Dynamics 365 Business Central New User Training (Video)

During this recorded webinar, one of our Dynamics 365 Business Central consultants will go over basic concepts and features that will help you get started and become more familiar with Business Central.

Topics discussed during this session include:

• How to log-in – 1:55
• Overview of Role Center – 4:25
• How to switch between companies – 6:00
• Using the search functionality – 8:00
• Overview of Dimensions – 10:00
• Overview of Master Records – 13:00
• Attaching documents – 16:40
• Adding a note – 17:05
• Overview of Transactions – 18:40
• Overview of List Pages – 32:00
• Overview of Filtering – 34:25
• Overview of Exporting and Editing in Excel – 36:10
• Common Filter functions – 37:40
• Personalization – 40:20
• Creating shortcuts – 43:40
• Pop-out window feature – 44:30
• Overview of Configuration Package – 45:30
• Submitting Feature Recommendations – 48:30
• Q&A – 50:00

If you’re a Dynamics GP user who has taken advantage of the CSP-EP offer or if you’re a new Dynamics 365 Business Central user, watch the above video to learn more about Dynamics 365 Business Central’s functionalities.

Contact us if you have any questions about Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Transcript below:

Tess: Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking some time out of your schedule today for our “Dynamics 365 Business Central New User Training” webinar. My name is Tess, and I’m the facilitator today. Before I pass it over to our presenter, I want to remind you that if you have any questions during the webinar, please type them into the questions area in the control panel on the right-hand side of your screen, and we’ll answer the questions at the end of the presentation. This session will be recorded and will be posted on our blog later this week. So now I’d like to introduce our presenter today, Rudy Balasabas, who is a solution specialist on our Dynamics 365 Business Central team at Encore. So, Rudy, I will pass it over to you.

Rudy: Thanks, Tess. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining this webinar. As Tess said, my name is Rudy Balasabas. I work on the Business Central team here. So, today, I’ll be going over a new user training. So this is the training that we provide our clients. So if they have any new users that come into the organization, this is the training that we provide. So if I go to the agenda, it does look like a lot. So this training usually takes about a couple of hours to do an in-depth user training. For this session, I’ll just go over as kind of the high-level overviews of how to navigate through Business Central, the different window elements, and so on. So if you are interested in kind of doing the full version of this training, feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll definitely schedule that out for you.

So there are a few topics here. I won’t go in this exact order, but I’ll try to include as much as I can here. Okay. So with that in mind, I’ll just switch to my browser here. So, as most of you are aware, Business Central is on the cloud. So to access Business Central would be just on your browser. When you first join the organization, you’ll get set up with an Office 365 account. You’ll get set up with an email address and password. So that’s the credentials you’ll be using to log into Business Central.

So, when you first log in, you would go into home.dynamics.com, and then the login screen will appear. So you would enter your email address here. So I’ll just do that. Let me just grab my address here. So my email address was kind of odd because it’s our tenant environment. It’s my demo tenant. So yours will likely have yourname@yourorganization.com. Okay. So you just click Next. I’ll just enter my password. Okay. Once you log in, you’ll enter this landing page here with all your Office 365 apps. What you want to look for is Business Central. So, as you can see here, I have two environments. So this first one here on the left is my production live environment. And then you might have up to three sandboxes. This environment I have one sandbox. So your sandbox, it’s usually a copy of your live environment, but it’s a sandbox. You can play around with it. You can practice. You can learn foreign functionality for Business Central. But for this webinar, I’ll go into my production environment here.

So, to kind of bypass having to log in every time, there are some tricks here to make it a shortcut. So once you log into Business Central, you can just highlight this URL here and just drag it onto your toolbar at the top. There’s various ways you can do it as well. You can make this shortcut on your desktop, and then you just click that link, open that browser, and then it’ll land on this page. You can also make this your homepage so that when you open a browser, it automatically lands on this page.

Okay. So, once you first log into Business Central, you’ll land on this. It’s called your role center. So, depending on how you’re initially set up, your role center might look different. So for my role center, I’m currently set up as business manager. With business manager, you can see the various…all the different modules, which is kind of perfect for me because I’ve worked in most modules when I’m troubleshooting or helping clients. So if you wanted to…say you’re doing AP most of the time, or you work in inventory, you’re an inventory manager, for example, you can always change your role center by going to the My Settings here and then go to My Settings, and then role is right here. So you can choose from the different roles that are available. So if I choose inventory manager here and click okay, my role center will refresh. And then you can see that these links at the top here as well is more inventory specific. All the tiles here are more related to inventory, but I’ll just change it back to business manager for this demo. As you can see, there’s other roles here. So, as you work in Business Central much more, you’ll get to see maybe there’s a different role that you prefer. So, have a look through these roles to see if one fits you. Okay.

