Category Archives: Dynamics 365 For Operations

Additional “Settlement” type transactions on Customer and Vendor transactions page in D365 Finance – Why do you see these and how to fix it?

Additional “Settlement” type transactions on Customer and Vendor transactions page in D365 Finance – Why do you see these and how to fix it?

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , • 1 Comment

Here is a quick tip for you all if you ever see additional transaction entries on the Customer or Vendor transaction page with Transaction type = Settlement offsetting each other, when you settle and post a customer payment for an invoice. These additional entries looks something like below.

Let us understand why the system creates these additional transactions.

I have seen in some cases, customers tend to set “Fixed value” for one or more of their financial dimensions, for the Trade AR or AP ledger accounts. They do this to zero-fill a dimension that is not required or in some cases they set it to a fixed value intentionally, for example if Legal entity is a financial dimension, they tend to set this to have a fixed value. Screenshot below shows an example.

With this configuration, when you post the customer invoice transaction, the Legal entity financial dimension uses the Fixed value “USSI” on the AR line of the invoice voucher. See screenshot below.

When you go to settle and post the customer payment for this invoice, here is what the system will do. Since you are doing the cash application(Payment recording) and invoice settlement at the same time, the payment’s accounting entry is not created until the Settlement process is complete behind the scenes. Since the settlement happens first, it basically reconstructs the accounting entry of the payment. It finds the AR main account from the customer posting profile and dimensions are derived from the customer transaction (Payment journal). Since Legal entity is setup as Fixed value dimension and there is no source of this dimension when recording the payment, the system basically determines to create adjusting entries (Debit and credit the same account), since the invoice was posted with fixed legal entity dimension, but the reconstructed payment entry did not have any dimension due to fixed dimension setup(This part is a little technical :)) The settlement process creates this additional entry with the fixed dimension and does not roll back the accounting. This is a standard D365 F behavior.

So, how do you setup the system so that it does not create those 2 additional settlement type entries? There 3 options.

  1. You can setup the dimension which is setup for Fixed value on the Customer record. In many cases this may not be well suited.
  2. You can setup the financial dimension on the payment journal configuration itself. This is the option I prefer.

As a 3rd option, you can chose to enter the financial dimension manually on the payment journal line. Not very ideal option!

With the option 2 setup above, if I post a customer payment with settlement of an invoice now, system will NOT create those additional entries on the customer transaction. See screenshot below.

That’s it about this quick tip. Till next time!!!!

Dual Write feature for D365 F&O is now generally available – Great news for Dynamics 365 customers and prospects!!

Dual Write feature for D365 F&O is now generally available – Great news for Dynamics 365 customers and prospects!!

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , , , , • Leave a comment

If you are in the Dynamics space, you probably know the investments Microsoft has been making in Common Data Service (Aka CDS) platform. All business applications under the Dynamics 365 umbrella are connected to a CDS environment by default and they make data available directly CDS in real time, except Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Also known as F&O). There was never an option to connect an F&O environment directly to a CDS environment until the release of Platform update 32. (Version 10.0.8).

The CDS platform earlier did provide options to configure connections sets and run data integration projects to connect a F&O environment to a CDS environment. This was actually available in early 2017. Refer to my earlier blog post where I explained how CDS, Data integration projects, connection sets etc. worked back then.

Even though the CDS platform allowed to connect an F&O environment to CDS using connection sets, data projects etc. earlier, the configurations were rather confusing(somewhat complex), time consuming and always felt like a disjoint admin process. Dual Write is the evolution of the CDS integration features such as Connection sets, Data integration projects and this is now natively built into the F&O app. The underlying complexity still exists, but Microsoft has now moved all the heavy lifting to happen behind the scenes and provided a intuitive , clean user interface, that is built within F&O app.

In simple terms, Dual Write is a mechanism to sync D365 F&O Data with CDS and vise-versa, which allows customers using other popular D365 apps such as D365 for Customer engagement(Sales/CRM) to connect and share data between with D365 F&O seamlessly, right out of the box. For example, Without Dual write, your customer accounts data in D365 CE/Sales are not readily available in D365 F&O for you to create and fulfil, orders or to do invoice. Dual write solves this problem and makes required data available across the D365 apps using the power of CDS, so that you can use the respective D365 apps to do what they do best and do not worry about the underlying data to be in sync. With Dual write the D365 F&O data is is very tightly coupled and is in near real time sync with CDS always, for the entities you enable for syncing. This also provides bi-directional data sync.

Starting the Platform Update 33 (Version 10.0.9) of D365 F&O, the Dual write feature is now a built-in embedded experience within the data management workspace of F&O. This means your administrators or integration folks do not have to login to a CDS environment to configure a dozen things to sync data 🙂

Microsoft ships several out of the box entity maps between F&O and CDS that you can use right of out of the gate. You can also tweak the out of the mapping to suite your needs. It does not stop there!! If you have custom data fields or custom entities built for your implementation, you can use those as well.

You should see a new Tile named “Dual Write” under Data Management workspace if you have deployed 10.0.9 deployed.

Make sure you have the CDS environment deployed and ready under Power Platform admin center. For my testing purposes, I have also deployed sample data in my CDS environment, so that I can validate the data sync between F&O and CDS.

Before you can link a F&O environment to CDS, you need to make sure the following configurations are in place.

