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. 

It may feel like Community Summit NA 2022 just came to an end, but we’re already planning for next year, which will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from October 15-20, 2023.

If you’re looking forward and thinking I’d like to go to Summit this year, it’s a good moment to start the process, because until January 31, Early Bird registration will provide the lowest price on all-access passes to the conference. If you can’t make that deadline, don’t worry – there are a few additional discount registration timeframes that will all provide a nice discount for you to benefit from.

1099s must be sent out by the last day of January, and if you need a refresher or first-time walkthrough for editing and generating 1099s in Business Central, we’re here to help.

We’re starting the new year off with an ongoing roster of exciting webinar offerings to help anyone using Business Central or Dynamics NAV optimize their system functionality by adding extensions, or add-ons, to their already established Business Central. If you use Business Central and have thought, “Oh, I wish the system did this,” then stick around for our monthly add-on spotlight webinars. First up this year: Multi-Entity Management with Binary Stream!

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.

As your organization’s CRM or Power Platform system administrator, you’re responsible for overseeing the permissions, settings, and functionality available to all your users, and you want to ensure that everyone has access to what they need to do their jobs efficiently day in and day out. When new employees are added to the system, or when current users need increased permissions, each request must be reviewed and approved by you – and the faster they are approved, the faster they can get logged in and start on essential tasks.

Dynamics 365 CRM users were eagerly awaiting enhancements to grids, and this new Grid control feature is the natural evolution from the previous read-only grid control and editable grids in model-driven apps. With it, you can now edit grids and add nested grids in groupings, making it much easier to see the target data in one location. Let’s check out the other features it offers, as well.

Multifactor authentication (MFA) is one way – one of the best and easiest – to protect your organization from these threats. Available in Dynamics 365 and Office 365 applications, modern authentication and, by extension, MFA are considered standard and common today. You’ve no doubt encountered MFA before, even if you don’t know it now.

Since 2022 Release Wave 2 updates were announced around August of this year, new features have been appearing in Dynamics 365 CRM apps. Some of these are flying under the radar, while others are front and center and have not been missed. Whether the former or the latter, we wanted to raise up a few features that we find particularly exciting and useful to admin and end users!

The semiannual Dynamics 365 Release Wave updates are highly anticipated, but it’s no secret that navigating through the Microsoft documentation to research can be difficult and time-consuming, let alone remembering and tracking the progress of updates that interest you. That’s about to be a thing of the past with this new tool: the Release Planner (currently in preview).

The Release Planner is a straightforward interface for searching through update plans. It is organized by application and can be filtered and sorted by a variety of criteria, such as status, availability date, and who the update will be available for (users, admin, etc.).

The Microsoft Bridge to the Cloud promotion is a great opportunity to embrace a cloud-hosted ERP solution at a fraction of the normal cost—Business Central is available for discounted licensing, plus a guided migration path from a trusted technology solutions partner.

The promotion was first rolled out for 2022, but has been extended to give more organizations the opportunity to migrate to Business Central—however, the current benefits will end December 31, 2022. Here’s what to expect from the 2023 benefits:

Recently, Microsoft became aware of an issue where workflow completion emails have been failing to send to the originator (or creator) of the workflow. Here’s our workaround: