Dynamics 365 2022 Wave 2 Release Highlights: ERP

Twice a year, Microsoft announces new features and updates across their Dynamics 365 platform. Here, our team have picked out some ERP highlights from the 2022 Wave 2 release, showing you what’s to come for Dynamics 365 Finance, Business Central and more.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Core financials

Vendor invoice management and OCR

The recently released subscription billing feature has been further enhanced with the addition of ‘split billing', which enables multiple customers to be billed from a single billing schedule. Where multiple customers are specified on a billing schedule, an invoice can be produced for many customers from a single billing schedule.

There have also been updates to vendor invoice management and OCR regarding configuration settings, which will enable data processing to be flexible enough to fulfil multiple business needs. These updates include:

• Define mandatory invoice data fields: determine the minimal data required when creating vendor invoices. Microsoft provides a default setting, but you can tailor it to your organisation's needs by adding or removing fields.
• Define confidence score of invoice recognition: set the quality standard for invoice data to be recognized by AI Builder. When the OCR process is finished, a confidence score regarding the structured invoice data for each field on the invoice will be sent. You can configure the confidence scores to indicate differences in the severity of the detected errors.
• Define mandatory review needed before invoice creation: determines if a manual review is needed for each recognised invoice.

Also, the ‘try new hub’ feature provides a central place to let recognised invoice data be validated and pre-processed before being converted to a vendor invoice in Dynamics 365 Finance.

The staging area will accept any accuracy level of recognised data from the AI builder – without regard to whether the invoice data is complete. The data can be enriched and validated automatically according to rules or even machine learning during the import process. It’s also possible to review and edit invoices manually from the user interface.

New bank reconciliation report

An update to the bank reconciliation report will provide clearer overall information of the bank reconciliation status and bank transactions details in a certain period.

Financial tags

The addition of financial tags will allow organisations to track user-defined fields on accounting entries posted to the general ledger, which will eliminate the need to create financial dimensions that contain value which are not reusable. The financial tag values can be used for reporting purposes and ledger settlement.

Features include the ability to enable organisations to define up to 15 financial tags, which will be stored on accounting entries posted to the general ledger. Financial tag names can be defined by the user, giving insight to data entry clerks about the data expected in each field.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Manufacturing

Monitoring equipment with Sensor Data Intelligence

The Sensor Data Intelligence add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is an updated, renamed version of the IoT Intelligence add-in previously available for Supply Chain Management. It enables your organisation to drive business processes based on sensor data from machines and equipment on the production floor. The new version of Sensor Data Intelligence enables you to:

• Collect details from machines and equipment to update maintenance asset counter values in Supply Chain Management to drive predictive maintenance
• Leverage a simple onboarding wizard to set up the solution, as opposed to manually installing and configuring components in Lifecycle Services
• Deploy components on your own subscription, allowing you additional flexibility to manage Azure components
• Configure, scale, and extend the solution as business logic running on Azure components, which are now managed on your own subscription, giving you the freedom to customise as needed to meet your unique business needs
  
  

Procurement

Source products and materials from multiple vendors

A new feature has been implemented to allow automatic vendor selection based on predefined split ratios to support increased supplier resilience. Planning optimisation now supports multivendor sourcing by allowing users to establish vendor sourcing ratios that are applied during master planning.

Warehouse management

Optimise warehousing setup with app insights

Businesses and consultants can utilise Azure Application Insights to analyse the way users work with the warehousing functionality of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Application Insights provides easy-to-use tools for viewing and monitoring telemetry data, which enables effective self-service monitoring and diagnosis of problems without direct involvement from Microsoft.

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Application

Updates to the core application based on popular requests for improvements include:

• Improved bank reconciliation including a test report and a statement report with two sections for outstanding reconciliations and improved automation for cheque ledger entries
• The ability to reverse journal entries from posted payment reconciliation journals
• Multiple remittance addresses available for vendors for businesses using cheque payments
• The renaming Account Schedules to Financial Reporting and improved overview of available reports
  

Country and regional availability

Continuing to increase the footprint of Business Central, more countries and regions will be added in Wave 2, bringing the total to over 100 supported localisations.

Power Platform integration

This Wave brings continuous improvements of Business Central integration with the wider Power Platform offering, including Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps. Continuous improvements with Dataverse also allows for more ambitious integrations.

Reporting

• Increased Excel capability: Users can select a specific Excel layout for consuming a report. When a report has several available Excel layouts the user can select the most appropriate.
• New Finance API: User created reports consumed in Excel and Power BI can provide more detailed analysis from the general ledger and G/L budgets with dimensions.
• Finance API: New template BI Power App, containing a set of financial reports and a dashboard with KPIs and aggregated general ledger information.
  

User experience

Users connecting via the desktop app, browser or mobile device benefit from improved usability, accessibility, performance, and stability.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Improving efficiency

We have some great efficiency features being introduced with Wave 2, including:

• Enhancements to benefits notifications to streamline and automate the following events:
  • Notify employees of their open enrolment status
  • Notify employees about planned updates due to qualifying events
  • Notify new starters when they can select their benefits
• Human Resources users will have the ability to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes to improve efficiency, for example:
  • Setting defaults for hiring
  • Automatically assigning guides based on job or position information
  • Automatically enrolling employees in compensation, benefit, and leave plans based on certain criteria

Expanding the eco-system

2022 Wave 2 introduces new integrations and provides new features that can streamline custom integrations through Microsoft Dataverse and with other Microsoft products. Wave 2 will bring capability that enhances experiences by bringing together all the training data from partner learning management systems into a single view, showing employee data in parallel.

Wave 2 looks to enable partners to quickly create integrations with Dynamics 365 Human Resources by leveraging a set of scenario-specific APIs in the integration platform, based on Microsoft Dataverse.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations

This wave brings a number of enhancements to improve the project operations processes, including:

• A new expense mobile app allows users to enter expense details on the go by capturing receipts via camera.
• New features have been added to help manage subscription-based services. These features include the ability to define and manage billing schedules, to record unbilled revenue based on the contractual agreement, and to defer costs and revenue and then recognise them based on the required schedule.
• New progress-based billing features allow project managers to split the value of the contract into a distinct schedule of values that are invoiced based on the progress of work.
• Enhanced project budgeting and time-phased features which allow project managers to view snapshots of project spend and work progress on a more granular level.

Dynamics 365 Cross-App Capabilities

Finance and Operations: Filter events by legal entity

Applying filters to the event subscription streamlines the configuration experience for events in Power Automate when there is a need to register only in specific legal entities.

To enable filtering on legal entity for business events, an option has been added on the ‘When an action is performed’ Dataverse trigger to define the legal entities for which the event registration will be applied. The option will be available to define multiple legal entities in a single registration, rather than needing to create a separate flow for each legal entity.