So, another thing for…actually, I’ll just refresh that, and then I’ll go into My Settings. I just wanted to show one other thing. So if I go back into My Settings. If you have multiple companies, this is where you would switch into that other company. So, right now I’m in Cronus USA, Inc, if I just click this icon. I don’t have any other companies setup on this environment, but you likely will have some. So this is where you would switch into them. Another trick is if you want to multitask, there is a possibility to open different companies at the same time in different browsers. So, if I just cancel out of here, and copy this link, and then start a new tab, and then open this, I’ll have now two instances of Business Central open. And then this company, I can switch into a different company, and then if I have multiple screens, I can pull this out, and then move it to my other screen. So that’s just one way to kind of streamline your work processes. Okay. So that’s an overview of the role center.

The next topic I want to go over is “The Main Ways You Can Navigate Through Business Central.” So, I find there’s two ways and it really depends on your preference. If you’re someone that does the same type of functionality in Business Central on a daily basis, say you’re an AP, and you’re doing invoices and payments all the time, you might have all the items that you go into within your role center. This is where you would do your invoicing, payments. So you can just click through from your role center. The other way is…actually, the way that a lot of users navigate Business Central is using the search functionality.

So, if I just do this search here. I just wanted to go over how user friendly this is and how intuitive this search function is. So, if I just want to enter an invoice, I can just search it right away, and then it’ll have some results. But the cool thing about Business Central is you don’t actually have to type in the whole word. You can just type in the first three letters of the first word and the first three letters of the second word, and it’ll start trying to filter and find what you’re looking for.

So another example is your detailed trial balance. Maybe you don’t wanna type that out because it’s quite long. So you can just go with Det Tr Bal. So, it’ll start finding what you’re looking for. It makes your work process a bit quicker. And then once you work in this for a little longer, you’ll get faster and do it in searching these items. Okay. So if I search for a trial balance, I just want to show another thing here, you’ll have your results, but there’s also this documentation section. So if I expand this, you’ll see that if you’re ever lost and you don’t know what a certain window does, there’s always these documentation links that tell you something about what you’re trying to search for. So, if I go into how to view temporary balances, it’ll open the Microsoft instructions link with some steps on how to do whatever you’re searching for, right? So this is a really good resource because it kind of gives you the instructions right away. Okay. So that’s the search functionality and how to navigate through Business Central.

The next topic is the concept of dimensions. So if I go to my chart of accounts. So this is my chart of accounts. So these are all my GL accounts here, GL account numbers. If you’re coming from another system, for example, GP, you might be used to the concept of segments. So, you might have the first segment is the actual GL account, so what type of account is it. Is it an asset, expense, and so on? And then you might have one, two, or more other segments. So the next segment could be your department or your region, and then the next segment is another type of way to do your reporting.

The way Business Central is set up, it’s a bit different. The standard way is your chart of accounts is just one segment. So, it does make your chart of accounts a bit shorter and a bit cleaner. So, that’s one thing about Business Central. And also, if you wanted to then post to different departments or regions within that GL account, you would post it to a dimension. So if I just search dimension here. So currently, I have two dimensions. So I have customer group and department. This is my demo environment. And then if I wanted to see the values of these dimensions, I will go to dimension and dimension values. Okay. So within the customer group dimension, I have three values, so large, medium, small. And then if I go back and go to department, I’ll see the departments that are set up here. So, that just gives you an idea of how Business Central is setup. Later on, I’ll actually show you how to post to these dimensions. Okay. And then just a side note here. So as you can see, Business Central, when you open a link, it opens pages on top of it. So to go back, there’s three ways. So you can click the arrow button here, you can also just click your Esc button, and then also the other way is to just click anywhere within the left side. Okay. All right. So that’s dimensions. For more information about Dimensions, please see our Dimensions in Dynamics 365 Business Central blog article.

