Recorded on the 30th October 2024, find out more about the new capabilities coming to Business Central following the Microsoft Wave 2 release update. In this 30-minute webinar, Jason Bradley explores new and updated features including:
- AI
- Reporting
- User experience functions
Watch on-demand here:
Transcript
0:07
Okay, it’s now midday. Let’s get started.
1:10
Great.
1:10
Thank you, everybody, for joining us today at this What’s New in Business Central Wave 2 webinar in October. Jason, if I could ask you to advance the slides?
1:22
There you go. Thank you.
1:24
As always, I am here to look after the chat, and I will be introducing Jason shortly. My name is Danusia Jolliffe.
1:33
I am the Customer Success Director here at TVision.
1:36
If anyone does have any questions, please post them in the chat at any point in that question box, and I’ll pass them across to Jason.
1:43
If it requires a slightly longer answer, then we can take it offline.
1:47
And also, this recording will be sent out afterwards and will be available on demand and also mentioned in our newsletter.
1:54
So, over to Jason.
1:58
Thanks, Danusia.
2:00
And I’m stepping in for Ian.
2:04
He’s taken a well-earned break. So, you’ll have me just for the next 30 minutes.
2:11
And yeah, looking forward to going through what’s new in this release. In wave 2, 2024.
2:20
Okay, so I’m just going to go to the next slide.
2:23
So, I thought I’d just start off with, there’s so many features in this particular wave release, in this main release, I should say.
2:33
and there’s so many changes that it’s really hard to keep on top of.
2:41
So, who decides where do these changes come from?
2:44
I just thought just quickly just rattle off some of the sources here.
2:48
So obviously Microsoft had their own roadmap and they’re influenced by the greater of Microsoft organisations, such as Copilot adoption, Power Platform.
2:59
So, all of their, you know, part of the whole ecosystem is that many of the apps are getting a splash of Copilot and the Power Platform features.
3:10
So, it was Business Central, which is fantastic.
3:14
Also, there’s IP acquisition.
3:16
So, I’ll mention a couple of features that have come in through just Microsoft buying out some IP from other providers.
3:25
There’s BC Ideas.
3:27
So that’s an important point.
3:29
I thought just to mention that, you know, people like us, people like you, you can actually go on to that website and look at all the existing ideas, vote a few of them up, you think yeah, I wish that was in Business Central or create a new one.
3:44
So yeah, I just thought I’d just mention that. You never know, it might appear in another wave release.
3:49
GitHub Pull Requests, so for the techos, so if that’s anyone who knows about GitHub, you know the actual, a lot of the source code of Business Central is actually open which, which is unusual for Microsoft.
4:03
And so people like ourselves, if we sort of have a feature that we’d say that this really needs to be inside Business Central, then we can create a pull request and Microsoft review it.
4:14
And guess what?
4:14
There’s a few features that have actually got into this wave release via the pull request.
4:21
So yeah, I’ll mention those too.
4:26
And so rather than having a sort of a demo right at the end, I thought, well, let’s have a demo in the middle.
4:32
So, this is what I’m just going to put across soon and hopefully it’ll work and Danusia you can confirm if it’s going to be seen.
4:39
But these are the features I’m just going to rattle off and show everyone.
4:44
Faster data searching and that’s a fantastic new addition.
4:51
Multiple file drag and drop, resizing columns.
4:54
So, lots of UX improvements there, just like everyday stuff that we all find really useful.
5:00
Copilot.
5:01
Of course, there’s that Copilot again, so Enhanced Analysis Assist and creating some sales lines.
5:09
There’s a couple of new features with that one.
5:11
And on the Accounting side, there’s updates to the financial reports for those people that have come from a NAV, that used to be called Account Schedules, now called Financial Reports, and also default GL quantity, small change, but why wasn’t it there in the first place?
5:27
So finally, that’s there in the BC base system now.
5:33
Okay, so I’m just say demo now and I’m going to sort of slide across my environment and Danusia, if you just want to confirm.
5:43
Yeah, it’s there, Jason, yeah.
5:45
All right, fantastic.
