Deep Dive into D365: Business Central

Financial management

• The general ledger functionality within Business Central acts as the central repository for all transactions that occurs in the system. It’s fully integrated with all of the platform’s modules, providing the ability to see the end financial results of transactions. Chart of accounts can be configured based on business processes and needs. 
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• The out-of-the-box deferral functionality provides the ability to accrue revenue or expenditure over a set period, giving accurate information as to when transactions are recognised in the general ledger. 
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• Dimensions is a powerful tool, used mainly to classify income, expenditure and other transactions based on cost centre, departments, geography, and many other parameters, enabling accurate monitoring and reporting of financial data. 
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• Additionally, bank account reconciliation provides the ability to import actual bank statements and automatically match these to open bank ledger entries, ensuring consistency between the bank ledger and actual bank balance. As well as this, the payment reconciliation feature provides the capability to register bank payments and reconcile to the bank ledger at the same time. 
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Supply chain management

• The supply chain management feature offers the ability to process transactions for both customers and suppliers, providing a complete overview and control over the company’s income from sales, shipment statuses, spend on purchases, supplier’s status, purchase history and more. 
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• Requisitions can be generated for suppliers and customers and converted into an order; once orders are processed and invoiced, the system creates a three-way matching for the transaction, allowing your finance team to interrogate and report on these transactions, with easy navigation back to the source document. 
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• You can also register items that your organisation purchases or sells, whether stock, non-stock or service items. Information such as item description, name, unit, unit price, categories and default dimensions can be specified on the item. Each item can also be mapped to a product posting group with related VAT treatments. Posting group mapping determines the general ledger accounts, into which any transactions relating to the item(s) are posted. By storing item information in Business Central, purchase and sales transactions will be consistent, improving the quality of data. 
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Service management

• The service management feature within Business Central helps you provide ongoing services to your clients, enabling the creation of service contracts and recording service details, responses, contracts and more, making service history information easy to access in a single location. 
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• You have the ability to enter service items by specifying information such as service number, description, item, warranty details, customer number and vendor. Transactions (such as contract details, bill of materials and warranty information) relating to these items can be tracked as and when needed, while personnel relevant to service work orders can be allocated and the status of their work is available, giving users up-to-date visibility. 

Underrated features

Integration

• Dynamics 365 Business Central allows for flawless integration with other Microsoft products, from Power BI and Power Apps to Microsoft Flow, Excel, Teams and Dataverse, and this opens doors to a great deal of further functionality. For example, with Outlook integration, users can generate sales or purchase records directly from Outlook, without having to log into Business Central.