Learn more about the new capabilities coming to Business Central in the 2023 release wave 2 update which launched in October. In the following 30-minute webinar we detail a 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, added AI capabilities and improved user interface.
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Transcript
0:04
Good afternoon everybody and thank you for joining us today on this ‘What’s New in Business Central Wave 2’ webinar.
0:11
So, just to begin with, we’d like to apologise for the delay – obviously we had to postpone this webinar due to the Microsoft update, wave being delayed, so, going forwards.
0:23
As always, my name is Danusia Jolliffe, I am the Marketing Customer Services Director here at TVision, and we’ve got Ian, who is the Support Desk Consultant.
0:36
Ah there we go; the slides are a little slow. If anybody has any questions, please do pop them into the question box or into the chat, and I will be answering those for you as we go along. As always, Ian will be doing the demo. And I’ll pass over to him, and he can talk to you around all the areas of interest in the new Wave update.
1:05
Ian over to you. Oh. Thank you. All right. So, let me open this screen for you. So, this update guys, to me is really exciting. If you remember the last wave, which happened at the beginning of the year, there was lots of new functionality that catered to smaller companies.
1:27
This time there’s a bit of something for everybody. And there are all some nice, chunky improvements for those bigger companies that are using Business Central.
1:38
For the wave, as always, you’ll be hearing from someone on our side. It’s going to be Jack this year. He’s going to be helping you with your Wave, asking you to test things, helping you through with any problems. And if you do get stuck at all, or you’re concerned at all, please do give us a shout. We are here to help you. Right, so, I said there were some, some big changes for the bigger companies. I’m not going to demo this first one, I’ll just talk about it.
2:05
If you are really on the big size company that’s using Business Central, and you have multiple environments. So, you have offices in America, Europe, maybe over in Malaysia or Singapore, somewhere like that. And you’re on three completely different BC systems on three different databases.
2:26
We now have some improvements where, if you want to do intercompany transactions, you can do intercompany transactions between all of those companies that are on different environments.
2:36
Automatically send your intercompany transactions, automatically receive them.
2:42
If you want to do consolidations on those companies that are on different environments, you can now do a consolidation from within Business Central. No need to log into different environments, save files, send them somewhere, import the files.
2:58
It’s just all handled seamlessly for you in the background. And these are huge. You know, this really just makes your reporting so much easier.
3:09
Some of the other changes, some things that will appeal to absolutely everybody. If we go and have a look at our customers.
3:19
We now have on customisation of pages, I don’t have many customers here, but if I was to go and personalise my page, we now get a lot more options when we are personalising.
3:33
Just waiting for this browser to catch up. There it is.
3:37
So, when I want to add fields, when I get this little drop-down box. Do I want to see recommended fields?
3:45
Would I like to see all fields? That’s only when you’re customising roles. I’m not going to Advance, or you can choose which fields do I see that I might want to drag and drop, just makes my customisation a lot easier.
4:00
And one of the fields that you can add now, is Name 2. So, Name 2 has always been there, but it’s just always being hidden and we’ve never had the ability to bring it on to our lists.
4:16
Now we can do that, and even if we drill into an actual customer card.
4:22
Just as easily could be a vendor card, Item card, resource card.
4:27
Anything that has that description to, or name to field. Then obviously, I’ve got the number, I’ve got the name and the search name.
4:35
Name 2 is also available. And I can, kind of slot this in here, between name and search name.
4:45
I can save this. And now I have named 2 available, where I’ve got the old name of this company, in case any of my older employees type it in. That can actually search on name 2 as well as name 1.
4:57
We have plenty of customers who’ve changed names, so that’s really useful.
5:01
And also, if you are creating a role centre to share with other users, maybe there’s a field here, you don’t want people to be editing freely.
5:12
You can set a field to be locked for editing, and then it will be greyed out on the screens unable to change this field. You’re getting options like that, now, on your customisation, so that makes your customising a lot more useful.
5:31
Um, another feature that’s probably going to make everybody’s day, is this analysis field. You’ll notice this button was released in Wave one, but it wasn’t available to everyone. Now this is available to everyone on just about every single page. We could go to Customer ledger Entries, vendor ledger entries to do analysis. We could go to post with sales documents, I’m going to take a deep dive and show you a screen, maybe you haven’t seen before. Value Entries.
