The Next Generation of Dynamics NAV – Dynamics 365 Business Central (Webinar Recording)

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TRANSCRIPT

Tracey: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you’re joining us today for our Next Generation of Dynamics NAV webinar. Super excited to share out lots of interesting ideas, met with a lot of customers over the past few weeks talking about these concepts. It’s something that really needs to have some time dedicated to kind of walk you through because I’m sure you’re hearing that word D365 BC or D365 Business Central.

So we thought, the team at Encore, we thought it would be great idea to have a webinar and to make sure that you understand these words, these concepts and what it really means to you as our innovation and how we’re gonna bring value to throughout that process. So I’m gonna be talking a little bit about Dynamics NAV, and the new name and what that means to you, and then we’re gonna talk a little bit more about it technically, then we’re going to be going and having a great presentation from Aran on Microsoft 365 or one Microsoft Demo. And then, Rico’s gonna take us through that new enhancements over the past three versions including the newest version which is D365 Business Central.

So again, it’s a new name, NAV has not gone away. It’s just been re-branded under this umbrella. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of information about D365 in general and D365 Business Central or D365 BC is now the new branded name for Dynamics NAV, which is a revision. For those of us that have been around for a while, we know we’ve come through those different iterations.

So talking about that solution for the clients that are already using Dynamics NAV, you can have D365 Business Central on-premise. It is also offered as a subscription-based. It’s also offered in the cloud, so that’s SaaS model. So those are the three different types of deployments for D365 BC. And we can upgrade to Dynamic 365 Business Central on-premise, and it is a bridging of licensing models. It’s a license migration transition upgrade that’s a long name, but definitely…for short, we call it LMT upgrade, and we can walk you through that upgrade process and that’s part of this webinar today.

In order to take advantage of the newest release of Dynamics NAV or D365 Business Central, you have to be active on your enhancement plan. One of the changes is the types of licensing. I’m not sure what I did. Sorry, go back, rest here is what part of the slide. I’m sorry. So licensing, in our current environment under Dynamics NAV perpetual, we have something called a full use user, and we also have a limited use users, and we have employee self-service users.

So in our new model, we’ve got basically full use users and they’re going to be named, and there’s also team members. So team members would be comparable to our limited use user in the past, and so those team members have that kind of read access. And full users have that read and write capability and their name. So in your current model, you have perpetual concurrent licensing and that’s going to move to basically a named user license. Thanks, Rico.

So what does this mean for you? Why that choice? Again, if you were on NAV 2018 or is on your earlier version of Dynamics NAV, NAV 2018 is supporting until October 2027. So again you’ve got choice. No one’s saying that tomorrow you have to go to D365 Business Central. And that moving from a concurrent to a named user once you do change your licensing model.

So let’s talk about the different options that existing customers have, Microsoft continues to develop enhance on-premise solutions. So again, the on-premise solution is not going away. As we discussed earlier, we respect customers who want to make their own decisions when this make sense for them, and maybe they do want to move to the cloud, maybe they want to remain on-premise. Again, it’s all about that choice. So when you’re ready, we wanna be able to walk you through what that process would look like for you. And again you’ve made that investment, Microsoft respects an investment and they wanna continue to support you and maybe for through those new versions of D365 Business Central.

So this visual kind of shows you currently here in NAV 2018 or lower, you had that starter pack, extended pack, you’ve got your full use users, limited users, and you have objects. When we go into this D365 world, again, we’ve got now this Essentials Pack, Premium Pack, Team Members and Objects. And again, that’s D365 on-premise or it could be subscription. When we move to the SaaS offering, which is D365 in a cloud, you have your users which are Essential or Premium users and Team Members. You no longer have access to the Objects, and Tony’s gonna be talking a little bit more about that as well.

And you got that ability to transition from Dynamics NAV to D365 Business Central on-premise, which should be basically exactly like what you have now on Dynamics NAV on-premise. Or you can go and move to D365 Business Central in the cloud. So, you’ve got options for stay on-premise or you can transition to that cloud. So that’s a little overview about what it means from a licensing perspective, moving from Dynamics NAV whether 2018 and below to Dynamics 365 Business Central. And I’m going pass it over to Tony.

