Soon, we’ll be seeing many of the features mentioned in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1 Plans--a lot of items will become generally available in April. While they may not be here just yet, there are a few things standout features that we think lots of CRM users will find value in.

As part of the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 CRM has been updated with a new modern look and feel. Early access to the New Look was rolled out in February 2024, with general availability in April 2024.

The New Look brings upon visual changes to make Dynamics 365 sleeker, more modern, and more intuitive to use. Here’s a breakdown of the subtle yet impactful changes you can expect to see.

Release Wave 1 of 2024 is coming in April, and the plans have been out since January. We’re gearing up for the update by reviewing the plans and testing features in a sandbox environment as they move into preview. Let’s review some of our most highly anticipated features, specifically for the Jobs module.

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.

Several new features have released, which you can review and track via the Microsoft’s Release Planner, which allows you to effectively plan for new features that will be added to the stack of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications.

Note that these are features that were announced with 2023 Release Wave 2. Some features have already been made generally available since their release, but some other features will be made available for public preview in March 2024.

It’s time for Microsoft’s twice-annual updates to Power Platform and Dynamics 365 suite of applications. With each of these updates, new features, improvements, and fixes are rolled out to Power Automate, Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Business Central, and more. There’s a lot of material to cover, so we’ve broken down a few of the features that we’re most excited to see rolled out in Business Central:

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

Business Central has added a new way to analyze your data right within the pages and lists you’re currently in. Analysis mode is a toggle that provides interactive and versatile functionality to calculate, summarize, and examine data right there, without going to another page or another application (like Excel). It’s faster than running reports, and you can add multiple tabs that each represent different tasks or views of the data.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the newest AI feature that helps users save time when working in Business Central and the rest of the Dynamics 365 CRM suite. Copilot is your new AI-assistant, taking your previous work and other inputs to generate content for you – from emails and presentations to proposal drafts and beyond. It is the ultimate idea starter to get you going with new material that you can use as-is or edit to fit your needs.

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

On its own, Microsoft Teams give great tools like messaging, calling, file sharing, and much more. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, provides a plethora of tools for sales teams to better engage leads and customers. By combining these two products, we can expand the capabilities of both. Teams can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales to allow for conversations to start directly from records, initiate calls to customers, or link records into Teams channels.

In this newest rollout of features (2023 Release Wave 1), Business Central is seeing a shift to how users can customize their workspaces to serve them best. With the goal of always being able to quickly adapt to new needs to facilitate company growth. In terms of system use, being able to view and enter data quickly and efficiently is paramount. So with this wave, all table fields will be unlocked so that any user can add them to their pages and personalize their workspace without the need to use extensions, saving time and cost.

In April 2021, Microsoft made generally available the ability to correct dimensions for general ledger entries. The goal of this shift is to allow your financial reporting to provide you with the most accurate insight possible, and this means not having to account or note data entry errors. Because, let’s face it: mistakes happen! But your financial reporting shouldn’t need to be negatively impacted as a result.

If you manually track deferred revenue or expenses, you know how timely and tedious it can be to balance these items on various spreadsheets before bringing those entries into your accounting system. Although not difficult, it requires you to manage things outside your system—like an Excel spreadsheet that you have to keep up with and post a recurring entry for each month. Luckily, Business Central has a solution that simplifies this. If you set up a deferral template, you can use it to defer revenue or expense over a set period of time. When you set up this deferral and post it, the monthly lines will be posted and booked automatically with no need for tracking or balancing. You can also check in on the deferrals with reports to ensure the process went through correctly.

The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.

We’re always watching the latest and greatest changes coming to the Dynamics 365 suite to see how they can benefit our users. Lately, there have been a few helpful shifts regarding the timeline and forms within Dynamics 365 CRM apps that allow for better workflow and easier management of what you’re doing within the system. Although these features aren’t brand new—they are generally available and your administrator or partner can help get you started with them whenever you want—but we’re highlighting them since they may not be on your radar.

Sometimes, Dynamics GP needs to be taken offline to perform certain activities that are easiest with an empty system—such as regular maintenance, system updates, error fixes, and even year-end close. Luckily, version GP 2013 R2 and beyond have a feature that allows you to take the system offline, making these routine updates and fixes easier than ever.

Note that taking a company (or several companies—you can choose) offline only allows the offline administrator and other specified users to log into the company, but you can set a message to alert anyone who tries to access the system during that timeframe so they’re aware of the reason they aren’t able to login.

Productive changes were made to Business Central with last year’s Release Wave 2: from report visibility for bank reconciliation to more seamless integrations with Power Automate, the Dataverse, and beyond. We covered these changes in our 2022 Release Wave 2 summary blog, but there’s one change in particular we’d like to dig into further—the Financial Reporting name shift. Here are the details you should be aware of. 

Information has never been more widely and readily available than in the hyper-fast, cloud-driven reality we have today; yet, office workers can still spend upwards of 20% of their workdays searching through digital clutter for information. Sometimes that’s due to siloed systems, departments, teams, or processes that are due for an update.