Functionality in Dynamics GP Compared to D365 Business Central | Sales Order Processing & Invoicing

Explore how Sales Order Processing and Sales Invoicing workflows differ between Dynamics GP and D365 Business Central. This recorded webinar provides a detailed function-to-function comparison to help your transition from Dynamics GP to D365 Business Central.

Topics Covered:

• Sales order entry
• Shipments
• Paper flow and dataflow
• Generating actual invoices
• Emailing invoices and documents

Transcript below:

– [Katie] …for our webinar, “Functionality in Dynamics GP compared to Dynamics 365 Business Central.” Today’s session will be covering sales order processing and invoicing. My name is Katie, and I will be today’s facilitator. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the question area in the control panel on the right-hand side of your screen, and we’ll answer questions at the end.

This session will be recorded and posted on our blog as well as shared with you early next week. Now I would like to introduce today’s presenter, Don McNulty, who is a solutions architect here at Encore. Don, I will pass it over to you.

– [Don] Thanks, Katie. So welcome, everyone. So today we’re going to talk about sales order processing and invoicing. So this is where we put the orders in from our customers, generate the invoices, and either send them by mail or by email out to the different clients. We’re not going to talk a lot about inventory. We are going to be selling inventory parts.

So we’re in a distribution environment where the inventory is already on hand. Okay. So let me just… Why is this…? All right. So we’re going to handle sales order entry.

We’ll do some shipments. So we’ll actually ship the product. So we’ll enter an order, potentially show where you can print a order confirmation, do shipment. What paper flow do we get, i.e., picking tickets and packing slips for the warehouse so that they can actually pick, pack, and ship it, generate the actual invoice, and then how we print the invoice and/or email the invoice depending on the customer. So that’s kind of what we’re going to cover off today.

We should be able to cover this quite easily in the half hour. So we might be a little short on that, but that’s okay. This is kind of an interesting way of looking at it. So what we’re going to do next is we’re going to go into both GP and into Business Central. I’m going to show you basically the same order. My Business Central environment is Fabrikam Corp.

My GP environment is Fabrikam Limited. And I’m only going to be dealing in the functional currency of the firm that I’m dealing with. So I’m going to be selling this in one currency only. I’m not going to be switching currencies. Both systems handle the currency, so that’s not an issue there. So in GP, the way that we handle these types of things is that when we go into Sales, we use what’s called Sales Transaction Entry under Transactions.

And we open up Sales Transaction Entry, which opens up a window. And then this window here, what this window does is this allows us to enter either a quote, a fulfillment order, an invoice, a return, or a back order. And we’re going to do an order. It also allows us to enter quotes. And Business Central also has quotes, but we are not going to be dealing with quotes today.

I’m going to go from order to invoice, and that’s today’s plan. And there it is there. So when I hit Order, I click on the standard order. It automatically gives me the next order number, which is fine. And then we pick our customer. And we’re going to pick Aaron Fitz. Now in GP, we need to know the number.

So we would either do a lookup, or we have to type in what we know about it. We’re going to pick Aaron Fitz. And we’re going to pick Aaron Fitz because he’s at the top of my list, not for any other reason than that. Come down through here. We can apply it to a batch. We’re going to save this and print this. We’re going to need a batch to put it in.

So we have to save it someplace. So I’m going to go… We’re going to create a batch called DEMO. And we’ll go Save. And the site that I’m going to sell from is the NORTH site this time, rather than the warehouse site. And then we can enter a customer PO in here if I wish.

And I can just type in Customer PO. So this is just kind of standard entry. And then when I get down to this line inside here, I get down into my…what they call the rolling windows in GP. We’re going to type in, and we’re going to look up the ACCESS 2EAR. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to sell a 2EAR and a 1EAR.

So I’m going to sell one of these, and I’m going to sell it at $100, like so. And then when I flip to the next line, I can then go into here and go ACCESS. And I could use the 1EAR here because I’ve done this before, or I could go up to the top and look at it. I can go ACCESS 1EAR. And again, my ACCESS 1EAR, I’m going to sell for $75.