Tony: Thanks, Tracey. That was great. So I’d like to walk a little bit about the different versions of Business Central that are available today, and the features from a technical standpoint that are available to you depending on the version of Business Central that you will deploy. The two versions of Business Central that are available from Microsoft as of October 1st would be Business Central on-premise or Business Central as a service, a SaaS offering. Business Central on-premise would be installed exactly the same which you’d install NAV today. You bring the wizard up, you click, you know, Next, next Finish. It’s really that easy. It’s a little bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea. It’s an installation is done on your servers or in a data center or on something like on calls cloud offerings.

Business Central software as a service, Microsoft will spin the application up provide you attendance and you would engage with the application the same as you would do say Outlook in a web browser or Word in a web browser or the one that I like to use if we remember back that was Hotmail. The way you interact with those is via the web browser. You don’t install the application locally. And that’s exactly the same as the experience you would get if you’re doing Business Central software as a service.

There are some other differences and they are highlighted here on that slide. So, licensing Tracey talked a little bit about that on-premise subscription versus SaaS when you’re in the SaaS version. Installation, I talked a little bit about that, so you can do it on-premise on your own servers if you have them, or you can do infrastructure as a service as well so that could be through a third-party IT provided with a data center, or Encore also offers an IaaS solution, WebAI install this software on some cloud service for you and maintain and manage those so you don’t have the cost of managing the service. It’s all included in our monthly fee.

When you go to the SaaS offering, there’s no service to install. It’s ust accessing the application in a web browser. Clients are available to you would be on-premise, you still have the Windows RTC as we know it. Today, we’ll talk a little bit about that in the roadmap, which is coming up. You have the web client and as well as the universal app. With the SaaS version as I mentioned mainly the web client but the universal app will also install and connects to your Business Central SaaS offering. One thing with the universal app is, it’s basically an app around the web client, so it just makes it easy to access and available as an app, but it’s effectively the same experience as you would have on the web browser.

And lastly, the administration levels, so when you do your BC on-prem, you’re able to still access SQL as you do today with your NAV on-prem installations. You can go to the developer environment, and you can pull up the object designer and make changes there. You can do the service tier, administration tools, you can go in there and make changes to your service tier, will turn them on or off. It’s exactly the same as you do with a NAV installation today. But obviously with the SaaS offering Microsoft is managing and controlling that, you don’t have access to it in the backend. So that’s the differences on the administration level.

Moving on to the roadmap the Microsoft published in October. We now have one common name moving forward, which is going to be Dynamics 365 Business Central. Microsoft are going to offer the on-premise as well as the cloud offering for the foreseeable future. We have no talk of removing on-prem. Microsoft is looking to maintain that for life. However, there are some changes that are coming up in 2020. There can have a little bit of an impact on the decision to move to Business Central.

So the first would be you can see the modern clients there. What Microsoft means by that is that they’re going to remove the Windows client for any Business Central on-prem releases after 2020, so old versions reached up until that point will still contain the Windows client. But from 2020 onwards, the Windows client will be deprecated.

At the same time, Microsoft is not going to allow you to go into the Object Designer and make modifications directly into Microsoft’s code, which has been a pretty big foundation of the NAV product up until now. What that does is and we’ll get into a little bit more detail about what that looks like, but what it does do is provide faster and quicker and as a result, less expensive upgrades. But it does require your developments to be done in a different style than you do today.

A note here would also be that the one Dynamics 365 Business Central products, the code base is identical between on-prem and in the cloud. Now, you might get some features in the cloud that are connected to Office 365 that are a little harder to connect on-prem. But in terms of NAV or Business Central features functions, they are identical in the cloud or on-prem. It is the same code base.

We talk a little bit about this development piece, because I know that’s a big part for our existing clients who have had customizations made to NAV and what does that look like moving forwards. Microsoft has move forward with this concept of inventing an extension. So if we look at the classic way of doing NAV development, all your modifications were made in line with Microsoft core code that allowed us to modify as well as remove existing code and obviously add-on top of the Microsoft product. This allowed tight customizations, but made it very, very hard to do version control.

It also meant that when Microsoft was to release cumulative updates or hot fixes, we would have to merge the code and spend time merging that code to make sure didn’t lose your customizations. As well as when doing other add-ons, and in particular when doing an upgrade to a new major release, there was the requirement to merge the customizations that client had invested into the newer version of NAV. And the screen shot on the right hand side, you can see, I’ve kinda added a message releasing sales document. And we can see that that’s directly in that code unit 414 release sales document, which is a Microsoft object. The change I’ve made is directly in line with MSFT core code.