  1. Make sure you have version 10.0.9 installed in the F&O environment.
  2. Install Dual Write Core solution from App Source in your CDS environment and enable the dual write entity map solution.
  3. Grant required accesses so that CDS and F&O can connect to each other.
  4. You can see the detailed documentation here.

Now you have to link the F&O environment to a CDS environment and enable entities for dual-write. From the Data management workspace of F&O, go to Dual-write and click “New link to environment“.

You should see the list of CDS environments available in there. Select the one you want to use and click Next.

Select the legal entities you want to connect to CDS and click Next.

If all your required configurations and installs are correct, the health check of CDS connection should succeed and you should be able to proceed with viewing and enabling entity maps and turn them ON for sync with CDS.

I just wanted to share my initial thoughts and excitement, now that Dual write is generally available. Customers who are already using D365 F&O and D365 Customer engagement apps should look at leveraging this to sync data between the applications at all stages of the Prospect to Cash scenario.

I am in the process of fully testing and validating this and I can’t wait to share my test results and additional details on the feature here soon.

More to come soon!! Stay tuned.

How “Business Events” feature in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations enables you take optimum advantage of Microsoft power platform(Microsoft Flow)

How “Business Events” feature in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations enables you take optimum advantage of Microsoft power platform(Microsoft Flow)

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

One Version(Evergreen Application), Power Platform, AI, Mixed reality, Virtual agent (BOT), Machine learning, IoT. These are buzzwords that are not uncommon to hear these days, when you talk of any business application.

The landscape of ERP and business applications has changed significantly, faster than we all expected. If you really think about it, the core fundamentals of business process requirements are not changing that much, but how you implement and accomplish those business process automation is certainly changing in a big way. No code, Low code app building service like Microsoft PowerApps, business process workflow automation service like Microsoft Flow and data insights building service like Microsoft Power BI are big components of it.

These different services are part of the Microsoft Power Platform and these combined with features like AI builder, Portals and services like Common Data Service, Azure Data Lak etc. makes the overall Microsoft Business Applications platform one of the best business applications platform for companies of any size.

Today in this post, I wanted to pick on one of the newest features in Dynamics 365 for F&O called “Business Events” and explain my experience with it with a very simple business scenario.

So What are business events?

Business Events in D365 F&O is a mechanism which lets external systems receive notifications from D365 F&O. The external systems can then perform additional business actions in response to the business events.

When a business process such as a Purchase Order confirmation, Sales order invoice, payment posting or even a workflow approval is initiated, a business event automatically fires up and generates a data payload. Endpoint such as Microsoft Flow, Azure Service bus can subscribe to these business events and get the payload information to trigger additional automated actions, both within D365 F&O as well as in external systems.

There are several business events that are shipped out of the box with the standard D365 F&O, and you can always customize and create custom business events that are suitable for you. The main objective is to notify service end points and there by external systems when a certain business process is completed within D365 F&O, so that you can carry out further tasks automatically. Screenshot below shows the business event catalog.

To illustrate how this functionality works, I took a very simple requirement. I wanted to notify the requester of a purchase order when the items arrive at the warehouse, so that they can go and collect those.

I built a Microsoft Flow which triggers when a “Purchase order received” business event gets fired up. My flow listens to this business event and gets additional information about the requester and purchase order from D365 F&O and then does the following things automatically.

  1. Sends the requester an email. I used outlook for this.
  2. Sends the requester a text message on phone. I used Twillo for this.
  3. Posts a IM message in Microsoft Teams as a Flow BOT.

Screenshot below shows the Microsoft flow configuration.

I will now go ahead and create a Purchase Request and Purchase Order with me as the Requester and will receive the items on the PO.

Purchase Order Confirmed
PO Requester on PO Header
Requester Contact Info

Let us now go ahead and receive the goods and post the goods receipt note/product receipt document.

As as soon the Product receipt for posted, the business event was fired up in D365 F&O and Microsoft Flow was able to listen to those and automate the intended actions of notifying the requester via email, text and Teams IM message.

Screenshot below shows my flow was run successfully and also the different notifications i got automatically on my email, cell phone text and IM on Microsoft Teams.

Flow run
Microsoft Team BOT notification
Microsoft Team BOT notification
Email Notification
Text Notification

Now, that illustration was a very simple business requirement and scenario. I could take this further and automate complex task automation such as,

  1. Update a data record in F&O.
  2. Create new data in F&O.
  3. Initiate Microsoft Flow approvals for all workflow item approvals of F&O for richer email approval experience.
  4. Connect to other business apps such as SharePoint, Common Data Service, Dynamics 365 for Sales and more to automate further business tasks.
  5. Notify customer when their order is shipped with Tracking info
  6. And more…

I was able to do these without writing a single line of code. That is the Power of the Microsoft Power Platform. The amount of process and task automation you can do with the Power Platform are endless.

That’s it for now and we will take a look at a more complex scenario next time involving a workflow approval. Till next time!!!

Configure Currency exchange rate providers and import exchange rates automatically in Dynamics 365 for Finance and operations

Configure Currency exchange rate providers and import exchange rates automatically in Dynamics 365 for Finance and operations

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations provides integration with 3 exchange rate providers out of the box.

  1. Central Bank of Russian Federation
  2. Central Bank of Europe
  3. OANDA

Depending on the country of your operations or your preference, you can use any of these providers to import currency exchange rates directly into Dynamics 365. Usually, OANDA is the widely used and most trusted exchange rate provider.