A little less expensive. There we are. So as you can see inside here, I’ve got no taxes on here because this particular customer is non-taxable, which is fine. And I won’t worry about taxes. Taxes can be calculated in GP and in Business Central based upon your customer’s location for the shipping location, as well as any other taxes that you wish to add.

So you can have… In Canada, we can add the GST. And if you happen to be selling in the province of BC, you could add BCPST. In the U.S., it would just add your standard sales taxes as required for where you’re shipping it to. So if I’m shipping it to California, I’ve got my California state taxes. And they can be city, county tax, whatever it happens to be. We can set all that up.

I’m going to do everything non-taxable today, simply to keep things simple from that point of view. So inside here, at this point here, I am now ready to save this. I can hit the Save button at the top. Underneath the Actions, I can do some other stuff inside here. I can copy and delete and things like this. And I can send attachments and email.

But what I can do also from here is I can hit the Print button. So if I hit the Print button, it’s going to ask me to save the document. So I will save the document. And when I hit the Print button, it comes up with a box that asks, what am I going to print? So I can print the sales order. And I could send it by email. So this would be an order confirmation.

So what I’m doing is I’m sending an order confirmation out to the customer. And when I hit Print…and I’m going to use the standard template from GP. And we’ll go out. And we get one that looks like this. There it is there. Order, ship, quantity. Tells them what we’ve ordered.

And there it is. It’s nice and clean. That is what you get from GP. So that means that we’re now sending the order out to the customer to get approval. So that’s fine. So I’m going to close this. And now I’m going to pop over to here, and I’m going to go into Sales here.

And I’m going to use… As you can see, Sales Quotes, Sales Orders, Sales Invoices. Pretty much the same as what you saw in GP. When we click on Sales Orders, we open up a screen and the sales underneath my… Let me just get rid of this information over here. So I’ve got no sales orders outstanding.

I hit New. And when I hit New, it’s going to create a new sales order for me. And when it creates the new sales order, it will automatically grab. So then, inside here, let me just make this bigger, like so. Under my Customer Number, I can type in what I know about him. It’s Aaron Fitz.

And there he is. He pops up automatically. There we are. We don’t have to do a lookup as much. So when I pick this, it brings up all the information inside here. This is the header information for the general promise and delivery and things like that. We’ve got different assigned users and things like that.

When I come down to my Item, I come into here and I go ACCS, and it brings up all my ACCSs, and I’m going to hit my Dual here so that it’s exactly the same order as the other one. And I’m going to do it from the NORTH site. I have attached Aaron Fitz in my Business Central to NORTH, but I can also pick my warehouse inside here as well.

It’s there. I just had… And mine’s defaulting to NORTH. Again, I’m going to order one. And I’m going to give it a price, whoops, of $100. And I’m just using my Tab key to move from field to field. Inside here, I’m going to make this non-taxable, as we talked about.

So there it is there. There’s no reading for a tax code. Again, there’s my $100. I can add additional pieces of information if I need to. So the rest of this stuff inside here is a bunch of information about the quantity shipped and quantity invoiced.

If I go back to my GP, there’s my order. In order to go in and see any more information about this item, I need to go into here, and this is where I can see all my quantities, back order, unit costs, and things like that.

I can see them inside here. So this is my additional window for that. So inside here, I can go back to the next line item. And when I hit Tab, why it’s so slow, and I’m going to grab my Single EAR again, and I’m going to order one.

And I want to change it to $75. There we are, $175. So I’ve got exactly the same dollar value that I’ve got there. And I make this non-taxable. There we are there.

And we’ve got $175. Now, other pieces of information that I have at this point in my order is I have the Invoice Details down inside here. This is a separate screen inside GP. We have to drill on the payment terms. And we can take a look at this, and we can see what the payment terms are, if there is tax codes, and things like that. This is my Department and my Division.

So this is the overlay. So in GP, this is set by the item. So the item sets all three. And inside here, I’ve got it set the same way so that it’s actually picking up 02 and 300, which is sales and department. And then underneath our shipping address, I can have a different Ship-to that I have. The Bill-to.

