The New Sheriff in Town: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

There’s a “new sheriff” in town, arriving on April 2, 2018.  And its name is “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central”.

Business Central is a cloud-hosted, single, end-to-end solution for managing finances, operations, sales and customer service, and offers an opportunity to easily upgrade from your entry-level accounting software and legacy ERP systems.

In addition to the traditional financial and operational functionality in other Dynamics product offerings (as in Dynamics GP, SL, and AX), Business Central offers advanced inventory, warehouse management, and even the option of discrete manufacturing and service management as well.

Like all of Microsoft’s business solutions, Business Central integrates with the rest of Microsoft’s cloud service offerings, including Office 365, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Power BI.  And, of course, Business Central offers automated tasks and workflows, all integrated within familiar Office tools including Outlook, Word, and Excel.

Here’s a brief overview of what functionality you can expect from Dynamics Business Central.

Beyond the new release of Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft is also releasing a wave of new features and functionality across the entire Dynamics 365 product line, with hundreds of new capabilities and features in three core areas: new business applications; new intelligent capabilities infused throughout; and transformational new application platform capabilities.

For a deeper dive into the entire Dynamics 365 Spring 2018 release wave, consider downloading the 200+ page release notes PDF that covers the business solution and platform updates across all Dynamics 365 products.

Business Central applications will be available in two licensing options: Essential and Premium, which will both be sold per user per month, and will be available for sale and implementation only through an exclusive global network of Dynamics 365 partners with industry expertise, called Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners.

And yes, most importantly, Express Information Systems is an authorized Microsoft CSP Partner!

Here’s an impressive listing of the key functionality in both of the licensing options of Dynamics 365 Business Central:

Dynamics 365 Business Central – Essential Functionality

• Basic General Ledger – Set up a company and start posting to the general ledger, chart of accounts, general journals, VAT facilities, recurring journals, and source codes.
• Budgets – Work with budgets in general ledger accounts.
• Deferrals – Set up deferral templates that automate the process of deferring revenues and expenses over a pre-defined schedule.
• Basic fixed assets – Keep track of fixed assets and related transactions such as acquisitions, depreciations, write-downs, appreciations, and disposals.
• Basic receivables – Post sales transactions in journals and manage receivables; register customers and manage receivables using general journals.
• Audit trails – The system automatically assigns audit trails and posting descriptions to every transaction. In addition, users can define reason codes to create complementary audit trails.
• Bank account management – Create, operate, and manage multiple bank accounts for catering to your diverse business needs and across different currencies
• Reconciliation – Reconcile your bank statement data automatically to open bank account ledger entries end keep track of all your bank statements.
• Dimensions – Add unlimited dimensions to any ledger for advanced transaction analyses.
• Currencies – Manage multiple currencies throughout the system, including payables and receivables, general ledger reports, resource and inventory items, and bank accounts.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Contacts – Maintain an overview of your contacts and record your contact information for all business relationships.
• Campaigns – Organize campaigns based on segments of your contacts that you define.
• Opportunity management – Keep track of sales opportunities, section your sales processes into different stages, and use this information to manage your sales opportunities.
• Dynamics 365 for Sales integration – Integrate with Dynamics 365 for Sales in a few easy steps to synchronize your data, including sales orders, item availability, units of measure, and currencies.

Supply Chain Management

• Sales order management – Manage sales orders, blanket sales orders, and sales order processes.
• Purchase order management – Manage purchases, blanket orders, and purchase order processes.
• Locations – Manage inventory in multiple locations that may represent a production plant, distribution center, warehouse, showroom, retail outlet, or service car.
• Item transfers – Track inventory as it’s moved from one location to another and account for the value of inventory in transit at various locations.
• Warehouse management (Basic and Advanced) – Warehouse functionality in Business Central can be implemented in different complexity levels, depending on a company’s processes and order volume. The main difference is that activities are performed order-by-order in basic warehousing when they are consolidated for multiple orders in advanced warehousing.
• Assembly Management – To support companies that supply products to their customers by combining components in simple processes without the need of manufacturing functionality, Business Central includes features to assemble items that integrate with existing features, such as sales, planning, reservations, and warehousing.

Human Resources

• Employees – Group and track employee information and organize employee data according to different types of information, such as experience, skills, education, training, and union membership.
• Expense management – Post expenses against employee cards to track and reimburse their expenses.

Project Management

• Resources – Register and sell resources, combine related resources into one resource group, or track individual resources.
• Estimates – Monitor resource usage and get a complete overview of your capacity for each resource with information about availability and planned costs on orders and quotes.
• Jobs – Keep track of usage on jobs and data for invoicing the customer. Manage both fixed-price jobs and time-and-materials jobs.
• Time sheets – Time sheets are a simple and flexible solution for time registration with manager approval and integrate with Service, Jobs, and Basic Resources.

System-Wide Functionality

• Multiple languages – Switch languages on the client in real time, provided that the desired language is available.
• Reason codes – Define a set of reason codes that can be assigned to individual transactions throughout the system, providing user-defined audit trails.
• Extended text – Set up an unlimited number of lines to describe inventory items, resources, and general ledger accounts.
• Intrastat reporting – Automatically retrieve the necessary data to report Intrastat information to statistics authorities. Local customs authorities can inform you whether your company is obligated to file such a report.
• Outlook integration – Synchronize your to-do items and your contacts with your meetings, tasks, and contacts in Outlook.

All the following features are in addition to those listed above and are available in the Premium licensing option of Dynamics 365 Business Central.

 Service Order Management

• Service orders – Register your after-sales issues including service requests, services due, service orders, and repair requests.
• Service price management – Set up, maintain, and monitor your service prices.
• Service item management – Record and keep track of all your service items, including contract information, component management, and BOM reference and warranty information.
• Service contract management – Record details on service levels, response times, and discount levels, as well as on the service history of each contract, including used service items and parts and labor hours.
• Planning– Assign personnel to work orders and log details such as work order handling and work order status.
• Dispatching – Manage service personnel and field technician information, and filter according to availability, skills, and stock items.

Manufacturing

• Production orders – Create and manage production orders and post consumption and output to the production orders.
• Version management – Create and manage different version of the manufacturing bill of materials and routings.
• Agile manufacturing – Plan rush hours, make exceptions, and handle last-minute changes to your processes with multiple planning options.
• Supply planning – Plan for material requirements based on demand, with support for master production scheduling and materials requirements planning.
• Demand forecasting – Plan and create production and purchase orders, taking into consideration the demand forecast together with the level of available inventory and parameters of requirement planning.
• Capacity planning – Add capacities to the manufacturing process. Set up routings and use these routings on production orders and in material requirements planning.
• Machine centers – Manage capacity on several levels; on a more detailed level for machine centers and on a consolidated level for work centers.
• Finite loading – Take capacity constraints into account so that no more work is assigned to a work center than the capacities can be expected to execute during a given time period.

Is It Time For You To Migrate to the Cloud?

Helping you make the right choice is what we do best at Express Information Systems. What drives our people is serving others, imparting knowledge and delivering on the promise to take the best technical products and wrap them into the deepest touch services possible. Going above and beyond to make that happen is what we call the “Express Heart”.

We believe that helping people get more time back in their day, by working smarter with fewer steps, will make them happier with their work and help their companies thrive in a competitive landscape.

We recognize that even the smallest step forward can make a major impact. That’s who we are.

Call our professionals (210) 614-9410 on the Dynamics 365 Team and arrange for a demonstration, and to further evaluate both your organization’s needs, and the solution’s capabilities and pricing.