Vendor Prepayments and Revenue Recognition For Fixed Price projects in Dynamics 365 For Operations

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics 365 Finance • Tagged Dynamics 365 For Operations, Dynamics AX, Fixed price project, Percent Complete, Prepayment, Revenue recognition, Vendor Prepayments • 1 Comment

Hello, Good to be back here on the blog !!! Jumping straight into topic here today about a new addition of a feature for vendor prepayments in relation with fixed price project revenue recognition !!

Issuing large amounts of prepayments to vendors is often a common business requirement for large scale, long term fixed price projects, which involves a lot of sub-contracted work. Vendors often request prepayments for the subcontracting services they are contracted to deliver for these projects. These prepayments can sometimes be just a flat amount based on mutual decisions, or it can sometimes be a percentage of the total cost of the subcontracting service. There can be several months of gap between when the prepayments are issued and when the vendors actually delivers the services.

For such projects, customers usually recognize revenue on a percentage completion basis and need the ability to include these vendor prepayments in the project percentage completion calculation of the project for revenue recognition/revenue estimates calculations.

In this post, we will evaluate one of the new features of Dynamics 365 For Operations (Referred as D365 – Operations from here on), which allows to consider these vendor prepayments automatically when running the monthly revenue recognition/estimates for fixed price projects for calculating the % completion of the project.

For this demonstration, I have setup a fixed price project and the associated contract already. This project is setup to recognize revenue on a % completion basis.

The Project Manager has created and submitted the purchase requisition for approval, so that the services can be procured from Rebar Supply Co. Ltd. See screenshot below.

The purchase requisition gets approved by the designated manager and the Purchase order is automatically crated. See screenshot below.

The Project procurement team/Project manager then sets up the prepayment details on the project purchase order that was automatically created upon approval of the requisition.

Finance and Accounting team now processes the prepayment invoice to initiate the prepayment to the vendor.

Now that the finance team has processed the vendor prepayment for the subcontracting work, let us now go ahead and see what happens when they run the monthly revenue recognition process for this project.

Notice that system was able to consider the vendor prepayment cost for the project and was able to determine the percentage completion based on the total project budget/forecast defined. See screenshot below

When this revenue recognition entry is posted, the revenue amount (based on Percentage complete and the total contract value) will be posted to general ledger. We all know how it works from here 🙂

That’s it for today !!

Sandeep Chaudhury **

Dynamics AX Tip: Interact with Dynamics AX Data using Microsoft Excel Online (Office 365)

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts • Tagged Dynamics AX, Excel Online, Excel Upload, Export to excel, New Dynamics AX, Odata, OData Services, Office 365 Integration, sharepoint, Upload Data in Dynamics AX • Leave a comment

In AX 2012 release, the Excel Add-in feature introduced additional productivity options and made it easy for end users to interact with Dynamics AX data from within Excel. This feature worked great in many scenarios, but it did not provide that seamless productivity experience for the user, as they had to launch the Excel On Premise app (Win32 app) and then had to connect to the AOS to select tables and data fields to be able to interact with the data. This required the end users to have certain knowledge of the tables/database to complete data exchange tasks with Dynamics.

With the New Dynamics AX (AX 7), the Office Integration framework introduced significant changes in the underlying framework by launching the new ” Excel Data Connector App”. The Excel Data connector app interacts with your Excel workbooks with Dynamics AX OData Services (For publicly Exposed Data Entities) and this made it possible for Excel to become a seamless part of the user experience in Dynamics AX.

Most of us probably know by now how the “Open in Excel” experience works in the new Dynamics AX, where you can launch your data (For example a journal entry) into an Excel On Premise app (Win32 app) with just one click. Once the excel app launches, you can sync data, make updates, add or delete data. The screenshot below shows this experience in the new Dynamics AX.

In the New Dynamics AX, it is also possible to open the Dynamics AX data in the Excel ONLINE version (Office 365) in case you do not have the Excel On premise(win32) app installed. The only thing you have to do differently is as follows.

After you click the Office Integration icon > Open in Excel, select Save To > SharePoint.

Then select the SharePoint location (Document library) and Mark the Open file after save option and click Save button.

Notice that the Journal entry will now open in Microsoft Excel Online and the Excel data connector app will run in an embedded experience within your browser(Built using Office web add-in framework).

From here on you still have the same user experience as you would see when dong it in an Excel On premise app. This will come handy in cases where you are away from your desk and using a device that does not have the native Excel on premise app installed. You still have full power of Excel and exchange data with Dynamics AX.

That’s it for today’s quick tip.

Regards,

Sandeep

MasterCard partners with Microsoft to streamline secured online payments in Dynamics AX ERP

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics AX 2012 • Tagged AX 7, Call center, CreditCard, Dynamics AX, MasterCard INtegration, New Dynamics AX, Online Payments, Retail • Leave a comment

Today MasterCard announced the integration of it’s “Simplify Commerce” solution, a cloud based payments platform, with Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP solution.

Existing and future customers of Dynamics AX can now take advantage of this to streamline their online and call center payments and will get access to one system that connects their end to end planning with online commercial sales.

What is New in Business Intelligence in the New Microsoft Dynamics AX (AX 7)

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Blog posts, Dynamics AX 2012 • Tagged AX 7, AX Rainier, BI, Business Intelligence, Dynamics AX, New Dynamics AX, Power BI • Leave a comment

Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP has evolved over several versions starting from AX 2.5, AX 3.0, AX 4.0, AX 2009, AX 2012 and all the way through the New Dynamics AX (Aka AX 7). In each of these versions, this ERP from Microsoft , has undergone several changes and enhancements in terms of architecture, technology, depth of functionality and support for industry verticals etc. The journey from the Client only AX 3.0 version to the fully web enabled version (The New Dynamics AX) has been phenomenal.

