Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, appears throughout their business applications, including Business Central and can do a lot to streamline and speed up your day-to-day work.

Now take that helpfulness and translate it to new user onboardings! Imagine the time you and your new employee can save by having a virtual training assistant ready to help whenever they are needed.

Power BI is a reporting tool that can connect to almost any data source, model that data, and create visuals to tell the story of that data in a clear, accurate way. What was once too much data to parse through easily becomes clear data visualizations (live dashboards, interactive reports, charts, graphs, plots, tables…) that provide actionable insights to improve your business.

Business Central has included the occasional AI feature here and there for a while now, but recently, with Microsoft’s 2024 Release Wave 1, more and more are being added. Though all these features prove useful for various needs, there are five features we believe are most valuable to our clients and the broader Business Central user base.

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.

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.

Piecing together fragmented processes is a great start for businesses looking to optimize the way their tech stack operates from day-to-day, and as tedious as it may seem to find technology solutions that keep your business running, implementing an all-in-one business management solution is one of the most effective tools you can deploy for your organization. Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-native ERP system made to address common business pain points to keep your day running smoothly, ensure cross-company teams stay in sync, and to promote visibility into key operations and workflows.

Efficiency is something we all strive for, but it seems as though only a lucky few can finish their workday without feeling bogged down or sidetracked one way or another. Not everyone has that natural luck, so that’s where Power Automate comes into play. Some Flows are specific to certain Microsoft applications like Business Central, Dynamics 365 Sales, or Dynamics 365 Marketing, but others can be used to facilitate just about anything.

A plethora of no-code-necessary, pre-built Flows are out there for the everyday user just looking to get started. Here are our picks for five prebuilt Power Automate Flows that can help make your everyday a breeze:

While Power Automate is intuitive and accessible for any level of coding experience, it does include its own set of vocabulary that must be learned, as with any new business application. To help you on your journey, whether you’re new to Power Automate or becoming reacquainted, below we’ve outlined the key terms you will encounter when working with Power Automate:

Without a doubt, automation is at the front of the pack, in terms of efficiency-building technology. Automating processes within your business—especially time-consuming, manual, and repetitive tasks—can free up calendars and mindpower for activities that can lend more value to a business.

Enter Power Automate, an application made to connect other apps in order to help them work together to complete your tasks faster, with less effort from you. Power Automate is included these Office 365 subscription plans: Enterprise E3, Business Premium, and Business Essentials (head to our page for pricing and further details). We’ve compiled an overview of Power Automate for those wondering the key questions: what is it, what are its benefits, and how does it work?

From the ancient masters of rhetoric themselves, we are told that logos, or logic, is an effective way to persuade an audience. And all of recorded history is a testament to the power of storytelling, a most innate human attribute, to influence people’s actions. Therefore, being able to tell a story with logic, with data, must be an effective way to understand the world and act within it according to our goals.

This is the foundation to which Microsoft’s Power BI application is based. Tell a compelling story through the visualizations of data, and that story can help inform decisions that will benefit businesses.

Setting goals is the best way to keep members of an organization focused on and working towards the same objective. The Microsoft Power BI team has announced the public preview of Goals in Power BI. This feature will help businesses to use the metric and data analysis capabilities of Power BI to create and adapt business objectives. With Goals, Power BI groups together the important, defined statistics to measure and predict progress.

A major benefit of implementing Microsoft business applications like Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 is the interconnectivity between applications and data. Microsoft Excel is currently one of the most popular software applications available for viewing and manipulating data.

For users of Dynamics 365 Business Central, the integration between Business Central and Microsoft Excel provides the ability to view and edit financial data from Business Central directly in Excel and import it back into Business Central.

Automation of accounting processes is an important part of any robust ERP solution. The ability to set automatic schedules that can either be kicked off manually or remotely can refine processes that would otherwise take excessive time and effort to handle. As a result, a lot of modern accounting systems have automation capabilities that build scripts to eliminate manual work. Dynamics 365 Business Central is no exception to that rule and has its entirely own system of workflows to help take out as much administration time as possible.

Business Central from Microsoft gives users more power in their ERP solution than ever before. Through integrations and connections to the other systems they already use, Business Central lets users accomplish more in one program than they normally would in 5. See how you can incorporate the products you use to make Business Central work best for you.