The Bill-to is where the customer gets it. And in GP, we have exactly the same thing. So in GP, in order to do the same thing, you would have to use the Customer ID here to change your shipping addresses. And you’d have to use your Document Number inside here for seeing what the documents are. And then underneath your items down here under the Amount Received, there’s the arrow key in here. And this gives you your posting dates and things like that.

So this inside here is how we do this. So the Customer ID here has the payment terms and the information about the salesperson and things like that. So that’s all attached up top. So that’s what we do inside here. I’m going to hit Save on that. And we’ll go back to here. So now we’ve got this.

At this point here, I can print and send, I can print a confirmation. So if I hit the Print Confirmation, which I will do, and I’m just going to preview it so we can take a look at it. We can then send this by email or by mail. This is exactly the same as what you saw before. The difference is that this sends it out as a PDF.

So it creates a PDF. And with a PDF, it does do what they call the floating footer. The footer does float up underneath the last line. So this will move up and down the page based on where it is. Whereas on the GP one, it’s always at the very bottom. And that’s because it’s a set form length, okay? And that’s just two…

One was designed for the dot matrix printer, and one is designed for laser jets. This is designed for laser jets. So that’s kind of what that’s about. So we can send that out if I wish. I can send it to it as well. When I click the Send To, I have a choice: I can send as a PDF, an XML, or Word document, or an Excel document, if I wish, and send it as a PDF. And then that will…

I’m just going to hit Cancel. I just sent it out as a regular PDF. So it shows you the PDF, and then you can download it if you wish. There is a location here to do the prepayment, as we saw before, where the cash was, we can put it on the prepayment as well. So at this point, this is already saved. It’s automatically saved as you move along. So if I go out of here now, and I’ll get out of GP.

So there’s the sales order, it’s sitting there, and it was the night, that’s today. And inside here, I can get out of here as well. And now I’m back to the beginning. So now I’m back, and the customer now sends me the information back, says that that is correct, that is what I wish to do, you can please ship it. So now the next step is that we have to ship the product.

So what we do now in GP is we bring up that same sales order, we look it up inside here, we know that it’s… We can go 44. We know it’s the one right before. Here it is here. When I hit the Print button here, I don’t want to print the order, I want to print the packing slip. Now we have both the packing slip and a picking ticket.

So we have a picking ticket that goes out to the warehouse, and then the packing slip would be something that you might send down in order to put on the box. So I’m going to print, and usually people just use one of the two. The picking ticket… The only difference between the picking ticket and the packing slip in GP is that the picking ticket is done by bin, whereas the packing slip is not.

Packing slip matches the invoice order so that when it gets to the other end and the customer receives the product, their packing slip matches their invoice. And that is also true inside Business Central. We have a picking ticket. And then we also have the ability to create shipments with a mini warehouse management system. I will not be showing that part today, but it is there.

I’ll show you where the buttons are for it. So I’m going to print the packing slip, and I can include specific pieces of information in there. I can hit Print. Again, I’m going to hit the Standard. If I use the template that sends it out to Microsoft Word…and this one gives me… That has a floating footer, that does not. So I’m going to show you the standard.

Here we are. This is what a lot of people are using. There it is there. And as you can see, this is a packing slip. It has no dollar values on it. So no dollar values go down to the warehouse, so the warehouse doesn’t know how much you’re charging for these products. Also, on the other side, the receiving people have no idea what the product is worth when it arrives.

Either they just are then responsible for putting it away. So there’s your Aaron Fitz done inside there, and we can then send that. There is a Send To up here. The only way you can get it to send by PDF is if you have Adobe Acrobat. If you don’t have Acrobat Writer, you cannot use the email recipient from the screen, okay? In Business Central…

So that means we’ve now sent it off. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to open up the order, just as I did on the other one. Now, inside here, we have Pick Instructions. So inside here, I can also issue pro forma work invoices here, which is something that we do not have in GP. Pro forma allows me to put a customs document together to send off with the package so that you can send it to the customs people and have them clear off the pro forma invoice, even though the invoice has not actually been done yet.