The next few topics I’ll talk about is the different window elements that you’ll see within Business Central. So, if I go back to my homepage here. So, the next few examples I’ll be kind of going through from the point of view of an AP clerk, so someone that enters invoices and does payments. The first type of window that I wanted to go over is your master record window. So, this would be your vendors, your customers, your items. Other type of master records are your jobs. Your chart of accounts is considered a master record. So, for this demonstration, I’ll go over the vendors as an example here.

So if I just click vendors, you can also search for vendors, you’ll see all the vendors listed here that are set up that exists. So I only have a few. You’ll likely have a lot more than this. So let’s just open one vendor here. And the setup is very similar across all modules. You’ll have different sections here, different sections that you can minimize and collapse. And then there’s gonna be a stat box pane here that I’ll go over. So, for this vendor card, really basic information here. So general, you can show more the general information there, address and contact information. Invoicing. This is an important area because you have to set up your vendor posting group and general business posting group. So what these are, are the default accounts that get posted, your GL accounts that get posted when you post any transaction to this vendor.

So vendor posting group, for example, if I just drill into it here, there’s only one setup, but if I drill in and expand this, you’ll see that anything posted to domestic vendors will post to this payables account, and then there’s these other GL accounts that are set up for other types of transactions. Okay? Usually, you’ll have maybe different vendor posting groups for different regions of vendors. So you might have one for U.S. vendors or Canadian vendors because you wanna post to specific GL accounts payables accounts, right? Okay.

And then payments. Payments is an important one as well. So that determines your default payment terms codes for that vendor. Payment Method Code. When you’re doing your check run or EFT run, this is an important field. If you’re doing EFTs, this is where you would enter their bank account number. This is the one that gets used when you’re paying by EFT. I think that’s all I want to show with that. And then if I just minimize this…anything that you see where you can hover and there’s a link here is considered a flow field. So, as you can see balance. So if I click this, it will actually drill down into the vendor ledger entries that make up that balance. So, these are all the invoices that are due. So how it determines it’s a balance is because there’s a remaining amount here. Okay.

So if I open this stat box pane, you’ll just see other flow fields that are available. So other statistical information that you can review and look for that’s specific just to this vendor. And then if you scroll down, there’s some other statistical information about this vendor here. Okay. With this stat box pane, this side pane here, there’s also Attachments tab here. So if you’re trying to go paperless in your organization, this is a good feature to kind of get in the habit of using. So, if you want to attach a document related to this vendor, maybe their shipping information or other information related to this vendor, you can search that and then attach it to this vendor.

The other thing you can do really useful is adding a note. So, if I just add a note here. When you add a note, it does have the date stamp and the user. So my username here is admin. And then you can always keep adding notes as you go along. It just gives a good history of the vendor itself. Okay. And, again, this stat box pane and its ability to attach, it appears in many areas in Business Central. So for your customers, you can attach documents there. If you’re doing invoices, you can attach the actual invoice instead of having to print it. You can have it live within the transaction itself and in Business Central. Okay.

So, that’s the sections there. And in the top here are just other shortcuts. So if I wanted to say let’s go to more, if I wanted to run reports regarding this vendor, I can do it on the fly here. If I wanted to do an invoice right away with the contact information all filled out, then I just have to enter the line details. I can click that here. I can do other transactions as well. Okay. And again, the theme is quite the same, and the setup is the same no matter which module you’re working on. Okay. So, that’s an example of a master record window.

The next section is how to actually enter transactions in Business Central. So, there’s two main ways to enter transactions. First is through a document page or a journal. So, again, from the point of view of an AP person…in AP you’re usually entering invoices. So, I’ll go through that example here. So I already have it as a shortcut here, but as I said, you can always search it. And then there’s also a shortcut key to get into this search bar which is all Q, and then it’ll pop up. So, little tip there. So I just searched for purchase invoices. So, when I go with the purchase invoices, you’ll see a list of all the invoices that haven’t been posted yet. So these have been entered but not posted.

So, same idea. If I go to sales invoice. So, it’s just the opposite concept but same idea. Here’s all the invoices that have been entered. For this example, I’ll just enter a new purchase invoice. You just click New here. Okay. So, when you’re entering an invoice, just a blank invoice from scratch, you would enter your vendor number first. There’s a few ways to do this. So you can click the drop-down and just choose the vendor, or you can start entering…if you know the vendor number, you can just enter that. If you don’t know the vendor number, if you just know the name, you can start typing the vendor. But just to kind of pinpoint this functionality even further, not likely, but if you don’t know the vendor number, vendor name, you just know the contact person, you can also just type that out, and then Business Central will try to find that as well. So, this search field, it doesn’t just search the vendor number and name, it searches the other fields as well.

Okay. So I’ll just choose a vendor here. And then you’ll notice this red asterisk sign as you go through. This means it’s a required field. So, vendor invoice number. That’s usually the invoice number you receive from your vendor. And then everything else is pretty standard, the dates default to whatever the work date is on your system. And then the next section is where you would fill out the details, so what are you expensing here. So, there’s some options. The most popular one is GL account. So if you choose that, you just enter the GL account you want to expense. Quantity and $100. Let’s do $100 here.

All right. If you wanna post it to this field expense but also a specific department or a dimension, so there’s these two dimensions here that I went through earlier. So maybe I want to post it also to HR, and then it’s a large customer group. So, that’s how to close it to a dimension. There’s other ways I believe if you go somewhere up here, I just can’t recall. There is another way to post a dimension here. Yeah. So, you’ll just have to look through there, but I am used to just entering it in the line. It’s faster that way. And then you can keep adding lines. Another example is an item. Maybe you’re purchasing a specific inventory item. These do have to get set up, your inventory items. So you can do it there. When you do this, it connects to your inventory module, and it goes through all that functionality that’s available for inventory. Okay. So I’ll just post it to HR, again, there. Okay.

Oh, just one more other type of line as well is quite convenient is comments. So if you do comment, you can just add a comment here. That’ll just live with the transaction. So that’s convenient if you want to explain what this purchase is. So, let’s add that there, and then you have your totals. And if you scroll down invoice details, most of this should populate from the vendor card. So it’ll pull in whatever is on the vendor card here, right? So the payment terms code automatically fills in. Okay.

So, again, if you go to stat box pane, you can attach the actual invoice to this transaction or some notes. Okay. So if you’re done entering the transaction, a recommended thing to do before you post is do a preview posting here. So what preview posting does, it’ll show the various effects on the other areas in Business Central. So, first is a GL entry. So this will show the payables account that’s getting credited and the other GLs that are affected. So, another thing is item ledger entry. Since we’re posting an inventory item, it’ll show the effect on the item ledger entry and other areas here as well, right? So, this is a good thing to reviews just to make sure you’re posting to the right areas, right?

So once that’s done, you just click Post and post. Okay. And then it just asks you if you want to view that posted invoice. You can click yes there, but I usually click no. And then that’ll disappear from this list. So once it’s posted, it’ll go to posted purchase invoice. So, these are all your posted invoices. Yeah, I have a lot of tests through my demos. So that’s that. Okay. So, again, it’s quite similar to other modules, how to enter transactions through a document window. Another one is your credit memos. So, if you’re entering a credit memo, you would search for purchase credit memos. In the same idea, click New, and then fill in all the various details here for your credit memo. Okay. So that’s one way to do a transaction is through a document page.

Another type of transaction is through a journal. So, if I just search for journal, you’ll see that there’s various types of journals that you can do. It really depends on your role. You can do your fixed asset journals. One that is popular is payment journals, that’s where you would actually start your check run or your payment run if you work in jobs. So, if you’re coming from GP, that’s kind of the project accounting equivalent. Your job journal, that’s where you would enter transactions. For this demo, I’ll go through how to do a journal entry. So that would be your general journals. Okay.

Let’s see here. It looks like I have some filled in. Let me just blank this out. Okay. If this is your first-time kind of using GP, you’ll notice there’s a couple of ways to enter a journal. So, usually, it’ll be blank when you start. So, this is your batch. So usually, it depends on your company’s preference here. Again, usually, there’s a batch for each user in Business Central. And then they would just use their own batch to post their own entries, right? So I’ll just use default for now. And then posting date, I set my workday to April 1 for some reason. So, it defaults to April 1. But if you click T, that’s a shortcut to do with today’s date…never mind.

You can see your work date here. Oh, it’s set up for April 1. Oh, this is the work date. So if you do T…T is a shortcut to do today’s date, whatever your system date is. There’s other ways to do kind of a shortcut. So if you just enter say 10…oh, sorry, so 0110, it’ll know that you’re trying to do January 10th. So if you do 0125, it’ll know the 25th day of the current month. So that’s just another tip there, a fast way to enter your dates, assuming it’s not today’s date. Okay. And then the rest you can fill in as you go here. So this is the GL account. This is the first GL account I wanna post to. So, if I just choose any account there.

So, how this works is positive numbers are your debits. So I’m debiting this account here, 61700. And then the offset is your balance account. So this would be your credit, so which account do you wanna credit. Okay. And then if I just blank that out, sorry, you’ll notice that the $100 here, it’s out of balance. So, it balances once I put a balance account here. Okay. And then if you scroll to the right, again, you’ll see those two dimensions that I mentioned earlier. So now you can just choose the dimension that you wanna post to. Okay.

So that’s one way of entering your journal entry. You can enter more lines as you go. But I want to show…I do notice we have a lot of GP viewers here that are on GP. Another way is if you click Page and show fewer columns, you’ll get the traditional way of entering a journal. So you have your batch name here, your document number posting date. And then you can see the setup here has changed. It’s not one long line. You have your debit column and your credit column. So this would be your first account that we chose. So this is a good error message to get here to show you here. So your bank account GL, any of your sub-ledger type of GL accounts, your AP GL, your payables account, you can set it up so that you can’t direct post because you wouldn’t wanna direct post to those type of accounts because then that would make your reconcile not balance. So, that’s a good control to have. And that lives within the current accounts, our GL account record.

So if I just choose a different account there. So this would be my debit. And then here’s my credits here. So, that balance of the account. And then you can add other lines as you go there. So once you’re done entering, again, it’s recommended to do a preview posting just to make sure there’s no…see there’s an error here, document number must have a value. So test then post. Oh, it cleared it out. I’ll just enter it again here. Okay. So it’s always good to do a preview posting to see what those errors are, and then once you’re ready, you just click Post. Okay. I’ll see if there’s anything else to show here, some good tips. So I won’t go over it, but you can enter entries in Excel and copy that in or paste that in. So there’s that option. And I think that’s all I want to show there. So that’s how to enter a journal. Again, if you’re working in payables, you would do a payment journal. As you go, you’ll learn these other types of windows that you’ll do transactions in. Okay.

All right. So, the next type of window that I want to go over is list pages and how to start analyzing data. So, if you’re coming from GP, you probably know SmartLists if you likely will use that tool. With Business Central, there is no specific SmartList window that you open. That functionality lives within the various list pages. So, an example of list pages is vendors that I already went over. So these are master record list pages. And then other list pages is…so the posted purchase invoices. So, this is another example of a list page. List page just means data that you can start analyzing on. And then another one that you’ll likely come across is ledger entries.

So if I just searched ledger entries, and I show all. So, ledger entries are basically all your transactional data that have been posted. So, coming from GP or another system, the SmartList feature has, for example, account transactions. So that would be all your GL transactions. With Business Central, the equivalent is your general ledger entries. So, another one is vendor ledger entries. So if I just go into that, it’ll show all the vendor entries that have gone through, all the invoices, payments, credit memos, it’ll show that. If I go into…what’s another one? So customer ledger entries would show, again, all your sales invoices, purchase payments, or credits that have gone through all your cash receipts. It’ll have it all here all the transactional data.

For my demo here, I’ll go through the general ledger entries. So these will be all your journal entries that have gone through, or if you posted an invoice, this is the GL effects. The GL entries would land on this page, on this list page, right? So if you scroll through, it’ll have everything from the beginning of time. So once you get into a list page, a general ledger entries page here, you can start analyzing the data. So, I’ll just go through how to filter first. So, this filter function here, you just click that part, and this side section will open. So now you can start filtering this data however you want. Maybe you’re interested in…so let’s just add a filter for anything posted. Let’s see. 20200930, anything up on September 30th.

Another way to do it, you can do a range, so dot, dot. Dot, dot is a range. So maybe I wanna go from September 30th to the end of the year. Okay. So populate with more records there. If I want to filter this even further, maybe I just wanted to see anything posted to a certain GL account, GL account number, let’s see, 10900. Let’s actually widen the range here, so we get more records. Let’s do 0630, June 30th. Okay. It’ll just pull in all the depreciation GL records there. Okay. So you can start adding more filters. I know some systems might have the ability to just filter on a maximum of maybe four or five fields, but with Business Central, you can just keep adding by pressing this filter icon.

