Item Charges in Business Central are a highly useful function that enables the allocation and organization of additional costs necessary for orders. This tool enables you to distribute a bulk cost from a vendor across multiple items. These allocations help ensure that each of your orders is accurately recorded in the Item Unit Cost and Cost of Goods, without omitting important details such as the amount of additional costs paid for service fees, shipping costs, or other non-recurring charges.

If your New Year’s Resolution is to make data-informed decisions that steer your marketing strategy, then decluttering your marketing application for clean data and clearer KPIs is a good place to start. 

If you’re using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, we’ve put together this new year’s guide to help you dive in with best practices and to revisit features and tools to help you make the most of your marketing application. 

Business Central version 27 includes a new 1099 process that now includes e-file and emailing your 1099s. In this blog, we walk you through the full 1099 process, from the fields that must be filled out on the vendor form, setting up the IRS reporting period, propagating 1099s, making adjustments, and finally sending the forms to the IRS and vendors.

In Business Central, selecting the right type of Bill of Materials (BOM) is an important decision to support efficient manufacturing operations. Whether to use Assembly BOMs or Production BOMs depends on the complexity of your products, the level of process tracking required, and your business's operational needs. So, which should you use? It depends on your situation.

In manufacturing, production scheduling is a crucial step to ensuring success. Teams rely on accurate, date-driven schedules to ensure that work is completed on time and resources are properly allocated. In Business Central, the production order calendar is a tool that defines working days, shift times, and resource availability for each work center.

When you send an email, the IP server that sends it is available to each server that processes that message, meaning the location from which the email is sent is traceable back to you. Why is this important to know? A collection of third-party watchdog organizations monitors activity, message content, and complaints associated with that sending address. So, how do you avoid sending your marketing emails to spam?

Whether your previous Partner did not fully understand your business processes or things became too complicated too quickly, your project can veer off track and off budget before you know it. If your implementation hasn’t been meeting expectations, you can still work to keep things running smoothly and get your timeline and budget back in check.

Here is our advice to help you get your Business Central Manufacturing implementation back on track so you can get the most out of your new manufacturing solution, even long after your implementation go-live.

It’s important to test your system to ensure the update will not interfere with your processes and, most importantly, system customizations and extensions. It is crucial to test the transactions that use any of your customizations or extensions early in a sandbox environment, lest they break in production and halt your business processes. So, we’ve put together a checklist of recommended tests to perform after Business Central is updated to the latest version, with those release wave changes.

Both Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented measures to ensure that bulk email senders provide an easy, visible one-click option to unsubscribe within all promotional emails. For businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing), ensuring compliance is super simple. In addition to the normal subscription center links with which you are probably familiar, Microsoft has added a new one-click unsubscribe feature.

Depending on where you’re located and where your clients or contacts are located, there are data protection laws you must adhere to. You may have heard of GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation) that went into effect in 2018 within the EU. Other data protection laws include CAN-SPAM for email marketing in the US, and CASL in Canada. The details of these regulations are readily available online, so if you haven’t already, be sure to familiarize yourself and your marketing team with the laws you must follow depending on your and your clients’ locations. Consent management in D365 will help you adhere to whichever laws you must follow.

The general best practice is that all contacts must opt-in to receive marketing communications from you, but that they also have the ability to easily opt-out and revoke this consent at any time. So, how is marketing consent established, and how does Dynamics store it?

Sandboxes are for playing around and testing customizations and features. Production environments are where you do your actual work. Now let’s dig in a little deeper into how to work with sandboxes, and how to move your sandbox content into a production environment if/when you want to!

Power BI is an extremely powerful data visualization tool. It can handle a wide variety of reporting needs, but if you’re just starting out designing reports, or if you’ve already gotten a handle of Power BI, you may be wondering how you can use all these cool visuals and tools to create something that someone—your coworker, your manager, whomever—can get real value and insight from.

So let’s discuss some general rules that you can consider when you design in Power BI to remove barriers to use. After all, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure all our hard work goes somewhere useful.

When you’re using a system for things so important as account and order fulfillment, you want to vet that any changes you make to the system—whether it be new features or processes, or even changes to your role centers or pages—will not detract from your system’s functionality.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

Receiving a canned or boilerplate email message is not nearly as impactful as opening your inbox and seeing an email that seems to be written just for you. Personalization drives engagement, heightened engagement improves the impact of your sales and marketing pursuits. That’s the whole theory behind Dynamic content as a method of making your sales and marketing messages more impactful without spending an abundance of time personalizing emails for each user. And you don’t even need to know how to code to create Dynamic content in your emails.

Many organizations’ fiscal year-end doesn’t match up with the calendar year-end. In fact, June 30 is a pretty common fiscal year-end. So if you’re in this boat, here’s your closing procedures refresher for Business Central/NAV, plus a handful of useful resources to get you started on your close.

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

Data security is at the core of all of Microsoft’s business applications, and Business Central has several layers of protection for every user account. As a growth-minded solution, it’s equipped to handle the changing needs of your business, including scaling permissions up and dialing them back as often as you need.

There are a few basic components to the makeup of Business Central’s security setup: user access, user permissions, and general data security.

Responsive design is the design and development approach where creators consider and adjust their web-based content (like emails and websites) to consider the size and layout of the device it will be viewed on and adapt accordingly. The goal is for your web content to render to provide an optimal experience—usability, navigation, visual appeal—no matter the size of a user’s screen size.

In today’s outbound marketing, we must consider mobile-friendly design when planning our email campaigns, but we also cannot forget the desktop experience. Dynamics 365 Marketing has recently added further responsive design options to help your emails flux based on the device it’s being viewed on.