So it will generate an invoice that would be acceptable for the governments on either side of the border. So there we are. So when I hit the Pick Instruction, it’s going to come up looking like this. What do I want? I want that order. That’s fine. Again, I can send it if I want.

I can print it, but I’m going to preview. Close the document. There it is there. And again, we’ve got a place over here. They’ve changed this a little. They’ve made it landscape instead of portrait. And inside here, they’ve got no footer.

But again, we’ve got places to put in how many we actually picked and how many we actually shipped, so that we’ve got the two steps sitting on the picking slip. Now, the Variant Code and the Bin code is listed here. So you can sort this however you wish. That depends on whether or not you’re using bins inside Business Central and for inside GP. I am not using bins today, so everything is in one bin.

Okay. So when I’ve done that, it closes the window and I’m now back to here. So now when I flip back to… So at this point, the packing slip comes back upstairs, and we did ship both products. So now we can go to here. Again, we can bring up 44. There it is there.

Now, at this point, we can verify that, yes, quantity to invoice, one, quantity fulfilled is one. You may have this separate or not, depending on your system and whether or not you got a WMS or not. But we’ve got one and one, so we’re ready to go. So at this point here, I now need to invoice this product. So at this point here, I’m going to go Actions and I’m going to go Transfer.

Now, in my transfer here, I can transfer it to an invoice, and I want to include my deposit details, which is the stuff at the bottom. And then if I’m short, override it. I’m not short. I made sure I had enough inventory in stock, so that’s not a problem. And when I transfer, this is going to transfer it from an order to an invoice. One comment about it right here is that there’s no place where you can mark it in your system that it is shipped.

In GP, it goes from being an order. You can print a packing slip. You can print another packing slip. You can print it again and again and again, and you can print picking tickets. But once the actual shipments occur, there’s no entry in GP until we do the transfer. So then when I hit the Transfer, it transfers this across, and it’s going to give me… I’m going to take a look at the log screen.

It won’t take long. There it is. One transferred. It transferred to standard invoice 2273. And then it opens up invoice 2273, so I can now go ahead and post this. At this point here, I now have an invoice. I’m going to leave that on the screen right now.

And then inside Business Central, what we do is that we can go into the Posting inside here, and we can preview the posting, and we can post and send. Now, when I hit the Post here, and when I hit Post, it’s going to ask me, am I invoicing this or just shipping this? Or am I going to ship and invoice this?

If I ship and invoice this, it posts it all the way through. So I’m just going to ship it. And I’m going to go OK. So now what it’s going to do is it’s going to post the lines, and they’re going to mark them as being shipped but not invoiced. So then I can have multiple shipments being on one invoice if I wish, okay? So when I do this, the order remains here.

Now, if I scroll across to here a little more, you can see that I’ve got quantity to… You’ll notice… Whoops, I went too far. My apologies. The Quantity to Invoice. So there’s the Quantity Shipped. There’s the Quantity to Invoice.

And then when we invoice this, these will move over to here, and then everything will be fine. At this point here, again, I can print and post this, but then I can also just go into Posting inside here, and I can go post, and it comes up like this, and I’m going to invoice. And I’m going to go OK.

Now, you’ll notice that it changed from an order to an invoice. Very much like the transfer. It does exactly the same thing. The post is posted and moved to… So the difference here is that it’s actually posted the invoice. So we could actually send it and post it at this point. So now, at this point, it is posted.

So I go, Yes, I want to open the posted invoice. And now when I go Print and Send, I’ll hit the Print button. I’m not going to… Again, I’m going to just hit Preview so we can take a look at it. There it is there. You can change the invoice to have your logos and things on it. Of course, these are just all defaults out of the box.

So this is how we get this. That’s the paper flow out. At this point here, I can send this. I could save this as a… I can download to a file. I can send it as a PDF. The other thing that I can do from here is just that down here, I can Send To, and again, I got that same data in there.

I can save it as a PDF or whatever I want to, okay? I can also go into the Print and Send, and I can hit the Email button, and it will email it to my customer. And the same is also true inside GP. From here, I can hit the Email button. I do not have email set up, and it will send it to the email, but I can hit the Print button here.

And again, I can hit the Invoice and I go Print. And then I’m going to use the Standard again so that you can see the default one, and it will then pop up with my invoice. And again, it’s got that footer at the bottom of the page because this is a set amount based on the old dot matrix printers.

I can put some logos on here. Most people use something else, like Microsoft Word or something. And for instance, if I go back to this invoice, let me just go 3, and I go Print, I will print it to a template this time instead. This will take a couple of seconds longer simply because it has to fire up Microsoft Word.

There it goes. Fires up Word. I haven’t got Word loaded. Adding the add-in. And there it is there. And you’ll notice that the footer is now floated up underneath the item. And no, I do not need that.

Thank you very much. All right. So there it is there, and then I can send this by email if I wish. That would then be the emailable document. So I can close that. I don’t need it anymore. And let me just minimize that.

Go back to here. So at that point, we now have it. Now, in GP, what we would need to do is we’d come into here in order to post it, like so. We go to Actions, and we can hit the Post button. Oh, it’s assigned to a batch. Let me take it out of the batch and go Actions and Post. You could have posted the whole batch.

Again, you can post multiples if you wish inside Business Central as well. And then when I close this, I get a sales posting journal. I’m just going to hit Cancel on that distribution detail and things like that. And the AA Central. So you can print off audit trails. Both sides have the ability when you hit the Process inside here. When I’m in an invoice, as I look up an invoice inside here, I’ve got an invoice outstanding already.

It’s probably very similar. There it is there. When I go Preview Posting, I can take a look at my general ledger entries, my AR entries, my tax entries, and my detailed ledgers. These ledgers are the same as those print jobs that I just canceled out of in GP, but that’s basically what you can see inside here.

And I can post this. So that’s how we work through the generation of the actual thing, how we email it, and how we print the documents. A couple of things that are interesting from that point of view is that as we… Do I want to exit? Yes, I do. So my invoice is here.

So I have the ability here to go directly to invoices. So I can go here, and I can just invoice it. I can print the picking slip. I can do everything. And that’s the same as in GP when I go in and I create an invoice. I would say about 40% of our clients don’t use sales orders. They just use the invoice screen.

Some use the sales orders, probably 30%, 30% to 35%. And some actually do quotes. So the quote can turn to an order. The order turns to an invoice. You do have the ability to do blanket sales orders, which is something that you can’t do in GP. Those blanket sales orders allows you to say, “Okay, the customer wants 10,000 units. He wants 1,000 delivered on the first of every month for the next 10 months.”

You can do that kind of a blanket sales order inside Business Central. Much more difficult to do those inside GP because you need separate lines for each one. It does not automatically work like that. Again, your return orders. This is how you can return orders.

This is no different than the return. When I click on the Return inside here, I go New, it’s going to look very much…like, it looks very much like the customer. What do I want to return? And things like that. And what do I return? And I can return a whole order if I wish. I can return anything that I wish from inside here as well.

Same as we do in GP. Your posted sales, all your posted invoices will end up in the Posted Sales Invoices. And you can tell which ones they are based on the information. So let me just grab this by number, and I’ll go Descending. So there’s my invoice.

So when I go into my invoice here and I show more… This is the posted one I just did. When I show more, I do have the ability to see what sales order it came on. It’s right there. And then I’ve got places to put all the, like, quote numbers, order numbers, and things like that. So all of that is available to you. Invoice Details down here, as well as Shipping and Billing information down here, where you’ve got your Ship-tos and your Bill-tos.

So that’s how you move around inside Business Central. Reporting-wise, you can report on these things. They will all be done through your sales and your information. Here’s a list of all my sales orders inside here. I can then print reports and things like that.