But if you’re satisfied with your filter here, you can do a few things. You can click Page, and open in Excel, and then it will export it to Excel. Oops, and that’s my other screen. So it just exports to Excel here, and then you can do your various Excel functionality against the data. Another thing to note is also this Edit in Excel feature. I won’t go through it because there is some setup to get it to work. But once it’s all set up, how it works is that you can export your data into Excel and then do some edits to that data. But there are only certain fields that you can edit, depending on the ledger entry window you’re in. So you can edit in Excel, and then there’s a Publish button that you press, and then it’ll publish those changes back into Business Central. A colleague of mine here at Encore actually has a blog (How to Set Up Edit in Excel for Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS) that goes over in detail how to set that all up. So, again, it’s just this edit in Excel button. If you go to other pages in Business Central, this feature is there as well. Okay. So that’s how to export to Excel. Okay. And then another thing here is, if you have a filter that you run, or actually let me go over a few things here. So, let’s do a mount because I want to show another thing here.

So, as you can see, there’s a range that you can do. You can also do greater than. So maybe amount is greater than zero. I didn’t like why I did that, greater than 1,000, the things there. Let’s see. Oh, okay, so it’s a negative. So less than 1,000. Okay. So it’ll start filtering some data there. So, I just want to kind of present that there’s different ways to filter. And if I go back to my PowerPoint, I’ll show you here, there’s…these are the common ways to filter your data or other ways you can filter. So, you can do equals. You can do range, which I showed earlier. You can do less than greater than and these other ones here. So, you can get quite creative on your filters. If I just go through the next slide here, this is a date filter.

So, again, if you just entered 27, it’ll know 27 day of the current month, and so on. And then T as I showed earlier is a shortcut to get today’s date and others here. So, different ways you can filter your data. I just wanted to show that. Okay. So, if I’m satisfied with this filter, and maybe I wanna run it every month, and I don’t want to enter these fields all the time, I can click this Save icon. You can name it whatever you want here, depreciation, and then just press Enter. If I now just get out of here, and I go back into general ledger entries, and now I just want to go to that filter. So, that saved you. So you just click all, and then it’ll show up in the shortcut here. Okay. So that’s kind of how to save the filter so that it saves you time if you run it on a monthly basis.

Okay. So related to this kind of brings me to our next topic is say there’s…maybe there’s this column here that you want to add or a field that you wanna do a filter on, but it’s not here. This leads me into the personalized function. So if you click…if you want to add a column, you click this gear icon and press Personalize. Okay. So this will open. So if you click More, and then let’s go through the beginning here and click…it’s not working here. General. Let’s do personalized. Let’s go to vendors.

So, for some reason, I’m working on the general ledger entries. It might just be my environment there. But this is just another list page example. So maybe there’s a column here that I don’t see, and I wanna pull it in. So this personalized function, if you click Field, this right-hand section will open with the other columns that are available on this specific table. So maybe I wanna go pull in the zip code. So you just drag that in, and then the zip codes will enter. So you can also hide certain columns. So if you click Hide, it hides it. So, it’s just a way to get your data a bit cleaner, or if you wanna see what you usually wanna see on a daily basis, you can use it by the personalized function. Another thing you can do is freeze panes. So right now it’s frozen to this number column. So this is the column that you’ll always see when you scroll to the right. You can also just freeze pane up to here. Set freeze pane, and then now that will keep showing as well. Okay. So that’s personalized.

I know there’s something else I wanted to show. I just can’t recall. No. Okay. So, again, if you go to your homepage…actually, let’s click Done here. Another way you can use this personalized function. So we just turn it back on. If you highlight various sections, there’s these other ways to personalize. So you can move it. You can just drag this and move it along. You can drag these as well. You can hide some fields. If you scroll down, maybe there’s a section here you don’t really look at on a daily basis, so you can clean it up and hide it. So, just various things you can kind of…so that you can personalize your environment a bit more. When you do changes with this function, it only affects your own user login. So you’re not affecting how others view their Business Central.

All right. Okay. So that’s how to personalize. So the next few sections are just some extra items I wanted to go over. So if you find that you use a certain window all the time, and you don’t wanna search for it, you wanna make it a shortcut, you can always just go to that page. So if I let’s say enter sales invoices all the time. So you can search the page and then hit this bookmark icon. So if I click that…once you do that, it’ll bookmark it, and it should show up now on your homepage here, sales invoices. You can also go within the page itself. And then the bookmark icon appears here as well. Okay.

And another tip is if you’re…again, if you want to kind of work more efficiently and you have multiple windows, you can go to a certain window, maybe you’re entering an invoice, and you wanna move this to another screen but still keep your Business Central here open on this screen. So, if I wanted to pop this out, I would just click this icon here. Okay. So now it pops up the sales invoice screen. Just wait for that to load. And then you can just move this to another screen. So that’s just a tip to make your process a bit more streamlined. Maybe you want to look maybe at another window here while you’re entering a sales invoice, kind of reference some information when entering. Okay. So shortcuts and how to bookmark a page.

And then a bonus item I want to cover. I won’t go into too much detail. But if you’re coming from another system, again, you’re likely using some sort of integration tool. In GP, you might be using Integration Manager or SmartConnect. The great thing about Business Central is there is a built-in integration tool already in Business Central out of the box, and that’s called Configuration Package. So with integrations, what you’re usually trying to do is you have data in Excel, and you want to…you want a quick way to import that into Business Central. So maybe you have invoices, or maybe you have a high volume of vendors, new vendors that you wanna import in.

So with Configuration Package, that’s the tool that you would use to do that. So if I search for Configuration Package…I already have some that are setup. And it’s really easy to set these up. There’s actually a blog video that we have that goes over this process. I think I have it open, How to easily import data into Dynamics 365 Business Central, so maybe if you’re interested, have a look at this. It does have a video that goes through the process. So if I go back into Business Central, the process would be…let’s go into…So as you can see, I made it for maybe you wanna import customers in or if you have a large volume of journal entries, maybe it has 100 lines, you have it in an Excel, and you can import it in, I made one for that.

So If I just look through the vendors’ one. So your process would be if it’s your first time, you would export this Excel file. Okay. So, it always exports with the existing vendors that exist. If I just deleted those records, you can now just save this into maybe a shared folder in your organization. And then anytime you have to import a high volume of vendors in this example, you just fill in this Excel file, save it, and then you would go back into Configuration Package, go back into this screen, and then click on Excel, Import from Excel, and then it’ll import it into Business Central. So, again, if you do general journals, same idea. You’ll just notice that the table is different. So I set it up so that it goes into the general journal page that I showed earlier. Okay. Let’s see here. Okay. And one last thing I wanted to cover as well. So that’s kind of my presentation of Business Central.

Another thing I wanted to share is with Business Central, we always depend on our clients to give us feedback on new features that they want in Business Central in upcoming updates. So a good website to go if you have an idea is this area here. It’s called experience.dynamics.com. And then this is the Business Central section. So, as you can see, there’s…if I go into financial management here…if you have an idea that you want in the next rollouts of versions of Business Central, you can submit it. And as you can see, there’s submission here. And then you can get people to vote on it so that Microsoft makes it a priority in upcoming releases. And then you can always search may be that your idea is already posted on here. You can search for it and vote on it, right? And then you can see the various ideas and the statuses they’re in. So completed just means it’s currently in Business Central now. Plan means it’s coming and then which release date it is, right? So, again, our clients are the ones that use it every day. So they would be the best to give that feedback just to make Business Central better in future releases. And I think that’s all I have. So I’ll send it back to Tess for any questions.

Tess: Awesome. Thank you, Rudy. So, yes, we have had some questions that have come in, but if you do have any, please enter them into the questions area in the control panel on the right-hand side. But I will get started. So, the first question, Rudy, is does the search function work to search transactions or just functions and reports?

Rudy: Oh, good question. So, if I just go into Business Central again. This search icon, this specific one just searches for various pages in Business Central, not transactional data. But if you go into a specific area, so maybe, you know, ledger entries, or let’s actually go into purchase invoices. It has its own search bar there. So, click this search, and it’ll search for anything on any column on this table. So if I just go…maybe I’m just interested in the Fabrikam invoices, they’ll just filter to that. I think that answers your question. Hopefully, it does.

Tess: Awesome. Thank you. The next question came in when you’re in the vendor card, and it is how did you hide the vendor stat box on the right-hand side of the screen?

Rudy: Oh, the stat box. Yeah. So, if I go into the vendors, I think you’re talking about this icon here, you just click this icon to hide it and make it appear? And then it’ll show up actually. Yeah. So I didn’t really go over this part. So if you’re on the list page, and if you click through, the stat box will change as you click different records. And then if you’re within the record itself, it’ll just show that particular vendor’s data. And then you can hide it from here as well.

Tess: Okay. Thank you. The next question is, “Can we customize the homepage to our user rather than the title in the company?”

