The 2022 release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and industry clouds brings new innovations that will provide businesses with significant capabilities to transform. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Financial Services,, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Field Service, Supply Chain Insights, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Business Central, Connected Spaces, Guides, Customer Insights, Customer Voice, Remote Assist and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Sustainability, and Nonprofit.
In this article, you will find most important Business Central and 365 Finance & Operations features planned by Microsoft for 2022. According to MS, Wave 1 release should take place in April.
1. Business Central Wave 1 features
Business Central delivers a set of features that are designed to simplify and improve the way businesses administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions.
- The finance and supply chain capabilities in Business Central are improved with
several optimizations and enhancement of the capabilities so that users can execute business processes more productively.
- Improved efficiency of collaborative business processes in Microsoft Teams, and hardened Excel and Outlook add-ins.
- More countries are added to bring Business Central to availability in now over 70 countries.
- As Microsoft has moved entirely to Visual Studio Code, they are continuing to invest
in areas that enhance productivity for developers. Additionally, they will introduce GitHub Go for partners to set up CI/CD for their apps without any prior knowledge about pipelines, Docker, or PowerShell.
- Improved Power Automate capabilities, making it much easier to set up workflows for the specific needs of an organization.
- Improved onboarding - The access to the context-specific content will be powered by a new and modern Help panel similar to that of other Microsoft current offerings. The context-specific content that users get access to through the Help panel will include Microsoft-hosted content and partner-hosted content so that the Help panel is the go-to place to get unblocked. Additionally, teaching tips will be able to include clickable links so that page - and control level teaching tips can refer to the documentation or other in-app pages.
- Improved reporting - MS will deliver a better experience with Excel layouts. Users will also be provided improvements to the account schedules capability. Finally, Power BI analytics story will be improved by enabling more Power BI dashboards to be shown on the Homepage of business users.
2. Most popular user requests of improvement that Microsoft listened to
- Blocking deletion of G/L accounts
- Auto-accept transactions for intercompany journals
- Payment reconciliation journal with enabled Preview Posting
- Allow the sell-to and bill-to customers to be different for jobs
- Bank Account Statement report
- Create bank deposits - enabled for users by admins, makers or analysts
- Block VAT and General Posting setups
- Change default company bank account on sales and service documents
- Check documents and journals in while you work
- Consolidate customer and vendor balances
And many more... you can read all features in Microsoft Release plan here.(Bear in mind it's 500 pages long!)
3. What's new and planned for microsoft dynamics 365 finance & operations?
This release for Finance & Operations is focused on bringing additional enhancements to core financial capabilities.
- Vendor invoice OCR - advanced configurations for OCR service, deployment wizard, business rules in staging area
- Enhancements around ledger settlements
- Validate vendor bank account before submitting payment to journal to workflow
- Financial tags
- Low-code globalization services - tax audit and reporting service
- Tax calculation service - accepting multiple API documents in one call
- Globalization studio
- Update budget plans with Excel template upload
- F&O cross-app features - vertically scrolling workspaces
- Near-zero downtime for maintenance updates.
Note - Starting with version 10.0.25, Internet Explorer can no longer be used so any users still using this browser will have to move to some other application, such as Chrome, Safari, Mozilla etc.
Some of the features are already available as early access beta versions, although generally the mass availability is scheduled for the 1st of April - let's hope all goes to plan for Microsoft and all of us will soon be able to test out these new functionalities.