6:04
And this is the one that comes underneath Item Ledger Entries where all the costs and sales transfers etc. are recorded on the value entries tables.
6:17
So, any, any transaction that involves inventory, customers, and vendors, is recorded on this table.
6:24
Well, this is a default view.
6:26
Again, you can customise this, show the columns that you’re interested in. You can filter this, only show maybe the date range, or the type of transaction that you’re interested in.
6:37
But now, we have this extra button and the lines.
6:39
And if I click that, it changes the screen. I’m still seeing pretty much exactly what I was seeing before.
6:46
But I get these extra boxes on the side over here. Now first up…
6:52
I’ve also got these tabbed to view up here. And so this tab, I’m going to rename it just so we don’t get confused. This is the default that I got when I came here. I’ll rename it.
7:04
I’ll add a new tab where I’m going to do some analysis. I’m going to use a sales analysis I think, so I’ll name this one to sales.
7:15
I have now a new tab.
7:17
Over here, I will add some filters where I’m only interested in seeing, Oh, source code, maybe. Yeah.
7:29
Let’s turn off purchases and transfer so many seeing where the source code is, sales.
7:34
Erm, I’ll also limited to a particular year, let’s have a look at 2022, for instance, and now I’m just seeing Sales for 2022.
7:45
So, what you could have done that from the previous page, this isn’t really very exciting.
7:50
But what I can do, I have somewhere on here, a customer number, or a vendor number, or a transaction type, and it comes under, the source number, is either a customer or a vendor.
8:07
So, if I scroll down and find my source number on this list, that’s my source number.
8:12
I’m going to come down, and group things by source number.
8:17
Now, I have, for each of my customers, I’ve got 48 transactions in the year to do with sales.
8:25
I can scroll across, I can see what the sales were. I can see what the cost of sales were, I’m viewing sales per customer for the year.
8:35
Income and costs.
8:37
That’s a quick way to put a report together.
8:40
I can hide some of these columns, I’m not so interested in up here. They’re just actually making a lot of noise for me, so let’s just turn some of them off.
8:48
There we go. Bring the numbers on.
8:50
Um, what if I wanted to look at this by month, instead of by year.
8:56
So, let’s see, I’ve got costing month up here, let’s bring that down.
9:03
So, I still have my source numbers, but now these 48 transactions, if I drill into them, I’ve got them by month, by customer, by month, what were the sales, what were the costs?
9:14
And, it’s that quick to put together a report. So, if you’re a small business, you can’t afford Power BI, you want something that’s quick and easy to use.
9:25
This is a fantastic option for you.
9:28
As your business grows, you can add Jet Reports. You can add to Power BI. And the system just grows with you, and you’d never lose this functionality. It’s always there. Ian, someone has said, so if you create that for yourself, can you then share that tab with somebody else, or does it have to be a role centre level? OK, fantastic question: when I was showing some of my colleagues, that was a question that they asked, as well.
9:51
So, any of these tabs, up at the top here, I can copy a link, and I can send it to a colleague.
9:59
A nice thing is they can paste that link, and they can actually paste it into a different company and get the same report for their company, which is a big improvement on what it used to be before as well. So that multi company element? Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s there now.
10:13
It’s the joined up thinking that it’s, it’s from a tiny business starting out, growing up to employing hundreds of people.
10:21
Those BC will grow with you, and it will adapt, and you can turn it to what you want it to be.
10:29
Once I’ve got all of this, and I’ve finished my reporting and everything, I go back.
10:33
I go about my day, I do my business, whatever it is, my boss phones me. He liked the report but he wanted it the other way around, on month by customer, not by customer by month. Oh dear, I’ve got to do all this again.
10:44
Not really.
10:45
I just go back to my value entries, and the system is… Oh, Value Entries, there they are. And the system is smart enough to remember.
10:57
I like to look at my stuff in analysis mode. I don’t have to turn it back on again.
11:01
It’s remembered my tabs. They’re still there for me, and I didn’t like this order. I can just drag and drop and swap them around.