Rudy: I think you’re talking about the name of the role center. I’m not sure if you can do that. Let’s see if you can do. No, I don’t think you can. But that would be customization to try to rename this, or there’s also ways to customize this so that it’s the default one for all users. So, if I choose a specific role center, if I wanted that to take effect to all users, we could do that. That is possible. And then with regards to the personalized function, that’s more for the user itself, whoever’s logged in.

Tess: Okay. Thank you. The next question is, “Can we set up a vendor to always pull up a specific account and dimensions with every invoice posting?”

Rudy: Right. So with vendors and any master records, there’s the functionality of creating templates. So when you create a vendor, there’s an icon where you can pull up a specific template, like a vendor template. And an example would be if you have Canadian vendors, and they all have the same posting group payment terms codes. You can create a template for that, and then you can use it when creating new Canadian vendors. Yeah. So that’s possible.

Tess: Okay. Thank you. The next question is in the journal entry, what if you have multiple credits for one debit?

Rudy: So within a journal, so you can add as many lines as you want. So, let’s just go back into…yeah. So this would be an example here. I don’t know how it defaulted there, but you can keep adding lines as you go. So, you have maybe another account here that you wanna do 300 on, and then you can see that it’s out of balance. So you just keep entering your debits. So maybe you have $100, and then whatever your offset is, you can make it your credit. So I’m out 400. So now it’s 400 there. Okay. So, yeah. With journals, you can add as many lines as you want. It doesn’t have to be one line is one total and one line is the exact opposite. You can add as many lines there.

Tess: Perfect. Thanks, Rudy. The next question is, “Can you attach document support in the GL?”

Rudy: In the GL. Let’s see. I think you’re talking about when you enter a journal. If it’s a complicating journal, you could… I believe you can. Let me see. Yes. I think you can. I just have to clarify that because I know that sometimes you have it…you do have a complicating journal entry, and you wanna attach maybe an Excel file. So that is possible. I’ve seen that. I just can’t recall the exact steps to do that, but I’ll definitely get back to you on that.

Tess: Okay. Perfect. I will share the information with you, Rudy. The next question is, “Can you review how to create financial reports?” Are there default reports?

Rudy: Right. So that’s a question we always get when we’re doing user training. So, the functionality for financials in Business Central is called your account schedules. So, that’s the defaults…that’s out of box financial reporting tool that comes with Business Central. So if I just search account schedules, these are the statements that are available. And then you can always create your own. So, account schedules, it usually takes a whole separate training session to create your own schedules. It’s very user friendly. So if I just go into an income here, my income statement, and I go to process and edit account schedule, you can see that this account schedule, it makes up these lines, and then these are the GL accounts. So you can do ranges and so on. If you could process and edit column layout setup, this is where you would set up the various columns. So maybe you have a column for your actual amounts and then another column for your budget. So, yep. So with financials, you can start…maybe these default ones work for you, but you can also create your own statements. Oh, and I’ll just add also, if you wanted to get more complex, maybe you’re used to Get Reports or a different system, Business Central does work with those other systems. You can always connect your data to Get Reports to create statements from there.

Tess: The next question is when will there be a webinar on financial reports?

Rudy: Good question. So, we do have a few webinars scheduled, but it’s always good to get feedback on what people want for our next topics for other webinars. So, we’ll take that into consideration, and maybe you’ll see it in future webinars. So, we’re trying to do these more on a regular basis. So likely that might…if we get enough popularity on that topic, we’ll make it a webinar.

Tess: Yes. Thank you for that suggestion. All right. Well, I don’t see any other questions that have come in, Rudy. So, if you could go to just those two slides that I had, and I will wrap it up. So I just wanted to highlight some of our upcoming webinars, and all of our webinars can be seen on our Events page. So I’ll add that link to the chat. And if you could go to the next slide as well, Rudy. I’ll just add those links to the chat here. And there we go. I added those to the chat.

So one is about receiving emails from Encore. So if you’d like to receive our newsletters, our product and service emails, or know about our upcoming events or training opportunities, you can sign up through that link there. And I also added a link for Encore Care Unlimited, which is our support plan. So that link explains the different features that are involved in Encore Care. And, of course, you can always contact us if you have any questions about anything that was discussed today or about those links. So thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and thank you, Rudy, for that great presentation. And have a great rest of your day, everyone. Thank you.

Rudy: Bye, everyone.