At Business Central, we use this Eventing method. So what we now have is a separate layer to the Microsoft core code as well as other add-ons or other partner developments. What this means is, there’s no merging for us to do with Microsoft or ISV updates. So if you have a cumulative updates, you can apply that without having to merge the code. Obviously, we still recommend doing a little bit testing to make sure that there’s no changes from Microsoft that are impinging on your use of Business Central, but it does make it a lot easier because we don’t have to check to make sure it’s not overriding customizations. So what that means, we can do is apply cumulative updates as well as do upgrades quicker and cheaper. It’s also giving us the ability to do source control because now we can take all of our modifications separate to the Microsoft code and install them in products like TFS and GitHub.

Unfortunately, there is no upgrade tool for classic to Eventing, so we do have to go for a bit of a manual process to move existing customers on to the AL as they call it, or the Eventing style. There are some PowerShell scripts that can help us get there a little bit more efficiently, but there is no tool that does an automatic transition of existing classic development to AL, so there is some time to be spent doing that transition.

There are limited events that are available, but Microsoft is adding more and more every month for the release that they’re doing for Business Central. And the other thing is we cannot change or remove Microsoft or ISV logic, we can only add to it. So as a result, sometimes you have to get creative in how we’re approaching a modification. Projects that we’ve been doing, we’ve been doing AL development now on all our new implementations for the last three months. We very rarely run into an issue with having to modify existing Microsoft code. And when we have, we fought creatively about it, we’ve been able to find ways around it. So this hasn’t stymied us at this point.

What this Eventing allows us to do is create apps, and apps are what you get published into your Business Central product. Microsoft has created a public app store a little bit like what you would have on your phone, your Google Play Store or your Apple iTunes Store. ISV and add-on providers are able to create and publish apps out to the App Store, and you’re able to go into and pull down those apps and install them into your application without having any worries about them interfering with the underlying Microsoft code or your partner’s kind of modifications. And what that means is you can basically try things out on a test environment, and see if they work for you or not. And if not, you can simply unplug them and move on and try something different.

There is no merging, but there is the concept that they do have to use Eventing when they’re creating those apps so that development style that I showed you a little bit earlier. And the way that we do modifications, specifically for customer bespoke customizations is we actually create apps and they’re called private apps and we install them into your environment, nobody else gets them. We don’t have to put them on the App Store for you to access them. The App Store is really for the more publicly based ISV add-ons.

And so we really like the idea of the App Store. It’s showing a lot more kind of add-ons from a global standpoint, that’s how the apps we weren’t aware of before, and also great that we can try them out and remove them. So if it doesn’t work, we’re not stuck with that app and we’re able to take it out of the system and try something else will go in a bit of a different direction. So we’re definitely very excited about the progress the Microsoft is making with these new development tools.

Tracey: Tony, we didn’t have a slide about this, but just maybe you can have it quick overview for client who stay on NAV 2013, 2015, and they’re thinking about doing that license migration and upgrading to D365 Business Central, what does that mean for them?

Tony: So a couple of different options. The first is you can go on to Business Central on-premise today with your customization exactly the same as it, so not converting it to the AL style of development. And that’s gonna be supported if we look at that roadmap until 2020, and after 2020 those customizations would have to be AL. As a matter of just how we procedurize or upgrades today, when we do upgrades for any customers to the new version of NAV 2018 or Business Central on-prem, where we’re able to as part of emerging, easily move those customizations to that Eventing style. We’re doing that anyway. So we’re kind of slowly moving our clients there as part of our procedures and our processes anyway. For the areas that are not able to easily migrate to AL, we would have to spend some time investigating how we would migrate those to the AL model. But as part of the upgrades today, we’re inherently moving the things that are easy, low hanging fruit, that is the best way of describing it, to that Eventing model so that as clients progress through the different versions, it’s not gonna be a sudden glith that they face.

Tracey: Thank you. I also forgot to mention to one my slides is that when we move from NAV or Dynamics NAV to D365 Business Central, it moves from that concurrent user base to a named user, and if you’re an existing customer of NAV, you actually get to named users for every concurrent user that you have currently. So again, that will be a benefit and that change that license model, so you don’t to worry about, oh, now it’s named user how does that impact me as a business?

Tony: Perfect.

Tracey: Okay. I think Aran is up next.

Tony: Aran is up next.

Aran: Perfect. Can you guys hear me okay?

Tony: Yeah, we can hear you, Aran.

Aran: Great.

Tony: And we can see the screen now.

Aran: All right, just before we dive into the demonstration, I wanted to give you a bit of an overview as to what we’ll be ultimately showing today in the variety of different technologies that are now tied together largely through Office for your Business Central applications. So just give me one second, I will get that going. And you can see there.

So really what we’re talking about in the far left is a completely cloud-based solution that is in many respects device and browser independent. So Business Central software as a service version can be run on Edge, Explorer, Safari, Dolphin, Firefox, Chrome, you name the browser and likely you’ll be able to run the application. Similarly, when you go to the various stores for either Apple or Google, you’ll notice that they do have a Business Central application that you can download from each of those stores in order to effectively get the application on your tablet or mobile device. So from that perspective, you can run it on any different piece of hardware you’re looking at as well.

Ultimately, it uses the concept of a universal client. So any changes that you make to the personalization that you do within the core application on any of those platforms largely permeates throughout any other device or application that you’re looking at and using, too, in order to access Business Central. So it really is one center point, and you get that same consistent user experience no matter how you decide you wanna consume that information.

There is a lot of different technologies now that Business Central is up in the cloud that we get to take advantage of. First and foremost, we’ll see some interconnectivity between Business Central and a variety of the different Office products. Excel is probably the most obvious one, and it’s been around in a variety of different ways for many years, I think Rico fills a little bit of the Excel integration. I’ll focus on what it looks like within the Office, sort of the Outlook framework for you guys today.

I will also show how Power BI is an extension of Office is used within Business Central to provide some pretty compelling reporting within the application that can take data sources from outside the application, which is a very interesting and unique concept that I think is really important for customers to understand. I will skip over some of the social side of things today, it’s a fun one but we’re a little bit limited on time. But I do wanna spend a decent amount of time and examples around Azure and specifically Azure machine learning and cognitive services, because I think it’s some of the more out there technology that is starting to make its way into the everyday use of the applications. And so I’m gonna give you a couple of examples as to how we can use those tools to improve what we do within our ERP application in Business Central.

You’ll notice maybe on some of the screens that there’s integrated, pre-integrated PowerApps and Flow for you to be able to develop your own simplistic applications and have them integrated workflow wise back into Business Central as well. I don’t focus on that today, but know that is part of the overall suite.

So on that note, let’s get into the actual demonstration. So I’m gonna start my day here within Office 365. At which point I can launch into any of the options, the traditional ones that you see here as well as Power BI directly or in this case Dynamics 365. It takes me to a second launching point from within this particular area, I can go to our more traditional CRM applications on the right hand side, or I can go directly into Business Central, or based on my links and frequent usage, I can go directly to specific customers or sections from within Business Central. Just before I do that, I thought I would quickly give you a glimpse into that app store that Tony had mentioned as part of his demonstration.

So off that D365 home page is where you launch into that app store, if you need, you wanna filter by the apps related to Business Central, then you can see as you kind of scroll through all of the apps that are ultimately available to you to add-on, and in many cases, trial before you actually buy. And you’ll notice Avalara Tax update is a very common one that we get from that. But from here we will launch directly into Business Central and take a look at the home page.

While that renders, I’ll bring up just to kinda prove the point around browsers, I will bring up Chrome. So right now I’m doing this demonstration on using Edge, just gonna quickly copy that link, and paste it into my Chrome browser so that we can take a look at how consistent the experiences. Hopefully, got the right one, demo password for everybody. Well, I’ll show you that later as I kind of move through this, so I’ll come back to that once I can get logged in.

So a couple of things on the home page, number one is insights from last week so largely the system is pulling the data that is being processed on a regular basis, and it’s pulling out the interesting facts about what happened within Business Central for the past week. So we closed five more deals than we did in the same period last year, we had the largest order kind of surface up to us, and so it gives those interesting tidbits from our data from the previous week. We also have this new intelligent cloud insights, which again, largely because the system is on the cloud, it can start to use a lot of the AI processing behind the scenes to surface up new and interesting information from time to time.

So every now and then you can go here and Microsoft will add on a regular basis some interesting information for you to be able to consume. So it’s got some traditional KPIs on the right, but it will also tell you who’s late and paying. I’ve 16 invoices that weren’t paid on time by us. I do get some other interesting KPIs down to the bottom related to finance as well as my customers.

Couple of other things that are on the home page as well. If we scroll to the bottom, I’m gonna skip through a whole bunch of interesting stuff, but I wanna get to the bottom because that is where we see Power BI reports rendered directly into the home page of Business Central. And again, why this is important is because Power BI is ultimately becoming the go forward industry standard business intelligence tool for the mid market, and as such, unlike previous versions of NAV, the data and report writing function doesn’t necessarily require expertise in the specific reporting tool that is native to NAV like it used to be. A typical Power BI user can start to develop those reports, so it makes that report writing task available to customers instead of Encore’s partners.

The other interesting fact about that is because it’s Power BI and a business intelligence tool, I don’t need to be confined to the data that is coming from my ERP application. I can take in other data sources, whether that’d be Dynamic CRM or maybe a line of business application that you’ve got deployed within your system. So my dashboard within Business Central then becomes one that is all consuming and again, not confined to the limits of the data within my ERP.

So that’s interesting that it’s right on the home page there, but it’s also context sensitive as well. So if I go to my customers, we should see a list of them. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that you have pictures of all your customers, but you can do it and you’ll see that Power BI report will start to render on the right hand side. Not rendering, referencing a different customer company I think. For me, it doesn’t look like it’s gonna be friendly to me today. Anyway, typically what happens is based on the customer that you are on it will change the content of that report to be filtered by that customer.

We will shift over and go into some new stuff around inventory, and what that looks like. Let me get back to the home page. It’s working hard on it. Let’s see if I’ve got connection here, too. Let me re-launch here, let’s see if it was having a problem with that one. So what he wanted to go into next four items, and looking at a couple of interesting concepts within the item card. And the first thing we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna do a quick search, and again we don’t have to like an old versions of NAV, specify where we’re searching. I didn’t even have to actually hit enter as I’m typing it literally finds it, finds the chairs, chairs being part of the string of the actual description, but I could search for literally any field within the item cards and it would render the responses to me.

So first of all, I mean, obviously we’ve got a nice graphical representation of our inventory which is good. We also, as we go into, say the London swivel chair, blue, we can start to do a couple of things with it. Number one, to the spot here, based on that picture I can have, as your machine learning and cognitive services, analyze the picture and return to me some attributes about that inventory item. This can be done on set of your inventory as well, so if you do so through uploading pictures into the inventory, it can make some decisions for you as to how it should be categorized.

So a couple of things that it is it recognize it as a chair and so it set up the category as chair. It also recognized that it’s seat and a furniture, I can add that to the item description. So I can start to build out based on the picture what it looks like. A couple of the interesting things I liked was looking at all the attributes and the confidence score. So it also thought pretty sure that it was blue, so it was about 50% chance it was blue, but it decided to ignore because its confidence wasn’t high enough.

The other one that I like in looking at this is, it had a 4% chance almost 5% chance that it was a drone. And if you look at it, it does kinda look like it could be a drone, but it wasn’t sure enough, so it didn’t suggest that as an attribute. So you can start to use those cloud-based services in order to supplement data entry and classify inventory without a human having to actually perform that function.

Let’s go back to the item lists itself. A couple other things on the item list, you’ll notice that we have based on the record that we’re on, a forecast for the item. This forecast is also taking data from Business Central, specifically the item ledger entries over a course of period of time. And it is sending that out to Azure machine learning, and applying variety of different inventory replenishment algorithms to it so that it can return to me a projection as to what my inventory balance is going to be. In this case, month over month, I’m currently working on a future date of I think April 4th or maybe it’s March 7th.

And as I can see that by this time right now I have 6, but by the same time the next month I should have 0 and then after that I’ll have negative 7 a month later, and only negative 10 a month later after that and up to 16. So again, based on those patterns of consumption, it’s gonna suggest where my inventory is going to be. That’s interesting information, but at the end of the day we need that type of information to be actionable and it is. So I can drop down that forecast and I can say, “Hey, I want you to create a purchase order for this item.”

Based on the set up of your inventory item card and the consumption that it looks like it as, it will come back and it will suggest that you buy 10 of these. Again, that’s all the very dependent on how you set up your item. The other thing that it will do I didn’t have any other inventory item but, you know, doing a point based replenishment really only buys that one item. If this vendor that I was now buying these blue armless swivel chairs from was also the primary vendor for additional items that were looking to be under stocked, it would ask if I wanted to add these two the purchase order.

Now that it’s done that, by the way, I don’t have to take the machine suggestion. I can, of course, make some changes to it as I see fit. I’m gonna delete that so I can do this demonstration again without messing up my suggestions. And we get back to the item list.

The final thing I was gonna show you was again that integration to Outlook. So I see I’ve got a couple of emails in my desktop version of Outlook. I’m going to select this one email that I got from my customer, Aran Cameron, for order number 1004. So again, within the context of the email, I wanna be able to typically do a few things with this particular email.

One, I wanna be able to assess it and then after I wanna be able to action it. Typically, that would require me to open up the ERP application, log in, navigate to the customer, look up their orders or look up the list of orders, enter the order number and find them. But because we are inherently connected to Business Central through our Office 365 account, we can do that without ever leaving email itself. So by hitting Contact Insights, I get a view into the account card for Aran and his company which is Alpine Ski House.

And as I do so, I can see that he’s passed you on some invoices to the tune of about $4,300. He has quite a few quotes on going with us as well as sales orders, and quite a few posted invoices over the course of time as well. So he’s been a decent customer for whatever reason. He’s got this one balance that’s now three years overdue so for quite a long way overdue. So I’m gonna do a little some additional investigation into what this invoice is. I’m gonna give myself a little bit more real estate, so you can see, but it is interactive so I can just simply click on that bar for three years.

And here I can see it’s actually just one invoice, it’s not a bunch of them it’s only one. So I can do just like I do in regular NAV, I can navigate and search through journal entries and tax ledger entries and whatnot, but typically I’m gonna go and see the actual posted invoice. I can see this one, it was indeed done about three years ago, given that I’m working in 2020 today, and it was for a whole bunch of furniture that was ultimately delivered.

It wasn’t delivered to Aran, it was delivered to a different rep, Paul. So I’m gonna trust that Aran’s actually okay to pay the invoices. And I’m gonna assume that that old order is something different. So the moment that I want to start auctioning that, again, typically you’d log in and you’d go to the actual physical order and you’d make some decisions about it. Because we know the customer and we know the order number, we’re able to do that again within the context of the email. And I have to sign in. Once you’ve signed in, typically you just click on it and it shows up.

And now again without leaving the email, I see the actual order itself. And I can see that it is for some Mexican swivel chairs and he’s asking for three. So I must say, “All right, I will give you three.” And just for fun, let’s just enter in 100. So the reason I did that is, I wanted to kinda action a trigger from within the system. So this is not a dumb form that is embedded within the email, this is actually directly connected to the business logic of Business Central. As I entered 100, it checked inventory and it told me that “Hey, you don’t actually have 100 at this location in order to sell them.” So it’s not that I submit the order and then find out, later that I don’t have inventory, it is actively telling me that I’ve got issues.

So we’ll change that back to three, I’ll get rid of the error message there. And then typically what happens at that point, we would want to get the order approved, release it, sender and back an email confirmation. We can do all of those types of things including, there you go, the approval request. Again integrated to flow if there were some custom flows that you wanted to build into this process as well, typically email confirmation tends to be the best one.

And that’ll send out a fresh email Aran for asking for final approval, renders that sales order as a PDF. This is gonna be the standard one, but it’ll do that all for you based on how you’ve got it configured and set up. And away you go, you can go ahead and submit that order over to Aran, close it and you’re done for the day again without ever having left the email. That was about the extent of what I was gonna show in terms of new functionality. So I believe at this point, we are handing over to Rico. Not quite ready yet for Rico. Might be some other things I can show in Business Central if you need little bit more time Rico, let me know.

Rico: Okay. Yes, we are. So I just, I mute myself. Sorry. I was talking to myself for a couple of minutes. Okay, so I’m going to show you more practical parts on the Business Central or formerly known as NAV clients. So I have a small agenda here. So the first part will be on the web client because as we heard from Tony, this is the clients to go in previous and the next versions. And then I also will show you some useful functions which are available in the RTC as well. And then there are some future new features and I will just highlight them on this slide.