The configuration of these is pretty simple and straightforward. The integration with Central bank of Russian Federation and Central bank of Europe does not require you to setup an API key within Dynamics 365, where as for OANDA, you will need to get the API key from OANDA and set it up in Dynamics 365. OANDA also lets you do more flexible setups, such as how many decimal places you want to use, what quote type you want to use.

Lets take a quick look at how the process for setting these up and importing the exchange rates looks like.

The first thing is to setup the Currency exchange rate providers within Dynamics 365. You can do this under General Ledger > Currencies > Configure exchange rate providers form.

Exchange Rate Providers

Exchange Rate Providers Config

If you look at the default key configurations for the Central Bank of Russian Federation and Central Bank of Europe, there are pre-populated by Dynamics 365 with the Key values, which are basically the service endpoint (XML files). Screenshot below shows the configs.

Central Bank of Russian Federation

Central Bank of Europe

To demonstrate the feature, i have created 3 separate Exchange rate types for the 3 different providers.

Exchange Rate Types

Now that the exchange rate providers and exchange rate types are setup, lets ee how the import of the exchange rate works. I will first do it for the Central Bank of Russian Federation and Central Bank of Europe and then i will do the setup for OANDA feed, since that involves some additional steps.

There are 2 options of importing the exchange rates. You can trigger the import manually every time you require or you can set the process to run in batch at specified recurring intervals.

  • To initiate the import, navigate to General Ledger > Currencies > Import currency exchange rates.
  • On this screen, you can select the Exchange rate type into which you want to import the exchange rates.
  • Then select the Exchange rate provider (CBRF, CBE or OANDA)
  • You can import “As of today’s date” or you can specify a date range as well (From date and To date)
  • If you using the Central Bank of Russian Federation as the exchange rate provider, you can tell the system to automatically create the currency pairs. This is nice !
  • You can chose if you want to override existing rates also.

CBRF Import

  • Here you can setup the import process to run automatically in the background(batch) at specified recurring time intervals)

Batch Import

  • After you click OK, the import process will start and you will get a confirmation message telling what was imported.

Import Confirmation Message

  • If you are using the Central Bank of Europe as the exchange rate provider, you can additionally tell the system to prevent import on national holiday.

CBE Import

  • After the import process is complete, you will find your exchange rates in the Exchange table.

Exchange Rate Imported

  • For OANDA as your exchange rate provider, you will do some additional setup. First you will need to get a API key from OANDA. If you have a paid subscription with OANDA, you will already have a API key for exchange rates. But to test, you can just start a 30 days free trial by simply specifying your email ID. You will receive the API key in your email.

OANDA Signup1

OANDA Signup2

OANDA Signup3

  • One you have the API key from OANDA, you will need to set it up under the Exchange rate service provider configuration.

Setup API Key on Provider

  • With this setup, You are all set!!. Now the import process for OANDA is the same as we saw above for CBRF and CBE. Only thing you need to note is, with OANDA, you will need to create the currency pairs depending on how many currencies your organization operates in.
  • You can verify that the exchange rates are imported.

OANDA Import

  • You can see below that i had created 3 currency pairs (USD to INR, USD to EUR and USD to GBP) and the import process imported the corresponding exchange rates.

OANDA Imported

OANDA ER

That’s it for this post..

 

Data import related error when importing Project work breakdown structure – Draft entity in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations

Data import related error when importing Project work breakdown structure – Draft entity in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations

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Here is a quick tip for an error related to data import of Project work breakdown structure – Draft entity using the Data Management framework  in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations.

If you are trying to import the Project work breakdown structure – Draft entity(ProjProjectWBSDraftEntity) and you are getting the error below, then follow the steps below to get around this issue.

Results. Field ‘Project category’ must be filled in.
Results. Matching record for the read only data source ‘ProjPlanVersionDetail’ does not exist

WBS Draft Import Error

Steps to Work around this error:

  1. Navigate to Project Management and Accounting > Setup > Projects > Work breakdown structure templates.
  2. Create  a new record
  3. Enter a  Name and Description
  4. Make sure the Active checkbox is marked.
  5. Click OK.
  6. That’s it. You do not need to create the details under the WBS template.

WBS Template

With this default WBS template record in place, if you try to import the roject work breakdown structure – Draft entity, system will import the data just fine.

NOTE: This is an issue in the July 2017 release with Platform update 12 and I have not validated this in the Spring release yet. To me, it looks like a glitch/bug in the DMF entity that needs to be reported to Microsoft. But i just wanted to share this info in case any of you are dealing with this issue and trying to find a solution.

Regards,

Sandeep

Advanced Vendor Collaboration and Vendor Onboarding in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition

Advanced Vendor Collaboration and Vendor Onboarding in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition

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Hello Everyone,

It has been quite sometime i have not written here. Last few months were very busy with several things and that did not allow any time to spend on blogging. I finally managed to get some time here!!

In one of my earlier posts, I elaborated some of the functionalities of the Vendor collaboration/Vendor self-service feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations – Enterprise Edition and what was coming in future releases. With the Fall release (Version 7.3), Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has much more to offer to automate vendor self-service and collaboration, specifically around the vendor user and organization onboarding aspects.

In this post, lets take a look at some of those new features, specifically in the vendor onboarding area.

The diagram  below shows an overall representation of how the data flows from a Prospective Vendor to an Approved vendor in D365FO.

Vendor Onboarding

Let’s now dig into some of the finer details of the processes and steps underneath each of these steps in the vendor onboarding process.

Prospective Vendor shows interest to become a potential vendor: Before an organization or individual wants to become a vendor for your organization, they are referred as “Prospective Vendors”. They can apply to be a vendor for your organization either via a website you may have, with anonymous access, or they can apply via a contact at your organization. If they come in through your website, you can have an OData integration with D365FO, to send the prospective vendor’s data into D365FO. Alternately, you can also use Data Management Framework to import the prospective vendor data periodically into D365FO.

Prospective Vendors DMF Upload

Prospective Vendors Import

After the initial basic data for the perspective vendor comes into D365, it will appear in Prospective Vendors registration under Procurement & Sourcing > Vendor collaboration requests.

Prospective Vendor User requests

Procurement Personnel from your organization reviews the details and initiates the vendor invitation process:

Before a procurement personnel from your organization reviews these requests to initiate the vendor invitation process, lets take a look at the workflow that is set up behind the scenes to do all the heavy lifting.

Under System Administration > Workflow > User Workflows, you can set up workflows for adding, modifying or inactivation of a new prospective vendor/existing vendor user. For a new prospective vendor user, the workflow provides your various options to fully control the new user provisioning in Azure AD and new user creation in D365FO.

Take a look at the screenshot below which shows this workflow.

User request workflow Create

Vendor User request workflowTo initiate the invitation process for the new prospective vendor, the procurement personnel will select the required user and review the details. If they decide to proceed with initiating the invitation process, they click the Invite User button.

At this point, the Processing status of the vendor registration request changes to “User requested“. This means a request for setting up a new user account in Azure AD and in D365FO has been initiated in the workflow.

Invite Vendor User

As soon as the user creation request is creation, the personnel setup in the workflow for this will get notified and will process the request further. If you notice the screenshot of the workflow above, the first step in our workflow is to review and approve the user request even before the Azure AD and D365FO user accounts are created.

The Personnel responsible goes into the user request and reviews the details to approve it.

Approve User request

The next step in the workflow is to set up the B2B user account in Azure AD. You can use the manual task within the workflow and assign it to the required person, who then can download the external user setup CSV file for import within Azure AD.

Manually Export User Invitatio File

Alternately, you can use the automated task for provisioning the Azure AD B2B user account.If you chose to use the automated task, you need to make sure to complete the below setups.

  • Register the D365FO app within Azure AD in Azure portal.
  • Complete the required setup for the API permissions for Microsoft Graph for the D365FO app. The automated task of the user setup workflow will invoke this to provision the user account in Azure AD.
  • Setup the Client ID, Application Keys within D365FO B2B invitation configuration page of D365FO.

App Registration

With the above setup done, the automated task will provision the Azure AD user for the vendor user automatically. In the next step of the user setup workflow, you can set up automated tasks for provisioning the user account within D365FO and also send the email notification to the vendor with a URL link to D365 for signup and registration. You can set up an email template and use (%portalURL%) placeholder in the email message, which will automatically include the URL of D365FO, when it sends the email notification to the vendor.

In this demo, the prospective vendor i added was John Smith whose email id was schaudhury@velosio.com. Since i had done all the setups above, ( (John Smith, the vendor) got the email notification with a URL for sign up.

Email Invite

Prospective vendor signs up to D365 and completes registration Wizard:

Now, it is time for the prospective vendor to sign up and complete the registration wizard and provide additional information about their organization.

When the vendor logs in to D365 by clicking the URL in the email invite, they are directly taken to a registration wizard, which appears as shown in screenshot below.

John Smith Vendor logs in to Portal for registration

The vendor selects the Country/region first in which they operate in. In this case , i selected USA.

Vendor Selects Country

On the next few screens, vendor enters their business information and all necessary details as shown in screenshots below.

Vendor Enters their information

Vendor Enters more info about contact person

Vendor Enters business information6

You can also configure and assign predefined questionnaire and assign it to the vendor to answer and you also let them select procurement catalog.

New Vendor request created in D365 for review and approval:When done, the vendor submits all the information at the end of the wizard. Registration submitted

This create the new vendor request in D365FO, which will then be reviewed and approved by a procurement or AP person of your organization. Procurement personnel can navigate to Procurement and Sourcing > Vendor collaboration > Vendor requests to see these.

New Vendor Request Created

New Vendor Details

New Vendor Details1

New vendor details reviewed and approved:

The Procurement personnel then completes the review process of the new vendor request and upon confirmation, the new vendor record is automatically setup in the Vendor master. After that, the vendor can have full access to the vendor collaboration portal and they can communicate with your organization in real time on purchase orders, invoices, consignment inventory, RFQs and responses, bidding and more.

vendor Review completed

That essentially completes the overall vendor onboarding process in D365FO. Stay tuned for more on this.

Regards,

Sandeep

My favorite features from July 2017 update of Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations – Enterprise Edition

My favorite features from July 2017 update of Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations – Enterprise Edition

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

One of the most awaited releases of Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations is now available (The July 2017 and Platform Update 8). Lot of new capabilities and exciting new features across all the functional modules and quite a few technology stack improvements!!In this post, I will highlight some of the most important new features that are my favorites so far, that I think are going to helpful for customers in big time.

First thing first! Starting with the July release, there is a change in the naming of the Dynamics 365 apps . Earlier we had “Dynamics 365 For Operations”, which basically represented the Enterprise edition of Dynamics 365 and “Dynamics 365 For Financials’ which represented the Business edition targeted for SMB customers.

Starting with the July release, the naming will be as below.

Dynamics 365 For Operations => Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations – Enterprise Edition (For Enterprise Customers)

Dynamics 365 For Financials => Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations – Business Edition  (Suitable For SMB Customers)

You should notice this name changes, when you login to the new version.

Default Landing Page

Here are some of my personal favorite features and functionality fro this latest update of Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations.

Embedded PowerBI and Analytical Workspaces for all D365FO licensed users:

Microsoft Power BI is the backbone of Dynamics 365 for delivering critical business intelligence to all users of an organization with rich interactive visuals, dashboards and reports, with appropriate drill downs, data filter options etc. When Dynamics 365 was first released, users had the option of consuming preconfigured or customized Power BI dashboards and reports from their PowerBI online workspaces right into their workspaces within Dynamics 365. This is a great capability and allowed users to mash up data from Dynamics 365 or even from external data sources and then see them all together right on their workspaces. However, this required every users to have at least a free PowerBI.com subscription to be able to do this.

With the July 2017 update, Power BI Embedded services are integrated into Dynamics 365. Embedded Power BI is a Microsoft Azure Service that allows to embed the dashboards and reports directly into Operations workspaces of Dynamics 365. Embedded Power BI is an ideal way of presenting near real time data insights, with Direct Query to the Entity Story (Data warehouse for Dynamics 365). These embedded dashboards and reports are available for all users with the base license of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and does not necessarily require the user to have a PowerBI.com subscription.

The diagram below shows the key difference between the PowerBI Online and PowerBI Embedded services.

Power-BI-Embedded-Overview

The good news is, Microsoft has already shipped several out of the box PowerBI asset files within Life Cycle Service starting with the July 2017 release, which can be simply included in the Dynamics 365 deployment options to get instant access to readily available dashboards and reports across all major business areas. Below are some of the sample examples of these embedded Power BI dashboards and workspaces in Dynamics 365.

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Prospect to Cash Integration between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations using Common Data Services:

This one is a HUGE step forward!! Since Dynamics 365 launched back in February 2016, the Primary objective and goal for Microsoft was to combine the best of Dynamics CRM and ERP worlds and provide a unified experience to end users, so that they can advantage of best of breed functionalities within the Modular apps for Sales and Financials & Operations and still be able to integrate the data flow between these apps seamlessly to get a 360 degree view of their business. We have seen steps Microsoft has taken in last several months to get the Common Data Service (Azure Public Cloud data storage) Platform ready for prime time along with the supporting surrounding services such as Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. With the July release, these all are coming together as a first significant step towards truly unifying the CRM and ERP worlds. This is the beginning of the departure from the traditional custom 3rd party integrations between CRM and ERP.

The following key scenarios are supported currently with this integrations, primarily in the Supply Chain side. More to come in future. I have not got chance to test this end to end yet. Will share some details when I am able to test it in coming weeks.

  • Maintain accounts in Dynamics 365 for Sales and sync them to Finance and Operations as customers.
  • Maintain contacts in Dynamics 365 for Sales and sync them to Finance and Operations.
  • Maintain products in Finance and Operations and sync them to Dynamics 365 for Sales.
  • Create quotes in Dynamics 365 for Sales and sync them to Finance and Operations.
  • Generate sales orders in Dynamics 365 for Sales for existing products and sync them to Finance and Operations.

  • Generate invoices in Finance and Operations and sync them to Dynamics 365 for Sales.

Mobile Apps/Workspaces:

Mobile workspaces/apps were introduced with the Update 3 release of Dynamics 365. Since then, these workspaces have been evolving and Microsoft continues to deliver more and more mobile workspaces covering various mobile business process scenarios. Some of the key mobile workspaces that were released in the July 2017 update are as below.

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The highlight of these workspaces is the mobile app for Project Timesheet Entry and the Expense Management app. I provided my views on the preview version of these mobile workspaces in my earlier post. These workspaces have added significant amount of new features with the July 2017 release. The Expense management workspace now support end to end expense management from receipt capture, new expense report creation, submission, expense approvals and expense status inquiry and so on. Below are some screenshots of the mobile workspaces released in the July Update.

Employee Expenses Management and Reimbursement related enhancements:

There are several new features and usability enhancements that are introduced for Employee Expenses management in the July Update. From all these features and enhancement, my favorites are as below.

  • Dedicated Expense management workspace

Expense Workspace

  • Grouping of vendor invoices for different expense lines of an expense report, as opposed to create separate vendor invoices for each expense line, for reimbursement. This was one of the most talked about concerns in the earlier version (AX 2012), since it was causing problems creating individual invoices for each expense lines and there by causing issues in Check printing etc. Now with this release, you can optionally group all expense lines with the same method of payment to post as grouped vendor invoice instead of individual invoices. If you enable the grouping of vendor invoices, this functionality basically posts all the expenses of the expense report with same payment method on the recent transaction date from the list of expense lines.

