Watch on demand to learn about the new capabilities within Business Central following the 2023 wave 1 release in our 30 minute webinar.
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 the Power Platform and improved user interface.
Transcript
0:07
Hi everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. We’ll be starting in just a couple of minutes.
1:34
Hi everyone thanks for joining us. We’ll literally be starting in just a moment.
2:03
Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today’s webinar: What’s New in Business Central Wave 1?
2:11
My name is Danusia Jolliffe, I’m the Marketing and Customer Services Director here at TVision, umm I’ll be looking at the webinar, I will be monitoring the chat and the questions, so if you do have any, please do put them in the chat box, or the question box, and I’ll be asking my colleague Ian as we go along. As always, at the end of the webinar the recording will be sent out. It will also be available on the website.
2:34
We’ve had a record number of people register for today’s webinar, and there’s an awful lot of information coming up. Ian over to you. Wow that was quick. Alright, guys. Let me just start the slide.
2:53
So, as Danusia was saying, there is quite a lot in this release, so I’m gonna go through it rather quickly.
3:05
And this time, Microsoft, have been very nice to everybody who is working in operations, working with inventory, warehousing, things like that, there’s some nice changes for you guys, as well as for finance. So, let me open up my demo environment.
3:25
OK, so, I am on the latest release. This is the preview version, so I can show you what’s going on.
3:33
As I said, Microsoft have done quite a few nice things for the guys in warehousing and operations. And let me just show you some of the things that have been added.
3:47
So, if I, for instance, went and looked at an Item journal, and I prepared an item journal earlier today.
3:56
So, I’ve got an item journal here, I’ve put 18 lines on this journal, I would like you to imagine I’d put 180 lines on here. It’s certainly the best part of the entire morning to prepare this journal. And now I want to post it.
4:12
But the big problems in the past, and the guys in finance have been complaining about costs not pulling through correctly. Unfortunately, with BC as it stands, I post this journal and then I find out what happens.
4:27
One of the new features that has been added, we now have a preview posting button. So that’s going to tell me exactly what will be posted before it actually posts. And if I click this preview posting button, I should get an error message.
4:44
Yep, oh, the document number is wrong. So, I started preparing this journal.
4:49
I had the correct document number, but now someone else has posted a journal.
4:54
I’m going to have to re number every line. I’ve got 180 lines.
4:58
That’s a mission.
5:00
I can always export this to Excel and do the update in Excel which is a little bit easier, but it’s still work that I’d rather not be doing.
5:07
There is a new option under actions, functions, re number document numbers.
5:16
That’s going to go look at my number series, and it’s going to update these document numbers to the correct document number for posting.
5:24
Just tells me it’s going to take a few seconds.
5:26
It’s updated the document numbers. I didn’t have to type them by hand.
5:30
It’s a small little change.
5:32
But anybody who’s been in that situation, they will know that that’s a huge timesaver.
5:38
Right now, I just want to check this journal before I post it, so I can click this Preview Posting button.
5:45
And now, it’s going to show me exactly what will be posted.
5:49
And it’s going to post 18 lines into my Item Ledger Entries. 34 lines into my General Ledger.
5:57
And immediately something rings in my head.
5:59
If there’s 18 lines here, there should be 36 lines there, there should be two lines for each one of these items – an in and an out.
6:08
Some thing’s missing. I know there’s a problem before I post. I can have a look at these Item Ledger entries.
6:16
I can have a quick browse through. All the items seem to be there…
6:22
What’s missing on here? Oh, there’s a problem, no costs have come through on this line.
6:28
I’ve made a mistake on my journal. I can go back.
6:32
I can fix my mistake before I actually post the document.
6:36
So, this is the line, yeah. I forgot to put in the, the costs. Let’s make those £2 each.
6:45
Now, if I go and do my preview posting again before I actually post, let me double check.
6:51
And, again, it’s gone through all the lines. Ah, now, it’s posting 36 entries in the general ledger.
6:58
And I can go and I can double check those items.
7:02
All of those costs, they’re in there, I’m happy.
7:06
I can now post this journal, and I’m confident that what I’m doing is correct.
7:11
And nobody from finance is going to come and shout at me in two weeks’ time when they say, oh, the costings gone wrong and trace back to this journal.
7:18
So, again, that preview posting, it’s not, you know, earth shattering. The guys in finance have had this for years.
7:26
But for the guys in operations, this can be a godsend.
7:30
Particularly if you’re at a company where costings a big issue and there have been problems in journals affecting costing in the past.