5:48
So about searching.
5:52
So, searching has been around for a little while.
5:56
So let me just sort of pull up something here.
6:00
So, if I just go to a list of items and what the reference to searching is to do with, not the filtering side of the solution, but actually just to sort of, you know, quickly go and find something here.
6:15
I’m just waiting for the system to wake up.
6:20
I did test this about 20 minutes ago and it was working fine.
6:24
Just give it a moment.
6:26
Here we go.
6:28
All right, I’m already in an analysis mode, which I’ll talk about in a minute.
6:33
That the search feature is this one here.
6:36
So, if you’re looking for something with your data set, traditionally, you just go and search for something.
6:45
So, I’m looking for chair and then it will start to filter down on chairs, so which is really neat.
6:51
However, you’ve got a, so that was the legacy search.
6:55
So just to sort of give you an idea of what the difference has been.
7:00
So still Chairs, still find Chairs.
7:02
But if you then start to say, ‘Sydney Chair’, sort of doesn’t find it.
7:09
So, this is what we’ve all sort of used to and I sort of didn’t notice, but I sort of make sense that it doesn’t find the exact text search.
7:18
But now flipping over to this new modern search, it still hasn’t found it.
7:26
Okay, maybe I haven’t spelled Sydney right.
7:28
So how about that one?
7:30
So yeah, so just to sort of prove the point, I widened the search the last time, but there you go.
7:34
It didn’t work.
7:35
And now with the modern search, it’s all good.
7:38
So obviously it looks for words in your search and that’s a sort of a really useful improvement.
7:46
And also, it’s been optimised.
7:48
So, behind the scenes, there’s optimisation by Business Central to actually do a faster search.
7:54
So, if you have a really large data set, that’s the one to use now.
8:00
Okay, so the next one I was going to talk about is the drag and drop.
8:08
So, let’s go and find some customers.
8:15
In fact, it’s already open here on the attachment.
8:19
So normally when you open up a list or a card, you’ll see your details about the particular customer.
8:25
On the side here, you’ve got attachments.
8:28
Microsoft is sort of, they’ve added this new area here, but they’ve kept this area here as well.
8:36
So, what’s going to happen is that this attachment area, I don’t know if you can see with my red pointer, that will actually disappear soon, and we’ll just have this documents section, which is going to be a lot more useful than this one that we’ve had in the past.
8:55
So, the multiple file and drag and drop is previously you can only do one file at a time.
9:02
Here you can actually load in multiple files at a time and sort of prove the point.
9:08
I’m going to have something here and then I’ve tried to have, there’s my folder.
9:13
I don’t know if you can see it here, but there’s a mugshot of me and some other pictures.
9:18
But here’s a folder, inside this folder I’ve got some files – I could either do, you know, pick out different files and drag them in this file, or actually, just do a whole folder and just drag it in that way. And here you go, it’s through with two PDFs you could then obviously go, and you know, view that open from OneDrive, you can download it and maybe share the link with someone else. So, I think that’s a great improvement.
9:47
And just to sort of reiterate that area here where you see the count two, that will probably disappear with some of the incremental updates.
9:56
So hopefully you found that useful.
10:00
The other one I was going to show is the, I’m just looking back the screen because of what I was going to say is, oh, the resize and the columns, that was on my list.
10:13
So, it seems like a real simple change, but now you can double click columns and then it will sort of resize.
10:21
But the critical thing is, that it’s going to be device independent.
10:27
So, I don’t know if any of you, maybe you take your laptop with you and then you maybe swap over to a tablet or your phone.
10:34
Has there been some sort of complaints that just your customisation of your columns don’t always sort of transpose to the other devices.
10:45
Microsoft have made lots of improvements just with a simple size and up column.
10:50
So now that should work a lot better between the devices.
10:55
And anyone who’s got a locked down profile, which means from an admin point of view, you can actually sort of lock down a profile so people can’t personalise, users can’t personalise.
11:09
They’ve made an allowance that actually for resizing columns anyone can do that regardless if your profile’s been locked down.
11:18
So that’s a good one for end users. Copilot, so we can’t get away with talking about some copilot features. Absolutely not.
11:28
Yeah, so let’s get back into items and sort of give you an example of what we’re talking about here, I’ll just move out the way.
11:41
So, what we’re talking about, so this little icon, I don’t know if any of you, anyone sort of noticed, it’s sort of appearing in lots of places now, but this is where we can go to an analysis list, but ask Copilot to maybe give us a hand.
12:02
So, what does that mean?
12:04
So here I’ve, again, I’ve just cheated, and I’ll just say, why don’t we just type, do that rather than me just typing, so just natural language, you know, group by vendor number, descending by inventory, so that, so we’ll see what that does. Actually, what I’ll do is, just take that one away and just see what happens here, and then you’ll see that we can then refine it. So off it goes, it’s sort of understood what I meant.
12:37
And here we’ve got vendor numbers, and we just need to click in the inventory there.
12:43
So, my other problem was that now I’ve got inventory that’s, I’d like to maybe sort it by inventory.
12:52
So here I can maybe say, let’s try that.
12:57
Send in my inventory and let’s see what it does.
13:02
And now we’ve got in a sort of a nice sort of descending order. Really great. Here you can, as per the previous release, just to make sure that everyone knows that you can actually save these analysis views and you’d, so the analysis one that you’ve created, you can rename them, you can copy a link so you can actually share it with someone else.
13:33
So, they get the benefit of your work of having a really interesting tabular sort of analysis.
13:43
So that’s really great, that one.
13:46
Let’s just flip back to my other mode, yes.
13:53
The other one I’d like to talk about is, with Copilot, is creating lines using Copilot.
14:02
So, let’s have a look at that one. Going to sales orders. Why don’t we go for a create a new sales order. And have a little think right, who should I select, I’ll do trade research here. So, there’s, so far.
14:34
I obviously I can just type on the details of the items here, in case anyone hadn’t noticed, there’s this one here that I think that came in a maybe previous release but it’s probably not sold as well as it should be, but select items is a nice way to select items or you can come down the traditional way and flick down your item list this way.
14:56
The other one is Copilot.
14:58
So here we’ve got a few options.
15:02
We can do a suggest sales line and that will come up with some other prompts.
15:07
We can select it from a file.
15:08
So, this is, you know, we can load in a file, but I’m just going to go with this guy here.
15:15
So, the idea here is that you can just start typing away.
15:19
So maybe you’ve got an email, or you’ve got some other sort of maybe a PDF or whatever it might be.
15:26
And if you can grab the text and put it into here, then it should be able to recognise it.
15:32
So, I’ve just got something here.
15:35
And I purposely mismatched the words of the item as well just, just to sort of try and test out Copilot.
15:45
Let’s just let it generate and see what it sort of comes up with. And it’s done a pretty good match.
15:54
It’s found a Tokyo chair; it’s found a Sydney chair and also worked out my quantities.
16:00
I’m quite happy to insert that.
16:06
There’s another little feature as well, sort of lurking in that prompt list. I’ll just get rid of those lines and add it in again.
16:17
Let’s go with that. I think it was actually, oh yes, the prompt guide.
16:32
I found this really useful.
16:34
So, you can actually say, for example, it’s got prompts already for you to sort of work out.
16:43
So, you could say copy from the latest posted invoice, for example. So, if there’s a previous invoice that was being posted, it’ll do that.
16:53
You could even say copy from the posted invoice number, you type in the number, so I thought this is sort of really useful.
17:02
So, you know, now you’ve got pre-prompts if you like, because I think it’s a good way to get started with some of these pre-prompts.
17:09
I thought that was worth showing to everyone.
17:14
Now we’re sort of looking at some of the accounting changes.
17:18
One of the quick ones, whilst I’m here, if anyone’s sort of doing documents and you’re adding on GL accounts here.
17:29
So, let’s try these, if that’s all works.
17:33
No, so let’s find something like…
17:41
I know it’s going to be a bad one if I pick one, but let’s do job sales.
17:47
Just hope that it’s all set up nicely in this system.
17:50
So, you notice here, so one of the little gripes that people have used had was, well, kind of just have like default of one.
17:59
So that’s sort of a very nice feature to sort of add in.
18:03
So, sales receivable setup.
18:08
Let’s just go and do that one quick.
18:10
And hopefully you’ll see here, this guy here is a new option.
18:13
So, default the quantity of one.
18:15
So, we can click that on, come back out.
18:19
You’ll have that the same option in purchase and payable setup as well.
18:24
Maybe I’ll just go to the next line, F8, the one above.
18:29
And now we have a one.
18:31
So, I know it seems like a simple change, but actually it’s a really useful change just to sort of make entering auras that much quicker.
18:41
And this one actually came from a pull request.
18:43
So, if you notice that the sources of changes that have come through into this wave, that wasn’t actually by Microsoft.
18:51
Someone said, hey, you know, this is pretty obvious.
18:53
Why don’t you just do it for GL accounts, because there is a similar option for items where you can have a default of one.
19:00
So the other one with sort of accountancy side, was financial reports, which are now – which is again, for the people that used to come from NAV days, that is account schedules, yeah so you know trying to sort of remember that there’s now two terms In case anyone hadn’t noticed, by the way, if you do type in accounting schedules, it does actually give you financial reports anyway.
19:33
So, there’s a bit of metadata behind the scenes that sort of says, okay, I know what you mean.
19:38
You mean financial reports.
19:40
But when I talk about these, there’s new financial reports that have been added to this list.
19:47
But the biggest change is the con definitions.
19:53
If I just go to a list here, this, I don’t know if you look at your current, if you’re on a previous 2.25, sorry, this 2024 release two, there’s sort of not as many as these.
20:10
So, Microsoft have really gone to town and added so many more column definitions.
20:16
So, you know, with the combination of the reports themselves and the con definitions, you know, times that out, you know, you’ve got sort of 50, 60, you know, brand new reports there.
20:29
So fantastic, just using the standard solution inside Business Central.
20:38
So yeah, that was my whirlwind sort of demo, and we may sort of flip back as we come to sort of talk about the next few slides but let me just have a few mentions because we’ve only got 30 minutes so I can’t show you everything. So, I’m just realising there’s only 10 minutes to go and we might need a bit of Q&A.
21:05
So yeah, so lots and lots of changes.
21:07
So, Copilot only showed you really a couple there, but with Copilot there’s plenty of changes.
21:17
Let me just rattle a few off here.
21:21
There’s the bank account reconciliation, for example.
21:24
I know that came in the previous release.
21:26
They’ve made improvements to that.
21:28
So again, that’s definitely worth looking at.
21:31
If you’re setting up a new company, you can actually use Copilot to help create your number series.
21:38
And again, going back to the sources of where that feature come from, and that’s a pull request.
21:43
Someone out there said, hey Microsoft why don’t you sort of include this as a feature and they said they loved it because it was Copilot and they brought it in really quickly.
21:57
There’s Copilot was also appearing in sort of those in the ecosystem of Power Automate so now you can actually use Copilot to actually create a workflow which is awesome.
22:08
So, it’s not just BC like I said but it’s something that helps us using BC, which is the Power Automate solution.
22:17
And I haven’t sort of seen it yet, but there’s enhancements to like chatting with Copilot, which I’m really looking forward to delving into that one a bit more as well.
22:29
Reporting, well, there’s, like I said, I’ve already mentioned the financial reports, but other features there, there’s going to be some sort of new ad hoc analysis, ways of doing reports, so that’s where they come sort of merging in different tables to sort of give it a bit more of a flattened view and an area they started to initially look at is fixed assets.
22:57
They’ve done a lot of work around Excel and so now lots of reports are seeing an Excel export feature.
23:08
And to make it easier to sort of actually adjust those Excel reports, they’ve been including sort of the named formulas.
23:17
So, they actually like the data set itself that’s actually given a name.
23:21
And that just really helps you to tailor those Excel reports so you can then load them back in and reuse them later.
23:28
Lots of embedded Power BI reports.