As the technology behind the application kept on evolving, so did the Business Intelligence (Analytics) framework for each of these mentioned versions.

In this post, we will discuss a little bit on the evolution of Analytics/Business intelligence framework in Microsoft Dynamics AX and we will also discuss about what are the various Analytics options we have in the most recent release, which is the New Dynamics AX.

The picture below shows a quick snapshot of the evolution of analytics framework in Dynamics AX.

In the initial releases with version 4.0, the concept of “Perspectives” was introduced which basically presented the ERP data schema to the end uses in a format, that they can use to build analytics. In AX 4.0 the SMDL Model along with the SQL Report builder was primarily used for business analytics building.

Then in AX 2009, Microsoft introduced the SQL Server Analysis services, which basically had the SSAS Projects/ CUBE Projects built for all the major areas of the ERP applications. These CUBES were then utilized to show data on the various pre-built dashboards on the role center pages. In AX 2009 you could also use Microsoft Excel to connect to the SSAS server and then build your own analytics.

In AX 2012, the SSAS Cubes framework was taken a step forward and Microsoft basically used the same technology and concepts, but developed several additional dashboards for the various role centers that were shipped out of the box. One of the major enhancements to the analytics framework in AX 2012 was done by introduction of Power View. Using Power View, you could simply leverage the analysis cubes and build dashboards, graphs, charts, tables, bars and any sort of analytics you wanted.

In the New Microsoft Dynamics AX (Aka AX 7) the analytics framework has evolved further and much better. In the new Dynamics AX, analytics can be primarily of 2 types.

Real time built-in analytics on the workspaces
Power BI analytics and integration with Dynamics AX.

1. Real time built-in analytics in the Work spaces:

Starting with AX 2009 till AX 2012 R3 release, most of the out-of-the-box analytics were contained in the Role center pages, which was basically the Home/landing page for the users when they launch AX client or Enterprise portal. In the new Dynamics AX, you will see something called as the “Workspaces”. You could compare workspaces with role centers, but the work spaces are designed keeping in mind a more process oriented approach.

The built-in analytics comes out of the box , as part of standard AX across various workspaces covering all major modules.
You can customize these further and create your own analytics in any of the workspaces.
One of the examples of such analytics is present under the Cost Administration workspaces. You can find these across all major business areas in the new Dynamics AX.

You can furhter click on the analytics to drill down on data right from the analytics and research the data further.

You also have additional option of presenting the data on the analytics by different parameters. For example you can view Top 10 Production variances by Production order number or By Produced Item Name.

Below screenshot shows all other workspaces that are available out of the box in the new dynamics AX which has built in real time analytics built-in.

2. Power BI and integration with Dynamics AX:

The second (and I think the most powerful and hopefully will be widely used too) analytics option in the new Dynamics AX is, the integration with Power BI, which is Microsoft’s business intelligence platform. Below are some of the key highlights of the integration of Power BI and new Dynamics AX.

You can use Power BI Online to build complex data analytics from your Dynamics AX database. Using Power BI online, you can also connect to Azure SQL Server data base and build your content packs and publish them with required permissions.

You can use Power BI Desktop app and also mobile apps to connect SQL server database of your Dynamics AX application and then build any analytics. For example, the screenshot below shows a simple analytics of sales by customer groups. I have built this using the CustInvoiceJour table. You can use the advanced reporting options of PowerBI to build complex queries and joins.

After creating analytics in Power BI Desktop, you can publish them into the Content packs in Power BI online.

Once you have your content packs are ready, you can Add power Bi analytics as tiles onto the workspaces in the new Dynamics AX.

With the RTW release of the new Dynamics AX that was released during the Technical Conference (Feb 23rd to Feb 25th), Microsoft has released a few Pre-built Power BI Content packs for Dynamics AX (Primarily around Retail and Finance areas) that customers and partners can leverage for reporting. Partners can also build their own Content Packs as their intellectual properties, and make them available for consumption by customers. To access the Pre-built content packs provided by Microsoft for the RTW release of new dynamics AX, Sign in into your Power BI online account, Or launch Power BI desktop app.

Long enough post !!!!

Note that this was not a Power BI specific blog post. I just wanted to highlight the key business intelligence options we have available in the New Dynamics AX and a very brief on how Power BI looks to be treated as a first class citizen inside the new Dynamics AX for BI and reporting. Stay tuned for future posts on How to build analytics for Dynamics AX using PowerBI and how to consume Content packs published by Microsoft or other partners.

Till then….Have a great time !!

Regards,

Sandeep

SBS Group, USA Expands with Solugenix’s Dynamics AX Practice

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Sandeep Chaudhury • Posted in Information • Tagged Dynamics AX, SBS Group • Leave a comment

SBS Group, a leading technology consulting firm integrating business management solutions, announced today the acquisition of Solugenix’s Microsoft Dynamics® AX Practice.

SBS Group USA, is focused on business management solution and is one of the Microsoft master VARs and also a member of Microsoft’s inner circle. It will be an unbeatable combination of SBS group’s vast experience in dynamics line of products, their long term relationship with MS and Solugenix’s exceptionally experienced Dynamics AX team.