7:40
What we also have, are the ability to post multiple transfer orders at the same time. So, you can imagine a situation. You’re working in a busy warehouse or stock room or a storeroom, and you have a lot of transfer orders.
7:57
Everybody’s busy. They’re doing their work, and at the end of the day, you come and you post all of these documents.
8:04
Now, I’ve only got four documents here, but imagine, you know, busy warehouse, maybe you’ve got 100 documents.
8:12
You would have to go to each one, post, ship, next one, post, ship, next one, post, ship. Really, that’s a waste of your time.
8:21
What we now have, on the posting option up here, as well as having preview posting on transfer orders. So, I can see exactly what this is going to do in the general ledger, on my item ledgers, in my value entries.
8:36
We also have a post batch option.
8:40
So, I can click on this, and I can fill in some filters and say, which ones do I want to post?
8:47
Or I can select the ones that I want to post.
8:51
And just these two, I think.
8:55
And if I go to that post batch, it will fill in the filters for me. So, it saves me the hassle of having to figure out what filter goes here.
9:04
I could have selected all the ones that were released, all the ones that from the East Warehouse to the West Warehouse.
9:11
I can put in lots of filters to choose, and then I can click OK and Ship.
9:17
And that will do the shipping.
9:18
I can do the same thing, OK, and receive if I’m on the receiving end. So, again, imagine you’ve got 100 of these.
9:26
You don’t have to do 100 single transactions.
9:29
You can do it all in bulk. A great timesaver, and I really like that.
9:36
The next thing, this last transfer order. I’m just going to open it up and have a look at it.
9:42
Oopsy, I didn’t want to press that.
9:45
So, within this transfer audit, you can see it was for two desks.
9:49
I’ve already shipped two of the desks, now, the guy at the West Warehouse.
9:55
He phones me up and he says he’s not going to receive this because there’s only one desk on the truck. I have a look around, and sure enough, by the back door, there’s another desk standing there that forgot to be loaded onto the trunk.
10:07
In the past, you would have to carry that transaction all the way through to the end. The guy on the other side would have had to receive the stock. And then do a transfer, order back of both the physical inventory journals or item journals to correct our inventory.
10:24
New feature, which is really nice if I go and look for Quick Search. I’ll look for that posted.
10:36
Transfer shipment.
10:41
And I just happened to know that it is this top one here.
10:47
By now.
10:50
If I select this line, I get the option to do the shipment.
10:58
It will ask me to confirm whether I want to undo that shipment.
11:02
And now it’s undoing the shipments. I didn’t have to carry this transaction all the way through to the end.
11:09
And if I come back to my transfer orders, I will now see.
11:18
I still have two units to ship.
11:21
I haven’t shipped anything.
11:22
So, I could change this quantity to one or I could send the other desk and then post the shipment but I can sort it out before it comes problem before people have to start doing extra work.
11:37
Now that preview posting functionality that I showed you, that is available on all item journals, your physical inventory journals, reclassification journals, revaluation journals.
11:50
And the good news, that’s for the simple inventory.
11:54
If you’re doing the advanced inventory, you’re using warehousing. You’re doing picks, movements put aways.
12:00
You’ve also got that preview costing available on your warehouse documents as well so you can see what’s going to happen in advance. Double check that everything is correct.
12:11
Make sure that you don’t make mistakes.
12:14
Um, another nice feature here on the transfer orders.
12:21
In the past, if I wanted to transfer multiple items, I would go line by line, by line, I’d choose the items I want to add. New functionality that’s being added.
12:32
You can pick multiple items.
12:35
Highlight the 6 or 7 items when you say, OK, it will populate all 6 or 7 lines, and you just need to put in your quantities.
12:44
So, again, a great time saving change that’s being made. On the warehousing, when you’re creating your instructions, your movement instructions, et cetera, new filters have been added.
12:58
So, you’ve got more filters, which just makes it easier for you to populate those documents, saves you time, and, again, it’s actually, I’ll take my hat off to Microsoft that they’ve actually paid attention. They’re doing stuff that’s not just finance this time, it’s great stuff.
13:17
Final thing to mention on the operations side, the ability within warehousing, now, you can, instead of just shipping or receiving items, you can ship and receive non-inventory things, such as break costs, et cetera. You can do that for the warehouse documents. It saves having to build/create a separate document to link the two together.
13:41
You can do it all in one place.
13:44
And all of this functionality is going to be available pretty much next month when the wave goes live.
13:52
So, if you, if you’re running a warehouse, if you’re using inventory, it’s well worth having a look at this. Have a look at your processes.
14:00
And maybe you can improve things, save time, cut down on mistakes.
14:05
It’s very exciting. Ian? Yeah? Having just said that, there was a question that came in. Someone was asking when the wave is happening so, I can pick up on that. An e-mail will have come out from Debbie Gibbs, and that would have been sent to the CPUs or the IT person within your organisation.
14:24
Talking about exactly what Ian just said about testing those processes. And, obviously as this is a highlights webinar, there’s an awful lot more that is available, and this all came out a session with the TVision team about what we felt would be the highlights, would be most relevant to you as clients. And we do have a couple of blogs on this. I’ll also share the link for the Microsoft Learn Document. Is there anything else to add on that, in terms of timing or anything like that, Ian?
14:52
Not a lot, as I said, this inventory stuff is going to be analysed as the wave goes by. The finance guys, not so fantastic for you this time. There is some nice stuff, but it’s not all going live immediately with the wave, it’s going to come out in dribs and drabs after the wave. But I’ll talk through those in the next session.
15:10
Yep. So that was the finance stuff.
15:12
As I say, each one of these elements by itself, it’s not a big deal. But the fact Microsoft has put these together.
15:19
It can make a big difference for guys in warehouses, guys looking at the inventory, costing et cetera.
15:27
Now, moving on let’s talk about finance.
15:30
So, some of these things I can’t show to you because they’re not available yet. Non-deductible VAT.
15:38
So, imagine you’re buying a company car for a sales director. There’s 20% VAT on that, but you can only claim back 10% when you’re submitting your VAT return.
15:50
People have come up with creative ways of recording that transaction, using journals, using a 10% VAT posting group, and other little tricks.
16:00
This new functionality, you’re going to be able to record non-recoverable VAT. And it’s, the entire transaction you can say the VAT is non-recoverable. Or you could say only 50% of the VAT on this transaction is recoverable.
16:14
So those situations where you need to record the VAT because you owe the money to somebody.
16:20
But you claim it on your VAT return, that’s now catered for in the best application.
16:27
For anybody who’s doing business in Europe, you’ve got offices in Europe, there’s a document transfer standard SAF-T.
16:34
Which a lot of governments in Europe now are saying that’s how they want to receive files from you. In Portugal, that’s compulsory that you use that format.
16:46
France are making it compulsory, Germany they started to use it, and it’s kind of becoming a standard, even though it’s not legislated. That functionality is now also available to export and SAF-T compliant file for governments, and that’s going to be coming out. Microsoft say a preview will be in May, so it’s going to May or June that’s going to be available along with the non-deductible VAT.
17:15
End of month adjusting exchange rates. I’m going to get quite a few calls on the help desk where people sometimes question this or struggle with this.
17:23
There are also new options that have been added for that.
17:27
One of them is, when you run the procedure, you’re going to get a preview posting button.
17:33
It’s going to show you before you actually post it, what it’s going to do to your GL accounts, so you can check your expecting about £4000 adjustment.
17:43
If the preview shows you it’s £50,000, you know something is wrong. You can go back and you can fix it before you post it, and then have to post a correction, and then have to stand in front of the Finance Director, explaining why didn’t you do it right the first time.
17:57
You can get it right the first time. You also have the option on those adjust currencies.
18:03
You can post that in bulk or in detail, so for each line, do you want to post a separate adjustment, or do you just want to add them all up and post one big adjustment?
18:14
You have that option now doing it either way.
18:17
Whatever make sense for you, whatever make sense for your reporting and analysis needs. Again, that’s going to be available sometime by September, Microsoft aren’t exactly saying way.
18:30
There’s also the possibility if you go and look at your vendor posting setup or your customer posting set up, let’s just have a quick look at Vendor Posting Setup.
18:42
You will notice when you look in there, oh, what did I, typo? Vendor posting groups, sorry, vendor posting groups.
18:58
It tells you which GL accounts going to be used as your payables accounts, your discount accounts et cetera.
19:05
Microsoft are going to give you the option on every single sales and purchase document.
19:11
The ability to override that GL account, if it’s not quite the right one for this transaction.
19:17
So, if you had different ones for your EU, your foreign, your domestic. You bought something from someone who’s always EU, but they happened to be able to ship it from the UK warehouse.
19:29
You’d be able to, on that transaction, change the GL account to match that it’s a domestic purchase or a domestic sale.
19:36
Which is nice. It saves you going back and changing a customer, changing a vendor, posting your transaction, going back, changing to what they should have been.
19:44
It’s just a nicer way of doing things.
19:47
Again, that’s going to be available sometime by September, not exactly sure when.
19:54
Then the next one.
19:55
This one, I was really excited when I saw this. It doesn’t just apply to guys in finance. This applies to everybody in the business.
20:03
There is a new type of account that is available. A Statistical Account.
20:12
So, within Statistical Accounts, this is where you can record numbers. So, I’ve set up two examples here.
20:19
One for my head count, my number of employees, and another one for my office space, the number of meters squared my office has. And I can post numbers in here.
20:32
Width dimensions. So, my head count, if I look at this, I kind of got 70 employees at this company.
20:40
I can see, I have 30 people in the Admin department, 10 in production, 23 in sales, another four joined production.
20:48
Another 14 joined admin, 11 people left the admin department. So, I have headcount per department.
20:58
That’s nice.
21:00
I’ve got the same thing for my office space, and again, I’ve split my office this up by department, how much space is being used by each department. And as people move offices etcetera, I can change that square meterage that’s been used per department.
21:17
Again, that’s interesting.
21:19
But the really nice thing, if you go to your account schedules, which are now being renamed as financial reports, that was, I think, the end of last year.
21:30
This change was is made. From here, if I just open any one of these reports, I haven’t built the report for you guys. I’m sorry.
21:41
But, this report, if I go and I change my rule definitions, so, you know, I’m tweaking this report or creating a new report, as well as getting posting accounts, and formulas, and bringing budgets, etcetera.
21:59
I’m getting the option now.
22:01
I can bring numbers from those statistical accounts, so I could get income for my different categories with a head count and I could do this per department, and see what’s my revenue per department per division. Per region, whatever dimension I might want to put on that.
22:22
And again, in the same place, if I’m doing, if I’ve got a shop and I’ve got shelves, how many meters of shelving for each of my departments?
22:33
I can do sales per metre of shop fitting to see which departments are performing well, which ones need more shelf space, which need less shelf space.
22:40
Suddenly, we can get this directly from the system instead of having to have separate spreadsheets, copying and pasting information, and trying to do formulas to figure it out.
22:50
We can have a built-in report that does this for this. And it’s part of our reporting pack at the end of every month.
22:56
So, these statistical accounts, I think I’m going to become very useful if you have those, you know, sales per meter squared, sales per headcount, sales per office. Whatever it might be, those type of reports that you develop, the statistical accounts will probably be very useful for you. And then the last thing that I want to show to you, this one, it blew my mind when I saw it. I thought it was fanstastic.
23:24
If I just go and have a look at any of my grid view type screens, if I look at my posted sales invoices, for example.
23:35
And this is pretty much what the screen looks like now. I’ve got my columns, my rows, all my information looks a little bit like an Excel spreadsheet.
23:44
It would be nice if I could use this more like an Excel spreadsheet.
23:50
So, this is where you would need when you’re doing your testing, to go to a page called feature Management.
23:57
I’m going to turn on this new feature, just so you can see the difference.
24:02
So, the default is switched off? Default is switched off, and it’s going to be switched on. As you can see by quarter four in 2023, it’s this line here, analysis mode.
24:13
I’m going to click the button to try it out.
24:17
So, it’s opening a new page for me to have a look at this. As I said, this is coming sometime by quarter four. And it’s going to be enabled for everyone.
24:27
And now, in this new little test environment that I have, if I have a look at my posted sales invoices again, you’ll notice a slight change to the screen.
24:41
While I’ve still got my rows and columns.
24:44
I now have a button up top here that says Analyse.
24:48
So, this is just a list of all my posted sales invoices with the dates, with the customer.
24:56
If I turn on Analyse, my view shifts, and suddenly it starts looking like a pivot table in Excel.
25:05
Summarised by month within each month, summarised by customer, how many documents there are, what’s the total?
25:14
I can drill down and I can actually see those documents.
25:18
And this is fully customisable. So, by default it’s by date, but over on the side, I can come, I can look at my columns and that’s where it’s chosen by…
25:29
By month, by name.
25:32
I could choose just to do it by name instead of by month, by name.
25:37
I can apply filters, just as I would have done on my normal screen, so that I’m only seeing my domestic customers or my export customers, et cetera.
25:48
So, pretty much all of those month end reports that you have to do, you can do them live on the system.