23:32
It’s pretty incredible, but there’s like over 63 new Power BI reports and that’s come from an IP acquisition.
23:41
So, there was a partner out there that really went to town with, creating loads of Power BI reports and Microsoft said, yeah, that looks great.
23:49
Can we have those?
23:50
So yeah, now we’ve, we all share that benefit if you’re using Power BI for your reporting.
23:55
So yeah, 63 brand new reports, lots of new features also coming out for Power BI.
24:02
I believe I’ve heard that if I just quickly flip out to here, if I just go back to my home screen here, I understand that you’ll be able to, up here we’ve got bookmarks of, you know, like pages that we normally can go to.
24:20
I believe we can actually start to now bookmark on Power BI reports.
24:24
So yeah, so I’m sort of really looking forward to seeing that work.
24:29
So yeah, all that work’s been done.
24:36
So, there’s more advanced set, there’s advanced features now with the Power BI connector.
24:43
So, this makes it easier to run your Power queries.
24:46
Yes, there’s so many changes to reporting there.
24:50
And I’m just aware that I’m going to rattle through the rest of them, because like I said, there’s so many changes.
24:57
Projects, so let’s not talk about, we can’t miss out on projects.
25:01
Lots of new changes there, mainly around closer ties with purchasing and inventory.
25:08
So, for example, now from a project, you’d be able to actually go and create a purchase order, that sort of thing.
25:16
And there’s other features such as looking for your availability of that particular item as well.
25:24
They’ve surfaced a lot of the actions that were sort of buried away in the menu and sort of making it a lot more visible.
25:30
So, a lot of love has gone into projects there.
25:33
Subscription billing is a whole brand-new feature.
25:37
I’ve got another slide if we’ve got time just to sort of rattle through some of those changes here.
25:40
But this is one of the, I think, biggest changes in this release.
25:45
So, if you’re in the service industry, similar to like ourselves, if you know, we would want to, you know, charge out services or if there’s a contract and yeah. Brand new feature, again, that was through an acquisition, they saw a feature out there in the community and said, yeah, we’d love that, we want to bring that into BC, yeah that sort of deserves like a like an hour-long webinar by itself. So, it’s a huge new feature. Job queue changes, I think that can be better for everyone.
26:17
Anyone who relies on job queues, they introduce a category feature, so rather than job queues sometimes fighting over each other and then sort of ending up in an error, now there’s a, you’re in a line, queuing in a line feature, which is basically saying once one job queue finishes, it taps the shoulder of the next one in its sort of category and says, okay, now it’s your turn.
26:43
You know, far more orderly way to sort of work out, sorry, how to process job queues.
26:51
So, there should be a lot less of locking than that because that does happen with job queues sometimes.
26:57
Notifications is important to a job queue so that now you can actually get notifications of job errors inside the BC client.
27:04
So that’s a great new feature.
27:07
Quickly, a deprecation of user groups, so.
27:09
Oh, Jason, can I jump in?
27:11
So, I know that Jack has been in touch with a number of clients about the deprecation of user groups.
27:18
We created a video, a how-to guide, and information got included in TVision Matters and Bevica Matters. So, we have sent that information out.
27:26
I know there are some clients that still haven’t done it yet, but that will be deprecated.
27:30
So, when the new wave is applied, they will no longer be there, and it will be those security groups and permission sets, et cetera, that need to be set up. So just wanted to jump in.
27:39
Yeah, no, great.
27:40
Thanks for that.
27:41
No, that’s, thanks then.
27:42
It’s just, yeah, glad that that’s been messaged out.
27:46
And it’s a far more useful feature as well with security groups, because if you’re anyone in IT admin, you sort of manage that through Entra.
27:55
It can be a lot, sort of a logical place for you to start assigning permissions to users.
28:02
Lots of legislators, a few legislation changes and something that may impact maybe for the UK, but definitely for EU, which is you can have multiple VAT numbers for a customer.
28:12
So that’s sort of driven by the country code.