  • Several usability enhancements in some key screens. Also, Employees can now track payment information for their expense reimbursements. Nice and very useful functionality, as this is one point that customers usually ask and they used to customize it in AX 2012.

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OCR interface for capturing vendor invoices automatically:

One of the most common asks from customers in the AP invoicing area is the functionality of OCR and vendor invoice automation. Organizations often offload the paper invoice processing to 3rd party OCR reader service providers. These service providers provide machine readable metadata for the invoice along with scanned imaged the invoice headers and lines. In the July 2017 release, the solution/standard interface to read these invoice metadata and invoice scanned attachments is in-built into the AP invoice process of Dynamics 365. 3rd party OCR service provider systems will be able to send metadata feed for invoices directly to D365FO.

This new functionality basically provides the following.

  • Out of the data entities invoice header, invoice lines, and invoice attachments.
  • Exception processing for invoices. A frontend UI for users to make it easy to track failed invoice imports.
  • A side by side invoice attachment viewer to imported invoices and exceptions.

Vendor Invoice

PowerBI reporting with Financial Dimensions:

This feature will be available with July 2017 Update and you will also need to have the most recent Platform update of Dynamics 365, which is Platform Update 8. This features let’s the power users or the BI report creators to add financials dimensions to the readily available aggregated measurements or custom built aggregated measurements in the Entity store.

With that, when the Entity store is periodically updated/refreshed, the financial dimension information of all the General ledger transactions will automatically be included in it. Then you can use those aggregated measurements to write joins, queries within Power BI to create any sort of financial report/dashboard within Power BI itself. Screenshot below shows just an example.

Publish financial reports from Dynamics 365 to SharePoint:

In the earlier versions/releases, you could generate financials reports and export/save it to your local computer. With the July 2017 release, you can now save financial reports directly to a SharePoint document library. The benefit of this is, you can setup alerts within SharePoint to notify you when new reports are available.

Note: I don’t have SharePoint configured in the demo environment, so not able to show the full experience.

FInancials Statement to Sharepoint

You could also extend this further and write a Microsoft Flow, to automatically send the reports directly to your inbox from SharePoint. Endless possibilities !!

Tools for upgrade from AX 2012 or AX 2009 to Dynamics 365:

You can upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition. The complete Dynamics AX 2012 database can be brought forward, and your AX 2012 codebase can be upgraded to Finance and Operations. You can migrate from Dynamics AX 2009 to Finance and Operations via a migration toolset to bring forward master data and opening balances. It would be interesting to test these upgrade experiences and tools as opportunity comes !! 

The Upgrade is now more predictable, which reduces the overall cost of the upgrade process. Upgrade starts with an automated analysis phase, which defines the preparation tasks required to reduce the time and cost to upgrade, as well as the ongoing future cost of Finance and Operations. Post upgrade, an automated validation phase provides statistics and metrics on the success of the upgrade process. The validation details can be used to quickly assess the state of the upgrade, so you can continue with functional testing and sign off.

In Finance and Operations there are no expensive upgrades needed to stay current and take advantage of continuous innovation. You can update to the latest versions of the product with a click of a button.

Support for Hybrid Cloud (Cloud + Edge) and Op-premise (Local Business Data) Deployment scenarios:

In one of my earlier posts, I explained some details about the 3 different deployment options that Dynamics 365 is going to provide. Starting with the July 2017 Update, both these deployment options are available. Customers who are keen on having an On-premise deployment of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations to capitalize on their existing infrastructure investments or due to data security and compliance requirements, will have the option to deploy D365FO in Hybrid as well as On-Premise model.

d365-opr-deployment-scenarios

Microsoft published system requirements documentation explaining the detailed system requirements for an On-premise deployment of D365FO. You can find the information at this URL

There was system requirements document also that Microsoft published. See URL below.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55496

I will share more info about this in future as we move with some testing and some actual deployments for customers.

That was a long enough post :). There are several other features and functionalities across technology stack, Retail and manufacturing modules, that I have not highlighted here in this post. There is a lot to explore and learn!!!

Stay tuned and stay current !! Till next time..

Regards, Sandeep

Powerful Mobile Workspaces/Apps in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations, for Android and iOS, Get more done on the Go!

Powerful Mobile Workspaces/Apps in Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations, for Android and iOS, Get more done on the Go!

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , • 3 Comments

Starting with the Update 3 release of Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations (I will refer this as D365FO from here on), Microsoft introduced the concept of “Mobile Workspaces” for D365FO. This works across all major mobile platforms, i.e. Android, iOS and Windows. The idea behind the mobile workspaces is to create and enable business process experiences for users of D365FO on mobile devices of any form factor, with purpose-built workspaces for various functions such as, Expense entry, Expense approval, timesheet entry, timesheet approval, invoices approval and more. All these workspaces are contained within one app, that you can download from Google Play Store or Apple Appstore. These are NOT individual mobile apps to address specific business process functions.

One of the key advantages of these workspaces is that, these are more configurable, that power users of an organization can create , instead of requiring heavy development skills (You would need to have basic level of understanding of the technical concepts of D365FO). I explained these mobile workspaces in one of my earlier blog posts here.

Today, I was able to use the preview version of ‘Expense Management Mobile Workspace” on my android phone and found it phenomenally usefully. Mobile capabilities in an ERP that is really meaningful and easy to use, FINALLY !!!

Here is a summary of my experience of using these mobile workspaces/apps.