And there’s the related G/L entries that occurred with that particular one. If I click this, it just changes what I see inside there. So whoops, I didn’t mean to click all the way through. I just meant to change it. There’s that information there. And then if I go down to this one here, it changes the G/L related entries. I can add attachments if I need to.

So if I’ve got additional documentation, I can add attachment. There is a document attach also in GP. All right. There we are. And I’m one minute below time. So there we are. So the next thing that I’ve got is I’ve got from current slide.

Are there any questions?

– All right. Thanks, Don. We do have some questions. But again, if anybody does have any questions, please enter them into the question area in the control panel. So the first one I have for you here, Don, is in Business Central, the sales document seems to have all fields that wrap. Is there a way to modify them so that it flows properly and doesn’t cut off the letters?

– Oh, you mean, like, inside here? Yes. Every one of these fields, for instance, this was Aaron Fitz. If I click on this, let me just go into here. You can resize any of your fields, like so.

And you can also change your screen. So, for instance, if you don’t like the order here, for instance, say I want to see my Currency Code between the Due Date and the Amount, for instance, I can go into here and there’s a Personalize and a Design.

The Design in Business Central allows you to change any field, and that Design can then be rolled out to all users. If I use Personalize, which is just me, because I don’t want to affect my cohort who uses this, I can come into here and I can grab this field here, and I can just move it over one, like so, and then go Done.

And now my screen will look like this, and somebody else’s screen will have Currency Code on the other side. So it’s up to you as to how you want to show this. This amount is in this currency, right? If I scroll across here a little farther, right, you have amount with tax, amount remaining, things like that, Printed and Corrected. If I really wanted to, I can come into here and I can go back to that Personalize, and I can add fields.

And inside here, I can add any of these fields that I wish to see. So if I wanted to see the original order number or something like that, I can drag it on. I can drag the zip code or whatever I need to. I can drag it onto this particular screen. So there we are there.

Contact. Maybe I want the contact information, and I want to put the contact information next to the customer. There it is there. And as you can see, the contact is Bob Fitz. And now when I go Done, I now have that particular one, and then I can resize my screen. As I resize these things, if I go out, so there we are there. We’re good there.

If I click on my… What am I…? And I’m going to Posted Sales Invoices. Okay, let me go the Sales Invoices and pop back into Posted Sales Invoices. You’ll see that the widths have remained. So whatever width changes you’ve made automatically get saved, so the next time you open up that screen, you as an individual will see that new sizing.

So that kind of allows you to adjust it based on… You know, some people have got very long item numbers. A couple of things that I should mention on item numbers inside GP versus Business Central, which is very important to understand, is that the length of the item number in Business Central is limited to 20 characters. In GP, it’s 50, I believe.

So if you’ve got items that are longer than 20 characters, we’re going to need to change those items prior to the go-live in order to get them to fit into Business Central, because there’s only 20. The other thing that is different is the ship-to address. So when I click on a sales order inside here, down here, underneath my Shipping, my Address Code here, the address codes in BC are 10 characters.

The address codes in GP are 15 characters. So if you’ve got any long address codes, we’ll need to adjust those on the way into Business Central. So just on a conversion point of view, something to be aware of. And we usually do a technical assessment, which gives us a list of things that we need to fix. That is one of the ones that shows up.

There’s a few other small, minor ones that we can hit. Any other questions, Katie?

– Yes, but I want to just go back on that first question, Don. I believe it was meant for, as an example, the packing slip. How, when you send that off to customers, how it wraps, is that something that could be personalized?

– Yes. You don’t personalize it. What we do is we change the report. So GP does the same thing. Out of the box, it has a default size of the field and if it’s 15 characters or 20 characters. So they’ve listed it at X characters.

And if it’s any longer than that, the one thing that Business Central does, which GP doesn’t, is that it auto wraps. Whereas in GP, what it does is it truncates. So in GP, if your field is not wide enough on your form, and you’ve only got 20 characters and your description is 25, it will just truncate the last 5 and only print the first 20 characters. In Business Central, if you have a 20-character field and you extend past 20 characters, it automatically wraps it underneath.