28:16
So, if you’re sort of, you know, depends on the ship to details, that’s in now in this sort of release and they’re going to expand that out to maybe vendors and so on, but they’re just starting small with that one.
28:29
Sustainability, that’s quite big in the EU and I think the UK is going to have that probably in the next couple of years.
28:37
So that’ll be like a sort of reporting requirement to government.
28:42
EU document framework.
28:44
Yeah, so that’s already started a number of months ago.
28:50
And now there’s countries in the EU that it’s basically mandatory.
28:55
So, Microsoft, they’re working hard to actually, you know, enhance that.
29:00
Bring on sort of those, that’s agents’ relationship.
29:04
So, BC agent agents to the end partner.
29:06
So, working with sort of third-party agents and a lot more is coming on board with that.
29:13
And attachments to e-docs as well, so e-documents, so you can sort of send any sort of PDF data through that e-document sending.
29:23
And Shopify enhancements, oh my goodness, there’s loads there, so there’s about eight or so.
29:30
And I know we’ve got a man at TVision, Hamish. So maybe we need to do a separate webinar at some point but loads of features with Shopify.
29:41
Yeah.
29:41
So, there was a question coming in asking if how much of those Shopify enhancements and changes we’ll be covering.
29:48
And I know that some of them will be included in the ‘What’s New in Bevica’ webinar next week.
29:52
So even if someone isn’t a drinks client, I know that it will be included there.
29:56
So, people could sign up for that and get that webinar on demand also.
29:59
So, we will cover some of it then.
30:01
Yeah.
30:02
I mean, just to sort of mention one, just that you can now send, I think with a sales invoice that didn’t come through Shopify that you process in Business Central, I think you can now actually do a payment against that in Shopify.
30:17
So that’s amazing to sort of, you know, stitch together that between the two systems.
30:23
And there’s some warehousing changes there, but I feel I’m really running out of time here because I know that there’s only, we’re dead on the end of our webinar. Jason, one question that’s just come in, simply to allow more than one user to post a warehouse entry at one time, so there’s a bit more flexibility for the warehousing.
30:43
And there’s a bit more on that’s linked also back to projects as well, because now you can do inventory putaways and also full-on warehousing activities through projects as well. Jason, someone has asked, where is the full list of all of this information?
31:05
Can you share that? I wasn’t sure if it was on the slide or next?
31:08
Yeah, well, there’s a couple, yes.
31:11
If I just flick to the end of the slides, so here we’ve got a few links there. Obviously, we’ve got our own blog for you to go and review.
31:25
I’m sort of going up the other way.
31:28
So, Microsoft Learn, this is where you’d see the whole list and it is substantial, so take your time.
31:38
And here, this is, I mean, it’s brilliant from the Business Central team.
31:44
They actually are doing sort of like, you know, short videos, some of them are a bit longer, but you know, sort of on average between about sort of 10 – 15-minute videos about some of those key features that I mentioned as well.
31:58
So, for example, if you’re interested in the subscription new feature, there’s like a 20 minute video on that one, at least it will give you a flavour for how that works.
32:07
So yeah, really highly recommend this one.
32:09
There are some technical videos in there, which I’m sure that will go right over top of people’s heads, but I haven’t even talked about all the other features from the development side.
32:18
There’s a whole raft of new features that I know that end users probably don’t care about, but there’s lots of new features just for our technical team as well to digest, not only just the actual platform and application itself.
32:32
So yeah, so I’m aware that we’re a bit over, Danusia, do you want me to sort of go back a couple of slides?
32:41
No, that’s great, thank you so much, Jason.
32:44
And if anyone has got any further questions, please do reach out.
32:48
And I know I’ve asked some of the ones that came in already.
32:51
So, thank you everyone for joining us today.
32:52
We have overrun a little bit.
32:53
If you want everything on demand, it’s on that URL there, and this webinar will be available in the next few days.
33:00
Thank you, everyone, for joining, and thank you, Jason, for stepping in and sharing all of that great functionality that we feel will be useful to clients.
33:08
If anyone has any further questions, please do reach out. If not, have a great afternoon.
33:11
Thank you.
33:13
Thank you.