One of the most important features that everyone needs in an expense reporting mobile app is the ability to easily enter expenses and easily capture receipts and upload them to the expense reports. The Mobile workspace addresses this in a very neat manner. This preview version of the app that I was able to play with, does both of these functions seamlessly in a very convenient way.

  • Easy to use interface. Nice use of the real estate.
  • Clean UI with minimal and key functions
  • Works lightening fast, Almost instantaneous.!!!

You can download the app for Dynamics 365 for Operations here.

Android

IOS

Login to the app and view all available workspaces. For example, I have a few workspaces in my environment, as seen in screenshot below.

Home Screen Login

Quick Receipt Capture using Mobile App. You can take a photo or import an image from gallery and see receipts immediately in self-service workspace.

Capture Receipts

ESS Workspace

Uploaded Receipts Available in ESS

Enter Quick Expense lines using the mobile app and see the expense line instantaneously in Expense reports in self-service workspace.

Quick Expense Entry

Quick Expense Entry available in ESS

The Mobile workspace and app for D365FO supports Offline capabilities also. You can enter your time and expenses and upload receipts when you are not connected or even when in airplane mode. The changes will sync immediately when you come back online. I was able to test this too and it worked flawlessly!!

This was just a preview version of the Expense management workspace that I tested. When the Spring release 2017 is available for download in next few days, the full-fledged app/workspace  will be available, which will have a lot more capabilities such as  below.

  1. Create and submit expense reports using the app for reimbursement.
  2. Create expense report details such as expense itemization, guest expense split as per policy and more.
  3. Attach credit card transactions for expense reporting.
  4. Expense policies validated in real-time within the app.
  5. Review and approve expense reports in the app.

Along with this, there will be several out of the box mobile capabilities for Project Time Entry (I was able to test the preview version of this app and it worked great too), Project time approval, Invoice approvals, Sales Orders management etc. and the list is going grow soon.

Stay tuned for the next post on my analysis of the Spring 2017 release of Dynamics 365 For Finance and Operations, which should be available for download in next few days.

Till next time !!

Manage your Project Resources efficiently with Resource request workflow in Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Operations

Manage your Project Resources efficiently with Resource request workflow in Microsoft Dynamics 365 For Operations

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 For Operations • Leave a comment

In some of my earlier posts, I discussed about the various capabilities of the Project resource management feature of Dynamics 365 For Operations and how it can help Professional Services firms manage their project resources, to ensure optimum resource utilization, and drive better project profitability, by deploying the right people at the right time in the project..

Continuing the conversation the this topic, I will discuss about some of the additional features that you can take advantage of, to manage your central pool of project resources even more efficiently. Your Project managers can better coordinate with Resource Managers, for finding and deploying the right resources by having visibility into resource’s capability and availability in real time.

Resources

In Dynamics 365 For Operations, you can optionally enable the Resource request workflow. When you enable the workflow, project managers can create and submit requests for resources whom they want for their projects. The Workflow can be configured to assign the resource requests to the required Resource Managers. Let us see in the few screenshots below, how this experience looks like for the Project Managers and Resource Managers.

Resource Request approval Workflow :

I have a very simple workflow setup, where the project resource request will be assigned to a designated Resource Manager of the Organization.

Workflow

Project Manager creates Project Team and submits request for resources: The Project managers can create the Project Team, where they can select available resources and submit the request for approval of the resources. The project manager requires 2 Software developers for this project. He is able to view the Resource pool of developers and testers and is able to view their availabilities.

Developers

The project manager then submits the request for these resources by soft booking (Tentative booking) them on the project.

Create Resource request

After the resource request is submitted, notice that the indicator shows that these resources have been requested.

Resource Requested

Resource Manager gets notified and reviews the resource request and approves the request:

Under My Resource Requests page, the resource manager gets to see all the resource requests where they can review the requests and approve/reject them. The resource manager also gets to see the other available resources and their current reservation details, in case they want to refer to those information. They can also see the details of resource request by clicking the Request details button.

Resource Approval

At this point, the Resource Manager approves the request and as soon as this is done, the resources will be automatically hard booked (Committed/booked to the project) and can be assigned to Tasks of the project further.

Developers Booked

That was a quick post about the new Resource request workflow feature for better project resource management in Dynamics 365 for Operations. Keep exploring !!

-Sandeep Chaudhury

Review of new features for Project Management and Accounting in Dynamics 365 For Operations

Review of new features for Project Management and Accounting in Dynamics 365 For Operations

Posted on by • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 For Operations, New Microsoft Dynamics AX, Professional Services, PSA • Tagged , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Dynamics 365 For Operations is a cloud based SaaS service, which provides rich features and functionalities to manage simple to complex business processes across all major industry verticals, such as Manufacturing, Professional Services, Financial Services, Retail, Distribution and more. It provides very rich features and functionality for project management and accounting for the professional services industry. In today’s post, we will review some of the key new features and enhancements that were released for project management and accounting, in Dynamics 365 for Operations (Update 3 released on NOV 1st 2016).

Let us review and discuss these new features in the order of what I think their significance would  be for customers.