That’s up to you as to whether you want it to do that or not. It is a toggle inside the RDL, which is part of the report itself. And you can say yes to wrap or no to wrap. By default, they say yes, because that was very frustrating for a lot of people in GP, is that they would type in a nice, big description, but only 10 characters, only 20 characters showed up, or only 40 characters showed up, and they had a 60-character thing.

They wanted it to wrap down to do that. So it’s both good and bad that it does it. It really depends on which one. The one that I’ve got is not a great deal because I’ve got fairly long descriptions, and that’s because GP has fairly long descriptions. And the company that I’m using is a converted Fabrikam. So I took it directly from GP and I migrated it into Business Central. That’s how I got the data.

And that way it would be matching, so that when people see it, this is kind of what you would see. We would then change that report accordingly. Okay.

– All right. Also, related to documents being sent to customers, would you be able to, like in GP, add your company logos in Business Central?

– Yes, you can add logos. You can change… So when you go to any of these prints inside here, it is printing 1306-0001. So you set this up as part of the setup, and you can set up customers to go to different ones. You get the ability to do that.

When I hit the Print or the Preview, I’ll hit the Preview again so that you can see it inside here. So this one here, I’ve only made this this wide. I could make it wider because my item number is longer. I can make this shorter. For instance, the unit price does not need to be that big because it’s only five characters. And the line amount doesn’t necessarily need to be that big.

So you would shrink some of these down and move them across. We can add logos. We can change anything that you want on site inside here, just like we did in GP. GP has the ability to do exactly the same thing. You can add logos, and you can do what you need in order to make it fit properly. So it’s just a matter of this is the default one out of the box. If you prefer it landscape, you can turn it landscape.

So it’s up to you as to what you want this to look like that goes to your customer. This is just the default out of the box. So then, if you were to start it tomorrow and hit Print, and you wanted to send the invoice tomorrow morning, this is what it would look like. If you said, “Oh, no, I want to change that,” we can then modify those. And as part of our estimates and quotes, when we put things out for doing the conversion, we talk to people about what kind of changes they want to determine how long it takes.

Depends on what you need to put on here. A lot of people got a lot more stuff on here than the unit price. Maybe you need a discount showing. Maybe you need a… You might need a discount showing. You might need the bin showing, for instance, where it came from. You might need lot numbers.

You might need serial numbers. There’s lots of different things that you may decide you need to put on here. You may decide up here all I’ve got is Document Date, Due Date, and Payment Terms. I don’t have any information about the sales rep. I have no information about the order number on this at all. But I could put that on there if I wanted to, okay? So this is just what they provide default.

And that’s what I showed today. But you can make modifications. I can modify it if I need to. So that’s kind of what we do there, okay?

– All right.

– Next, Katie?

– Next question here, Don, is, would you be able to show an inquiry on customer and vendor invoices?

– An inquiry? Sure. So they work pretty much the same way. So what happens is that when I go into my Customers inside here, there’s Aaron Fitz. This is my guy. Over here is the amount of money that he owes me. If I click on the amount of money that he owes me, it’s going to bring up a list of all of his transactions.

And if I want to see any of those transactions, all I got to do is click on it. So it’s a complete drill system all the way down. Here’s the standard. There’s the Aaron Fitz. You’ll notice that I ordered five and six of the Dual Ears and Single Ears. They’re my favorite parts because I keep lots of them in stock. This particular one, I did have taxes calculating, $55.80.

As you can see down here, there’s my invoice details and things like that. I can see my details on this side here if I need to. And then I can add… There are attachments if required, and I can then print this again if I wish. If I want to print this, I just hit the Print. I can email it, and I can attach it as a PDF, right? Create a PDF and attach it to the document, and then send the document to customers’ profiles such as that.

