Deep Dive into D365: Finance

Workspaces

• Workspaces provide you and your people with the tools needed to work quicker and smarter. This Dynamics 365 Finance feature allows employees to access their own role-specific area displaying data, tasks, reports and inquiries designed specifically to streamline their day-to-day duties. Each workspace shows as a tile and this represents an activity that employee carries out as part of their role, for example, a clerk might have an invoice processing workspace. 
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• There are endless workspaces available out-of-the-box to help employees save time and enhance their efficiency, and embedded Power BI reports help bring data into play. What’s more, if existing workspaces don’t cover a specific task you’re looking for, you can easily extend the existing offering or create and deploy your own in next to no time at all. 
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Chart of Accounts and financial dimensions

• One particularly useful D365 Finance feature (and one that helps greatly with governance and reporting standards) is the Chart of Accounts. Anyone working in the world of finance will know that a Chart of Accounts is a set list of posting codes used to classify and differentiate financial assets, liabilities and transactions – and Finance is the perfect way to track and manage these effectively.
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• Financial dimensions and analysis codes, which can be created based on your organisation’s specifications, allow you to further enhance your financial reporting and transactional analysis. Combining these with the Chart of Accounts functionality locks in financial traceability and analytics by assuring that any entries made must align to your internal reporting requirements, ensuring data accuracy at the point of entry and, in turn, a stable structure for core statutory reports. 
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Tax

• D365 Finance’s tax functionality enables organisations to assign different tax information to different customers and vendors, as well as any purchases and sales. This flexibility allows your finance department to account for differences in taxation rates based on who your organisation is buying from or selling to and what it is you’re buying or selling.  
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• In a demonstration of Microsoft’s ongoing investment and development of the D365 Finance product, a recent feature enhancement also allows it to handle partial VAT recovery, allowing you to further automate those difficult VAT transactions while maintaining compliance. On top of this, a verified, out-of-the-box connection to the HMRC Developer Hub ensures your organisation remains fully compliant with HMRC’s Making Tax Digital legislation. 
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Expenses

• D365 Finance’s expenses module handles everything, from out-of-pocket expenses and mileage rate tiers to per diems and corporate credit card transactions. The module is customisable, enabling you to select relevant fields and use configuration to align the software with your organisation’s expenses policies, for example, by setting a maximum spend for meals or hotels. 
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• The expenses function allows you to connect to card providers and import employee credit card transactions directly into the module itself, and you can set up workflow functionality to ensure the correct member of staff gives approval for each expense submitted. In addition, a mobile app makes it easy for employees to submit their expense claims, wherever and whenever they need to. 

Underrated features

Electronic reporting

• This out-of-the-box function allows you to configure the format of incoming and outgoing electronic documents, which in turn allows you to do e-invoicing. There’s no coding required – output documents, such as purchase orders, can be customised from the front end, enabling you to maintain compliance with constantly changing regulations with minimal hassle and no code. 
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Task Recorder

• This tool enables you to capture your business activities and save them as recordings to build a library of core business processes and step-by-step documents which can then be exported and used as training manuals or replayed as a step-by-step system walkthrough guide for end users.