Dedicated PowerBI Content Pack for Project Management and Accounting Reports and Dashboards:

The is the biggest enhancement /new  feature under Project Management and accounting in Dynamics 365 For Operations. Customers will now get access to  preconfigured PowerBI Content pack that comes out of the box and provides key project management and accounting related dashboards and KPIs that are readily available for consumption . This content pack offers the following dashboards and reports. (Note: You can get access to the .pbix PowerBI files via the shared asset library in Life Cycle Services)

Projects Overview Dashboard: Shows overview of projects by customers, budget performance and revenue and provides a bird’s eye overview of the projects so that you can promptly review projects that are either exceeding budget, underperforming in revenue to take actions.

proj-db

Project Cost and Revenue Details Dashboard: These 2 dashboards enables you to view the project cost and revenue trends easily by customer and various other classifications and also shows actual bs budget comparisons.

proj-cost

proj-rev

Earned Value Management: Earned value management(EVM) is one of the key project health and success measuring criteria for professional services firms. Traditionally, in the earlier version of Dynamics AX, there was no dashboards/KPIs available out of the box that shows EVM and associated KPIs such as Cost Performance Index(CPI) or Schedule Performance Index (SPI), even though you could develop or customize reports and dashboards for these. But in Dynamics 365 for Operations, the content pack provides these out of the box enabling organizations to measure EVM and associated KPIs easily for projects. A very welcome addition !! (In one of the upcoming posts, I will dive deep into EVM in D365 For Operations)

evm

Project Hours Details report: This dedicated dashboard page shows the hours/time details for projects and resources. This also allows you to measure resource utilizations in various perspectives.

proj-hours

Manage Estimated Costs, Revenues and Item requirements on WBS Task Details form of a project:

In the earlier releases of the New Dynamics AX (Update 2 and earlier) or even in AX 2012, you could always define the estimated costs and revenues for each task on the WBS for a project. In Dynamics 365 For Operations, you can add estimated costs and revenue lines for Hours, Expenses, Items and Fees on the WBS task under ‘Estimated Costs and Revenue Tab” as you were able to do in earlier versions, But additionally, you can also manage these on the “TASK Details” form. You can also add/setup “Item Requirements” on the WBS Task details form, so that when you save and publish the WBS, Project Item requirements will be automatically created. (It was also possible earlier, but you had to transfer the WBS Item estimates to Item requirements specifically). Small enhancement, but can be very useful !

wbs-details

Option to setup ledger accounts for intercompany cost and revenues based on lending and borrowing entities for projects:

The Intercompany timesheet and intercompany customer invoicing has been one of the very useful features of AX which enables organizations to deploy resources from multiple entities on the project of borrowing entity and automate the intercompany timesheets and invoicing and accounting. In earlier versions, you only setup one Ledger account for Intercompany Cost and One ledger account for intercompany Revenue postings, regardless of the resource borrowing and lending entities. Dynamics 365 For Operations now provides the option to setup multiple ledger accounts for intercompany cost and revenue posting based on the resource lending and borrowing entities respectively.

int-cost-account

int-rev-account

Enhancements to Project resource management:

There are some significant changes and enhancements to the project resource management feature in the Dynamics 365 For Operations release. I am listing some of those which I think are important, but will discuss them in greater detail in one of the future posts.

  • Organization’s Operations resources such as Machines, Tools, Facility etc. can now be added as project resource and can be scheduled on projects. Earlier, only workers (Employees and Contractors) could be designated as project resource.
  • New Resource request workflow enabling a resource allocation manager to control the resource requests from various projects. (It was there in the AX 7 release as Planned resource, but it has be revised up to some extent)
  • Resource role based pricing and cost price visibility based on date of Task and booking.

resource-request

resource-request1

Miscellaneous usability enhancements across various forms:

The following are some of the miscellaneous usability enhancements.

  • WBS Task ID and the Task Name are now visible on the Project Forecasts Transactions forms. This will certainly make it easier to see the forecasts (Labor, Expense, Items, Fee etc.) at each Task level with easy identification of the task, instead of just looking at the Activity ID.

taskidname

  • On the Resource management screens such as Resource Availability, Resource fulfillment, clearing record selections for each date range is now possible and it a whole lot earlier and neat! Certainly a very useful enhancement.

clearresselections

  • Multiple record selections on various forms to take actions is now possible. An example is the price setup form.

multiselect

  • The Project resource availability form’s business logic now considers Employee’s efficiency rate. Earlier the resource availability was based on Competencies and calendar availability, but Efficiency rate might be a good addition. I am not sure yet if I would use/need it that much, it certainly is a good add-on.

res-avail

  • When you select the Project Manager on a project, it is automatically added to the Project Team under the Project Team and Scheduling tab. Make Sense and makes like a little easier 🙂 !!

pm-team-member

  • Timesheet workflow status is Reset if the workflow and Document status are out of Sync. I believe this enhancement is related to cases when the “Approval status” of a timesheet changes, but the corresponding workflow status does not change sue to unexpected intermittent issues. If this happens, my guess is the workflow status will automatically reset to match with the timesheet document/approval status. I was not able to review and test this feature yet.
  • You can now select a funding source specifically on Fee journal lines. This will prove to be a very useful enhancement, especially in cases where there multiple funding parties responsible for a project contract and when booking Fees for the contract, you can select a specific funding source if you want to bill the partially fee to that funding source. (Note: This was indirectly possible in earlier releases where you could do a Project Free Text invoice and select a funding source on the line, which in turn will post a project Fee transaction.

proj-fee-fundsource

Hope this was helpful! Till next time..