11:09
Now I’ve got months, and if I open up the month, I’ve got by customer, my sales, my cost of sales.
11:16
This is really easy.
11:17
And you’ve still got pivot mode, which you can turn on.
11:21
And now it’s like a pivot table within Excel. You got all the fields, all the rows, all the columns, all the values. You drag and drop and make this look the way you want it to look.
11:34
And the system will remember this for you.
11:37
OK, so that’s one for everybody, I think.
11:40
Um, we also have some huge improvements in navigation.
11:47
So, we can see, I’ve got these customers on my system.
11:54
Sometimes you go searching, you want to find a customer, you have to go to the customers list, you then search for the customer. Not anymore.
12:02
I can’t remember who the customers were. I think one of them was Trey Research.
12:10
I can search within company data for Trey.
12:14
And it has found there’s a customer called Trey Research. There are some ledger entries for this customer. I can open them all up.
12:21
There are some sales invoices. There are some contacts that belong to this customer.
12:26
And I can drill in on any of these, and it will take me to the page I’m looking for.
12:32
So, I don’t have to go to my vendor list, search for the vendor, and open the card. I can just search for a vendor, search for an item, search for a customers.
12:42
It saves me so much clicking around and makes my life a lot easier.
12:47
Um, there are other ways where it’s easier now to find information if we go and have a look at purchase orders.
12:59
Usually, I choose sales stuff, but today, we’ll look at Purchase Orders instead.
13:04
So, we’ve got some open purchase orders on the system, I hope. Yes, and we’ve got one that’s released.
13:12
If I look at this purchase order, I could just as easily be looking at a quote, sales order, sales invoices, et cetera.
13:22
There’s an item on this order.
13:25
If I click the little Lookup button, I used to go to ‘Select from Full List’ to open up that item card. I don’t need to anymore. I just click on Show Details.
13:36
And it’s going to open up the item card for 1896-S.
13:41
Tell me everything I need to know about this item, how much I have in stock? What’s coming? What’s potentially going?
13:48
I can come back to my documents, I didn’t have to jump through hoops to find that information.
13:53
Really easy to get from one place to another. And even easier still, purchase orders…
13:59
don’t always come in one go, sometimes you receive piecemeal, we ordered seven to have been delivered. We’ve invoiced one of them.
14:09
Oh, we’ve invoiced one.
14:10
If I click on that number one, now, suddenly it takes me to this is the posted purchase invoice that makes up that one.
14:19
If there were multiple invoices, I would see a list of them.
14:22
I’d be able to click on them, and open up those documents.
14:26
And, the same thing for the quantity received.
14:29
If I click on that, it will take me to the posted purchase received lines. Just makes my life so much easier.
14:39
On sales, I would see the shipment lines, all the posted sales invoices.
14:44
Really easy to jump around the system, get to what you’re looking for, saves you time, ultimately it saves you money.
14:53
Another one, which is really nice for all you guys who are using warehousing.
14:59
So, in the past, the guys in finance, they’ve done their journals, they sent it to Excel, they edit their journals in Excel.
15:08
Guess what?
15:09
Now we can do that if we’re working in operations, if we’re doing a physical inventory journal, we can open it in Excel, we can edit it within Excel.
15:19
So, you know, send the guys out to do their counting, type in the numbers on my Excel spreadsheet. And he recounts.
15:25
Type it in, click Upload and it will send it up to the system ready to be posted and that’s not just on a Physical Inventory Journal, that’s also on reclassification journals.
15:39
It’s on your purchase planning worksheets within your warehousing, your warehouse inventory journals, your warehouse physical inventory journals, your pick and put away worksheets. You can now edit those in Excel.
15:54
You have that power, that previously, only the finance guys had. So, we’ve caught up with finance which is fantastic.
16:03
Another one which is a little bit exciting to me, barcodes. So, on items, for instance, is one of the places where… let’s find an item.
16:16
That’s one on my list.
16:19
Every item, you can assign them the GTIN Number, GTIN number. Um, a barcode number, basically.
16:29
And there is an option now in reports to print a label, and if we print a label for this item, I’m just going to preview it.
16:39
We could send this to a label printer, obviously.
16:42
It gives me a barcode readable by a handheld laser scanner, a barcode which is readable by a mobile device, such as your mobile phone or a tablet you see with a camera.
16:54
Sure.
16:57
Yeah, that’s nice.
16:59
It’s not really all that exciting until we realise that another thing Microsoft has done, they have updated the app that runs on your mobile phone, on your tablet to now be able to read those barcodes.
17:17
So, if you’ve got somebody using a mobile device, their cell phone doing some inventory transaction in your warehouse, they can now scan a barcode that you’ve pasted on the box instead of having to type in the number.
17:28
Again, so much easier, so much quicker, less mistakes.
17:33
Not only items where you can get labels.
17:36
If you have batches and serial numbers. So, if you’re doing proper item tracking through your warehouses, you can print a label for each batch, each serial number, stick that on the boxes.
17:48
You can scan those as you’re doing your directed picks and put-aways through your warehouse with your mobile device.
17:56
Again, it’s just, now, it’s joined up thinking, but I’m seeing from Microsoft, but it’s not just a thing that’s nice, it’s things that start working together. And we can see the future is really looking rosy.
18:09
One other thing I did want to mention. Power Apps. So, if you’re using Power BI, if you’re at all interested in creating power apps, or if you’re using power flows, power automate, I’m linking that up to Business Central.
18:27
Microsoft have made a lot of improvements.
18:30
I’m not a boffin on power apps. My colleague is. And when I was showing him the list of what been changed, he was getting very excited, saying ooh…
18:39
that’s a huge improvement. One of the areas where he got excited was approvals.
18:44
So, within Business Central, you can set of basic approvals for purchase documents.
18:49
You can set up advanced approvals for your journals, changes to vendor bank accounts, et cetera.
18:57
You can also, through Powell Automate, set up separate approval flows, which are really complex and have multiple branches.
19:04
That’s all been made a lot better and a lot more powerful.
19:09
Um, again, there are a host of other things that have been updated as well.
19:14
One of the things on the governance and auditing side of things, effective permissions that users have, those reports have been improved to make them easier to read.
19:26
By default, you now get a payment practices report, which will say how long it takes you to pay your invoices.
19:34
Which, in a lot of companies, that’s a legal requirement.
19:37
Now, that’s available by default for everyone. So, larger companies who want to keep track of those kind of things. It’s now built into the system.
19:45
That’s a lot in this wave release.
19:49
As I said, when Jack gets in touch, he asks you to do the testing, please help him out. Help us out, do those tests, so we can get you onto this version as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
20:01
Were there any more questions, Danusia? Someone did ask where the full list is available. Erm and on one of the slides coming up, it will point the link to the Microsoft Learn and the Microsoft documentation. As always, with these, what’s new in Business Central webinars, what we do is we look internally, we attend some of the Microsoft sessions, and then as a team, we discuss, I think, what would be useful to our clients.
20:26
So, these are our, are our highlights. That’s not to say there is another functionality that other people might find useful. So, these are our highlights, but there is a lot, lot more that people can see. And, obviously, once your environments have been waved then you will have access to all of those. As Ian has said, that testing is important. Just to make sure that what you did previously is similar, or have you do need to change anything internally. So that when the live production environment is copied, and you know exactly what to do, and to move forward. I’ve got no more questions at the moment, erm so, can you roll through to the next slide, please, Ian from the deck.
21:08
So, these were the highlights, as I said, as Ian has mentioned already. And those are the areas that we think are going to be of particular use to all of our clients across all the various sectors.
21:21
So, we can read through that later, and we’ll be sharing the deck afterwards, or the recording, rather.
21:28
And on the next slide, we have the information where you can learn more. So, within the Microsoft Learn environment, there is a release plan, which includes all of the information. And we have issued two blogs already that Alex wrote internally that are on the website that talk about the updates, application features, that kind of thing.
21:49
So, I’d like to say thank you for attending. And once again, apologies for the delay and postponing the session but previously we wouldn’t have been able to show you that environment as it wasn’t available. So, thanks, once again to Ian for doing a wonderful demo. If you do have any questions, please do get in touch. This recording will be available on demand on the website in the next few days. Once again, thank you, everyone for attending today.
22:15
Thanks Ian. Cheers guys, bye.