So we can do that kind of thing inside here. Underneath my Electronic Document, there is an EDI, some built-in stuff, not as good as the SPS Commerces and things like that. Also, we need those in order to push down the EDI through here. And then underneath, you can update non-audit trail items. So in other words, I can update a document for a…

I could change the due date because it’s not audit. I can change the description because that’s not audit. But I can’t change the quantities or the dollar values because that’s what’s been posted through the system. And then I can correct inside here. I can cancel it, and I can create a corrective memo. So we will actually reverse this, which is something you can’t do in GP.

You can’t do a correction inside GP. In GP, you must issue a return and then rebill it, whereas here you are allowed to do a correct, which is a good feature. So that’s kind of… But you can do that against any of your customers inside here. If you wanted a list of these, up here inside Business Central, at all times, you have the ability to open it in Excel.

You have the ability to edit it in Excel as well, which I will hit. And when we edit it in Excel, what happens is it’s going to take this particular list and it’s going to send it out to Excel. And in Excel, it’s going to tell me which fields I can change and which fields I can’t change. And it allows me to make the entries inside here.

I’m going to go Enable the Editing, and we’ll just… Okay, there we are there. Let me bring that up just a little so you can see it. It’s loading on the right-hand side. This is connecting Excel directly up to Dynamics 365 Business Central. You see, it’s retrieving the metadata, refreshing the data, and then it’s writing to the cache.

It’s going to bring up this. So this list here. So, for instance, if I click on this list over here, you’ll see the field is in red. That means I cannot change this because it’s an audit field. If I go to my Description, I can change this. Instead of having a description, I can say… Ordered by Don, like so.

And then I can hit the Publish. And that will write it back to Business Central. So now this particular record, Document Number C1000, is going to say “Ordered by Don” instead of Aaron Fitz Electrical.

Default is Aaron Fitz Electrical, as you can see, it kept going. But you go, “Oh, I forgot to change that. I need to change it after the fact.” I can do so. If this field was also on the invoice, then I could reprint the invoice with the new information, okay? So from inside here, if I click back to here, as you see, there’s the description there. If I go back out of here for a second and then go back into it, there it is there.

It says “Ordered by Don.” And the rights are controlled by security. So you can give people rights to do that. I can also just send it directly out to Excel and go Open in Excel. This should be the same as running a smart list, okay?

So when I hit the Open in Excel, I can hit Open, and it gives me the same thing. Okay, can’t open two workbooks with the same name. Let me close this one first. Nah, I don’t want to save it. And now let me open this one here. And again, you’ll notice that it hits the download. This is opening just your local copy of Excel.

Yeah, I know it’s in protected view. That’s fine. And you’ll notice up here, this is just a spreadsheet. This is like a smart list. And again, you know, these aren’t wide enough. You just double-click the…like so, and double-click. There we are, automatically.

I mean, that’s just Excel. So then, from here, I can then deal with it in Excel if I wish. I can run reports and things like that as well if I need to. There are reports on this as well, but most people use the Excel portion. And as you can see, I’ve got the Department Code, the Division Code, what departments, what divisions is going through, what’s outstanding, what’s not outstanding, and things like that. So these are the amounts.

The amount here and the amount here is the same. The one with the dollar sign is functional currency. The one without the dollar sign is in the currency of the order. So if I did this, I’m in Canada, so this was done in U.S. dollars, then that 938 would be, say, $700. And then the 938 would be the Canadian equivalent, okay?

Any other questions?

– Great. Thanks, Don. So we do have some questions left, but unfortunately, we are at time for today. So if you did submit a question but we weren’t able to get to it during this session, we will get back to you by email later today. So I did go ahead and add the link to our events page into the chat. So we do have some upcoming sessions that Don will be hosting. Purchase Orders is happening on October 23rd.

And then, Don, into November, we have Assembly and Light Manufacturing. I believe that’s November 20th, that’s happening. So you can click that link and register for those sessions. We also have lots of past sessions. You can see those as well in that link. I’m also going to go ahead and add a link where you can set your email preferences and opt into our email so you can stay in the know about all upcoming events, as well as see our latest blog articles.

So thank you, Don, for the information today, and thank you, everyone, for joining us.

– No problem. Thank you, all.