Top Five Highlights of Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations, December Service Update

During the holidays, you may have missed what’s important in the December Service update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Here are the top five highlights of the release which addresses address reporting, efficiency, and global compliance issues, as published on Microsoft’s Blog:

1. Enhanced Financial and Operational Reporting – The latest service release introduces a new set of default reports built using Power BI. The new financial reporting experience is now embedded within the Dynamics 365 UX, giving users a seamless experience of report generation and allowing them to drill into supporting documents. Key sub-ledger data is available to provide better ledger to sub-ledger analysis. Default reports such as a trial balance, balance sheet, and profit and loss, are shipped out of the box and can be quickly and easily customized using the Power BI desktop. The existing financial reporting using Report Designer within Microsoft Dynamics 365 is still available and fully supported. In addition, Power BI Solution Templates are now available on AppSource. These will empower customers to extend our existing Power BI reports for unique business requirements.
2. Global Coverage – India Regulatory Functionality. In this update for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft has added and updated important regulatory functionalities for India, where a new Goods and Services Tax (GST) is driving sweeping business changes and a strong move to the cloud. Dynamics 365’s strong international accounting, tax, and operations capabilities along with Microsoft’s strong local presence make Microsoft a natural choice for businesses seeking a digital transformation partner. Fixed asset depreciation, Value-added tax (VAT), Withholding tax, Customs Duty and India GST are all supported, with additional Retail regulatory functionality currently in public preview. Customers can now easily configure India GST in the Global Tax Engine without the painful application changes required by many other systems.
3. Vendor Collaboration – A new vendor portal provides vendors with self-service capabilities to view and selectively maintain their own company information, such as contact information, business identification data, procurement categories, and certifications. Microsoft also enhanced vendor onboarding with a new workflow-supported process which can facilitate the addition of new vendors using invite-based registration and signup, further improving employee productivity. In addition to onboarding and profile maintenance, Microsoft included support for vendors to view and respond to RFQs with the ability to receive and upload attachments. The collaborative interface allows the vendor to receive information about the awarded or lost bids. In public sector configurations, RFQs can now be published and exported as entities via data management. This enables the data to be consumed and exposed in a customer-hosted public website.
4. End-to-End Process Integration – In July, Microsoft introduced Prospect to Cash integration for Microsoft Dynamics 365, leveraging the Microsoft Common Data Service (CDS) to enable deeper business processes integration across Dynamics 365 applications and thereby transform operations. With its latest update, companies can now maintain data synchronization of processes between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations using data integration templates without a third-party data integration tool. These enhancements enable additional end-to-end business process integrations focusing on customer, quote, sales order, invoice, and order fulfillment data. More information about the supported processes integration scenarios can be found here.
5. Implementation efficiency – To further improve the implementation experience for customers, Microsoft has enabled a new capability to create legal entities based on configuration data from an existing legal entity, to drastically shorten setup time for new legal entities. In addition, Microsoft continues to make progress towards a full extension-based customization model to improve serviceability. In this release, Microsoft has enabled a ‘soft-seal’ mode for the application functionality, which will help customers and partners to recognize un-desirable customization development patterns as warnings during compilation.

The top five highlights above represent just a few of the highlights of the December service update for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (application version 7.3). A detailed overview of all updates can be found here in Microsoft’s online documentation.

Best regards,

Robbie Morrison
Chief Solution Strategist, Velosio

About Robbie
Robbie Morrison has spent nearly 20 years helping customers build and deploy elegant technology and business solutions. From start-ups to enterprise-class organizations worldwide, his knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem and products helps Velosio customers maximize ROI on technology investments.

Today, Robbie serves Velosio customers in his role as Chief Solution Strategist where he provides thought leadership and manages the development of B2B solutions. Robbie received his MBA from the University of Georgia, Terry College of Business.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbiemorrison