.
34:09
It’s now possible to have BC comply with those countries’ laws and then there’s a lot of backend changes that make it easier for us to write programs and things as well.
34:21
But, that’s what I wanted to show you, … any questions to go through?
34:25
So, one of the questions was, It sounds like there’s a lot going on. And, obviously, I can see that a lot of financing that you were talking about. How does somebody find out exactly what’s in there and what they do next? I mean, I was going to cover a little bit, but, I think you might have to move the slides. Yeah. You can go to Microsoft.
34:49
If you search Google, if you search for Business Central wave 1 2022, there’s a list of every change that’s being met A lot of them are not relevant to you. This backend stuff, programming stuff. It talks about AL AI.
35:06
You can ignore that stuff, and you can concentrate at the top of the list is the things that you probably find, interesting, where it talks about consolidation customers and vendors, and.
35:20
different … on jobs, things like that, That’s towards the top of the list.
35:25
Have a look, you can read through why they’ve done it, and it gives you some, some of them, actual the screens that you need to go to, and what you need to click to see that functionality.
35:36
It also mentioned whether it was something that Microsoft wanted to do, or whether it was something that came from the user community where they said, Oh, please, can we have this function.
35:47
And they’ve included, Think, Danusia, you mentioned it earlier, yeah, if you’ve got a good idea.
35:53
go to Microsoft’s website.
35:55
Put in the idea if enough people like it and they say, Oh, good idea, it might be in the 2023 release.
36:02
Right, can you advance the slides?
36:11
So, we’ve mentioned all of these things in the demo. As we’ve already said, there’s an awful lot included in the release, and we just take a snapshot instance. So, this is just highlighting the 10.
36:25
So, next steps.
36:27
What we’d like you to do is try out this functionality when it becomes available.
36:35
You’ll be receiving an email from Tessa from here at TVision with an invitation to test your instance over the next month or so. These invitations do get staggered, and you’ll have a specific length of time to test, usually about a fortnight. We then schedule the update for you within a month. So, that’s the URL that you can take a look at all of the changes that are being implemented. And it tells you all about what’s in this wave one and it gives you the overview there, etc. Then, you can get a little bit more info.
37:15
Thank you so much for joining us today for this webinar, it will be available on demand, and the links will be shared on our social channels as always. And in the next newsletter. Thanks very much for joining us today.
37:28