So the web client is the next new client, but RTC is still available. So don’t get scared, it’s not going away that fast, but you will have some time to continue on the web client. So what is one improvement on the web clients? The first one is we have updated keyboard shortcuts. In the previous versions, we had no shortcuts so what you had to do is all manual in the web clients. Now, you can use stuff that you already know like copy, paste with Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. You have the F8 key to copy and development from the cell above. You have filters and all this nice stuff that you already know from the RTC.

The next part is an optimized search. In the web client, you have…so when in the RTC you have the search box into your top right corner and when you search you will find a ton of results. The search in Business Central now is way more advanced. So for example, if you are in the customer cart and you search for customer, it will tell you “Hey, you have some insights right here in the customer card.” So this is the first part of my screenshot. so you can see what’s happening on the customer card which is tied to the keyboard customer. And you have the like the old way search results like customers, customer template, price groups, and so on. And then you also have some reports which are highlighted for you. So this is pretty nice, especially for new users to actually find stuff very easily. This will be your best friend I assume if you’re a new user.

Next thing which is really important, and it’s coming into the web client is the actual filtering lists. Because when you’re filtering in the previous versions, you could filter on one value. But what you couldn’t do is filter on multiple fields at the same time, and you couldn’t also filter on flow fields. So imagine you were on tablet accounts and now you wanna filter on a date, date filter. This wasn’t possible in the web client before nowadays, so pretty much the same experience as you have in the RTC.

And then again I told you already, you have to copy and paste rows. In the previous version we had a thing which were similar to copy and paste because you could export to Excel and then do all the data in Excel and then publish it into Business Central, again. Now it’s as easy as copy and paste with on Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. And as I told you before, we also have the copy function of the key F8, which allows you to copy the value from the cell above, which is really the value that we have surely.

This is what I have from my web client, so I think the most important part for you is the RTC. Because I think most of you are still using the RTC. So I think I will just demo the stuff in the RTC. Some of it, I have to have a look on time as well, so let’s see where we get. So the first thing is we have new improved data entry in journals. So I call it like document type journals. So before you had one journal with multiple document numbers, now you can kind of group them.

So let’s open the RTC, you can see it’s still there. It’s pretty much the same. Let’s see if we can find the general journals. We have a general journal over here, I open this one, default one, added the journal. And this is the way you all are used to it and now I can use the show fewer fields. And what it will do for me, it’ll group it by document posting date and currency code, and it will remove some columns in the bottom.

So now you have everything that’s connected to this one document because you could have multiple documents within one journal. You can skip to the previous into the next document. It’s pretty neat if you want to enter a multiple document in the same time, in the same journal, and have already balanced if every document number is balanced out. I totally like this on new functionality here. And as you can see, it was optional so you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it for some reason.

The next feature is blocked items are not visible in sales and purchase orders anymore. Which is a good thing because sometimes to select an item, then you get the image “Oh, this item is blocked,” you can’t use it. Why do I see it in first place, right? So now they got rid of this item, you usually can’t see it in the documents, but you can still see it in the item list because you need to place to block it and unblock it, obviously. So this advantage is that supports the user of selecting the proper items and it avoids wrong data entries.

Next thing which is pretty similar to the service item is the non-inventory item. So before we had [inaudible 00:45:59] passed, we had only items. Whenever you post an item on had inventory effect that you had quantity on hand and this sometimes force a bit stupid. Because you sold like services and you use an item for some reason for this, and then you had negative quantity on hand. Before Microsoft introduced the service item, and now we also have the non-inventory item, which is an item for example what you can sell or what you don’t purchase on an item level. Maybe, you buy it on the bulk level, on a GL level or you produce it, manufacture it, whatever.

And the same thing like for service items doesn’t calculate the quantity on hand in your item cart. I think that we’re already implemented in 2018 was the employee ledgers and the payments. So when you go back to your clients, oops, let me show the client, I can go to…actually awards at the journals. You could create a general journal which is for travel expenses, then you can edit the journal. And then you have…show more columns, you have one more account type. So our account type that we have now is of the employee, and we have to drop down. This is a new entry here. And the employee actually allows you to post on ledgers against your employee, and you can pay your employee directly.