25:55
We anticipate that by quarter four they’re going to have the export to Excel button here.
26:02
It’s an assumption that we’ve made. I’m not making this a promise.
26:05
But we expect that to happen as well.
26:09
And quite apart from all of this, you get the ability to turn on pivot mode, which just gives you more options on how you can look at this screen instead of just looking at this.
26:25
Boring, old screen, I’ll have to go back one screen.
26:36
Instead of looking at this boring old screen, which is still useful, you now have this much more dynamic screen where you can pivot your data. You can slice it, you can dice it, you can look at a month.
26:50
You can look at the customer group, see the totals, see the details.
26:55
Sort them in any order that you want. I think this is mind blowing for the guys that are doing business analysis work and preparing month end reports. It’s probably going to be a godsend for you guys.
27:08
There are quite a few more things, which I haven’t even had time to touch on.
27:11
Some of the things, there are new localisation if you’re doing business in Africa, you’ve got an African office.
27:17
There’s localisation in just about every African country as well as smaller countries, such as Liechtenstein, San Marino et cetera. If you happen to have offices there. On all of the list pages now, more columns have become available.
27:32
So, stuff that’s been hidden from you in the past, it’s now you’re able to put it on the screen and see what’s going on. The intercompany postings they’ve been tweaked, they’re going to get much better, again, that’s by September that’s going to go live.
27:48
Um, and there’s an intercompany synchronization that’s coming. We’re going to test that, that’s where you can change the GL…
27:58
Chart of Accounts in one company, and mirror that change in another company. Which sounds very exciting.
28:05
We’re looking forward to testing that one out, and then the last one that I want to show you, anybody who’s doing data capture work, it’s much quicker if you just work on the keyboard, rather than using your mouse to navigate around, back to the keyboard, back to the mouse.
28:24
So, for instance, I’m using my mouse.
28:27
Maybe I want to go to Sales. I want to get to the sales invoices, want to get sales invoices, I want to have a look inside one of them to see what’s going on.
28:37
Without using my mouse, if I press Alt, it shows me shortcut keys that I can press to get there, and I can start remembering the shortcut keys.
28:47
So, to get to my sales documents, J then S within my sales documents, A gets me to the invoices. I have a list of invoices, I want to look at the third one down. So, it’s down arrow, down arrow. Press Enter. I’m not using my mouse to navigate here.
29:10
While I’m on this screen, I want to see the statistics for this order… when it finally opens.
29:15
Again, I can press Alt.
29:18
I can press I for invoice and S for statistics.
29:23
I can look at the statistics. Yep, I’m happy with all of that. Escape. Escape.
29:31
Am I sure I want to exit, Tab, yes press enter.
29:36
Escape. I’m back to my home screen. You can do everything now without touching your mouse. For a lot of us, we like to use our mouse. Guys who are capturing orders, doing lots of transactions. Keeping your fingers on the keyboard. It can just speed up your work so much. So, well worth looking at that, seeing those shortcuts.
29:57
I don’t have much time left, guys. Very briefly, a lot of these changes happen because people in the user community, people like you, suggest them to Microsoft. Yep.
30:07
If you think of an idea that you would like to see in a future release, from within Business Central, click on the little question mark, Help and Support, and you get an option here, give feedback. You can follow this link. You can type in. It would be really nice if there was a button that did this on that screen.
30:29
And then you can ask your friends, send them the link. Say, vote for this.
30:32
The more votes it gets, Microsoft are more likely to make that change for you. So, if you think of something that’s a good idea, let Microsoft know.
30:41
They said that a lot of these changes they made this time, came from feedback from the user community, people who press that button and made suggestions. So, they do listen and it’s well worth giving your suggestion there.
30:54
That’s all I’ve got time for. But if you do have any questions Danusia will tell you how to get in touch.
31:02
I could just ask you to go to that next slide, just to finish off.
31:07
So, I appreciate they’re long links, but the two blogs there are on the TVision website and they also would have been included in recent newsletters. And each of those blogs also points back to that really hefty Microsoft Learn section. So, while Ian has covered the majority of the highlights, and again, this is all content that we felt as a team would be really useful to clients – it will all be in there. So, thank you so much everyone for attending today’s session. We’ll also be running a ‘What’s new in Bevica’ session next week, for our Bevica clients, for our drinks industry clients. So, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today. Ian for presenting. The recording will be sent out in due course, and will also be available on the website. And also send out a newsletter in the next month or two. Thank you so much, everyone.
31:53
Cheers guys, bye bye.
