Discover what’s new in the 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications, encompassing Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, represent an impressive combination in cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Dynamics 365 Finance is a robust financial management tool designed to oversee global operations, streamline financial processes, and drive automation efficiency. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an impressive tool to connect your operations, improve production performance, modernize your warehouse, and optimize asset management.

Microsoft releases updates to these powerful applications twice a year. In this blog, we highlight important updates and new features from the 2024 release wave 1.

The 2024 Release Wave 1 update for Dynamics 365 Finance introduces practical AI enhancements aimed at improving efficiency within financial operations. Dynamics 365 Copilot is now embedded into various functions, significantly reducing the time spent by collections agents and AP clerks on routine tasks. The introduction of these features aims to optimize time management, improve data handling efficiencies, and simplify user interactions with Dynamics 365 Finance.

Core enhancements include:

• Consolidated customer summaries: With the new AI-driven workspace, collections agents get a snapshot of customer data, including credit, payment, and contact histories, on one page, reducing research time.
• Streamlined invoice error resolution: Copilot now facilitates the correction of common invoice errors such as receipt mismatches directly from the vendor invoice list, minimizing the need for multiple screen toggles.
• Automated administrative functions: Generative AI empowers users to perform administrative tasks like security setups and report generation using simple language prompts.
• Enhanced Excel integration for planning: Users can now leverage Copilot within Excel for improved budgeting and forecasting, including the execution of what-if scenarios without learning new software.

The latest Dynamics 365 Finance release enhances the plan-act-analyze cycle through automation with Power Automate, enabling organizations to expedite the operationalization of strategic plans. Critical to sustaining growth and adapting to market changes, continuous planning equips businesses with a competitive edge by enabling rapid action. However, the complexity of processes and disparate systems often hampers the timeliness of action based on such planning. Automating the execution of approved actions within operational systems, Dynamics 365 Finance and Power Automate provide a cohesive solution that accelerates responsiveness while saving substantial time otherwise spent on manual execution. This ensures strategic plans are quickly reflected in daily operations, translating into immediate business impact.

Examples of automation include:

• Commit budget to financial system for budgetary control
• Automate the requisition of new salary or hourly headcount
• Create a new product or region
• Reorganize around efficiencies with sales or shared services
• Purchase new assets

These automated actions, supported by Power Automate, play a crucial role in transforming plans into measurable results, demonstrating the potential of integrated business performance tools to enhance organizational agility.

The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Finance extends the utility of financial tags, broadening their application to a wider array of journals, documents, and transactions. Financial tags offer a flexible approach to tracking up to 20 user-defined fields on accounting entries, serving as an agile alternative to financial dimensions. Unlike dimensions, financial tags operate without adherence to strict rules or validations, offering a streamlined capability for analytical reporting and account reconciliation while avoiding the complexity and system strain associated with financial dimensions.

Key updates include:

• Wider journal and document coverage: Financial tags are now supported in additional financial journals (e.g., Bill of exchange, Promissory notes, Advanced ledger entry), purchase orders, free text invoices, and certain project accounting transactions.
• Enhanced defaulting capabilities: Organizations can define rules to auto-populate financial tags based on transaction data, eliminating redundant manual entry. This is facilitated through a Default engine that utilizes natural language inputs, an expression builder, or direct technical rule entries.
• Rule simulation: Before implementation, rules can be tested against posted transactions to validate outcomes without altering the original data.
• Inclusion in accounting distributions: Financial tags are integrated into accounting distributions for documents utilizing the source document accounting framework, enhancing reporting and ledger settlement processes by providing additional transaction matching options.

Dynamics 365 Finance now offers a data archiving feature to help organizations optimize storage and enhance system performance. By leveraging this new functionality, users can safely and securely move large datasets into an archive, reducing the active dataset size. This archiving process is integrated seamlessly into existing automation within Dynamics 365 Finance. The archived data remains accessible for standard reporting and analysis, offering continued visibility into historical data without impacting performance.

Key updates include:

• Archiving General Ledger and Tax data: Streamline storage and speed with archival options for both general ledger posted entries and tax transactions, with a focus on selected fiscal year data.
• Secure and consistent data transfer: Move data to history tables within Finance and Dataverse while ensuring data integrity and security throughout the process.
• Reporting on archived data: Maintain access to historical data for reporting via Finance history tables and analytic insights through Dataverse, using Business Performance Analytics.
• Reversibility of archival actions: Retrieve archived data back to the system’s ‘open’ tables if required due to incorrect data movement.

These enhancements offer valuable solutions to free up storage and enhance system performance while providing secure, seamless, and reversible data archiving capabilities.

In the 2024 release wave 1, Dynamics 365 Finance introduces advanced bank reconciliation features, designed to optimize the efficiency of the financial management process. This critical task, which compares a company’s ledger balances with bank statements to spot discrepancies, has historically been very labor intensive and requiring great attention to detail. Through automation and significant functional enhancements, this feature considerably reduces manual labor and saves time for cash management professionals. By refining the bank reconciliation process, Dynamics 365 Finance not only ensures accurate financial reporting but also aids businesses in maintaining sound financial management practices. Key upgrades include a redesigned reconciliation report and improved matching rules, streamlining operations while maintaining data integrity and accuracy.

• Redesigned reconciliation report: Incorporates comprehensive improvements in the report’s header and body, including detailed transaction categorization and snapshot-saving capability for consistency in future retrievals.
• Improved matching rules: Facilitates automated posting of vouchers, customer payment journals, and vendor payment journals directly from the reconciliation worksheet, enhancing the efficiency of the reconciliation process. Facilitates the automatic settling of open customer invoices with bank statement lines, eliminating the manual effort.
• Autonomous cash application functions: Empowers users with the ability to generate payment journals, post vouchers with an updated user experience, and automatically settle open customer invoices from the bank reconciliation worksheet, significantly reducing manual intervention.
• Automatically clear bridged transactions: This feature mitigates the manual labor of clearing bridged transactions by automating the process in advanced bank reconciliation. Bridging posting is a two-step process that is used when payments are posted. The feature automates the second step by clearing bridged transactions within advanced bank reconciliation.

The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management includes several enhancements with Copilot and AI. Copilot and AI technologies serve as indispensable solutions, facilitating efficient demand planning and procurement decision-making. In this release wave, AI innovations drive operational excellence through:

• Efficient demand planning: Copilot empowers demand planners with in-product guidance and AI-driven insights, enabling them to make informed decisions and optimize supply chain operations. By exploring trends, anomalies, and influencing factors using natural language, demand planners can enhance forecast accuracy and respond dynamically to changing market conditions.
• Streamlined procure-to-pay: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management introduces a conversational AI experience that assists purchasing agents in handling purchase order changes efficiently. Copilot identifies ripple effects on downstream processes and facilitates intelligent decision-making, leading to streamlined change management, improved stakeholder collaboration, and effective risk mitigation.
• Collaborative forecasting: Built on powerful AI capabilities, demand planning in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management facilitates collaborative and accurate forecasting. With detailed configuration options and seamless integration with other applications, users can easily override data based on insights, collaborate with colleagues, and ensure accurate end-to-end supply chain planning.

Efficient inventory management is essential for optimizing supply chain operations and ensuring the delivery of high-quality goods to customers. With the 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, organizations can leverage advanced features to enhance quality control, streamline document reproduction, track time-series inventory, sync external changes, query inventory without site or warehouse info, and enhance discrete manufacturing costing.

Key enhancements include:

• Quality control for goods-in-transit: Dynamics 365 SCM now supports quality control for goods-in-transit orders, ensuring product quality throughout the transit process. Users can initiate the quality control process directly from goods-in-transit orders, enhancing visibility and control over quality-related processes.
• Reprinting business documents for product bundles: Detailed product-bundle information is now preserved, allowing for the reprinting of original sales order confirmations and invoices even after deletion or archival. This update facilitates the electronic exchange of order confirmations and invoices, ensuring an accurate representation of product bundles.
• Time-series inventory tracking: External systems integrated with Dynamics 365 SCM can now access accurate inventory availability information up to 180 days in the future. This capability enables users to promise sales orders, search for spare parts, and view material availability more efficiently and confidently.
• Synch external changes through Inventory Visibility: The Inventory Visibility add-in now supports the synchronization of inventory updates between external systems and Dynamics 365 SCM, minimizing implementation efforts and improving system performance. Users can trace inventory transactions back to the source documents and run historical inventory analyses based on synchronized data.
• Query and manage inventory without site or warehouse info: Inventory Visibility now supports querying and updating inventory data without specifying site and warehouse information. Users can query, post, soft reserve, and allocate inventory through Inventory Visibility with or without site and warehouse details, catering to diverse business scenarios.
• Discrete manufacturing costing enhancement: Global Inventory Accounting Add-in enhancements enable accurate parallel inventory accounting practices for standard cost using multiple configurations. Features include improved onboarding experiences, tracking and recording manufacturing costs, processing returns for trade transactions, and creating comprehensive Power BI reports for strategic analysis.

The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enhances customer service by providing real-time Capable-to-Promise (CTP) calculations to offer customers accurate delivery dates. This feature is crucial for businesses that operate on an assemble-to-order or make-to-order basis. It assesses existing inventory, evaluates production capacity, and factors in transportation times to calculate realistic promise dates for goods.

• Present customers with precise receipt dates for their orders in real-time, even during a phone conversation
• Assess the impact of product variations (e.g., color, design, options) on the delivery schedule and communicate changes immediately
• Evaluate how alterations in ordered quantities will influence the promised delivery dates
• Optimize the grouping or separation of order line quantities to adhere to delivery deadlines for make-to-order products

With the integration of CTP calculations, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers a more responsive and reliable order fulfillment process, enabling businesses to fulfill customer expectations efficiently while optimizing their supply chain operations.

Master planning is a multifaceted process that requires coordination among various stakeholders, including supply planners, production planners, and material managers. With the 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, collaboration within and across teams is greatly improved. The system continuously recalculates master plans, providing real-time access to the latest, fully optimized planning results after each edit. This ensures that all collaborators have access to up-to-date information as they enter data and review and update each plan. By refreshing master plans throughout the day, supply planners can promptly address new issues such as material delays or changing priorities, optimizing resource utilization and minimizing delays in providing products to customers. Moreover, the planning engine operates in parallel with the rest of the system, ensuring uninterrupted system performance even during recalculations, thus enabling teams to access optimized supply plans without experiencing delays or disruptions.

This enhancement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management facilitates efficient collaboration and decision-making, ultimately enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. By enabling real-time access to up-to-date information and continuous plan recalculations, organizations can streamline master planning processes, improve resource utilization, and meet customer demands effectively.

As your trusted Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations support partner, Rand Group is dedicated to bringing the latest Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features into the spotlight for your organization. Our role extends beyond introducing you to these new functionalities; we’re here to ensure that your team is proficiently trained and adept at using the updated features to optimize your ROI. Are you ready to harness the power of Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management 2024 release wave 1? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.