So what is the advantage? Imagine situation when you have set up your employee as a vendor, and you do want to pay the expenses to your employee. But you don’t want your purchasing guys to see all the expenses that were paid to your boss to whomever into company. So this was kind of an issue because you couldn’t prevent to see some vendors for these guys and some others are allowed to be visible. So now we can read think so we can say employee are only available for finance for whomever, and the actual vendors are the data entries for your purchasing guys.

So this is a cool thing and which is really secure because it’s a different tables. Everything is different and you can ask that different permissions based on these tables and pages. And what happens is when you post journal like this, you can go to your employee and actually yesterday. I’m still, yeah, I’m still…

What you can see here is, you can find your ledgers…actually, where is my…the trend is here. And you can see that I posted some letter entries for a hotel, for this guy here, and she needs to be paid $132. And the next thing which is integrated is obviously the payments in your Payment Journal. In your Payment Journals, you have this nice functionality, so just render payments. I think you already know this functionality because it was here like forever, and now you have, these are just employee payments, which is pretty much the same. So you can suggest vendor payments all due payments. You can filter on employee, you can, yeah, summarize a current employee, you can pay it separately, whatever you want. So pretty much the same as you have for vendor payments, apart from a separate table, so it’s all secure, nobody can see if you don’t want them to see that.

There’s one limitation which you should be aware of, it doesn’t calculate sales taxes. So this is kind of not a nice feature but you can still look around because you can use the journal to actually calculate the taxes. And then there’s one more thing which is kind of my favorite in the NAV 2008 version which is the dimension filter builder. So before when you were in a chart of accounts what you could filter on where you’re to global dimensions. Right now you can build a filter based on whatever you want, so you can filter your sales by let’s say, a sales campaign from last winter, and then you can see all your ledgers, which are connected to these sales campaigns, no matter what other dimension combinations that were. So this is really nice thing because before you had to actually create an analysis by dimensions and then you have to create an account schedule to actually filter and fill all these data, and now you can do it right away in your chart of accounts.

And then one more tool which I’ve already mentioned was the edit in Excel functionality. What you can do is, you can export from your Business Central into Excel, and your Excel pops up, you can enter all the data. And then you can hit the button in the bottom of Excel say Publish, and then all the data from the Excel file will get published to your Business Central. We’ll run all the business logic, make sure that all the information is valid, and then you can go back and actually post your journal in this case. Yeah, bits about the case on my demonstration. I hope you enjoyed some of the new features, and yeah, I hope some questions.

Tracey: Great, thank you Rico. We’ve got a few minutes left so we’ll open the floor for up, if anyone has any questions. And nobody has any questions, then we’ll be able to give everyone five minutes back. Hi, Susan, open to people can speak or they’re gonna type in their questions?

Tess: If anyone has any questions, they can raise their hand and I can unmute them, or they could type their questions into the side pin.

Tracey: Awesome. Thanks, Tess.

Tony: No.

Tracey: Great. Well, thank you everyone for participating. It’s great to see so many people online watching this webinar. It will be recorded and put up on our website, so you can consume it at your leisure. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to Rico, myself, or Tony, and we look forward to help you on your journey to D365 Business Central.

Rico: Is there is a question?

Tess: Yeah, there is a question that came in. So does it work for internal approvals as well rather than just confirming an order?

Tony: I think it’s going to Aran’s area, right?

Aran: Yeah. So that is the approval process that you saw, there is the traditional and the standard one that is an internal routing process, typically based on dollar amount of the user that is trying to update the order. So based on those rules, you can route that internally within your organization for an approval of that order before it is set to release status within Business Central. Hopefully, that answers the question.

Tony: Just one addition here. If you want to you could also create an external flow which is the Microsoft Flow thing, which allows you also to push it out externally but so the approval buttons you could see, and which are already built are only the within Business Central. But you can extend it to the flow.

Aran: Any other questions?

Tess: Yeah, another one. We are NAV 16 On-Prem, how can I obtain a download and try it out?

Tony: In terms of Business Central the SaaS offering, you can easily spin up a trial and give it a go. If you are on-prem with Microsoft, if your enhancement has been paid, you can download or you have access to download the Business Central on-prem and install that give a try. You’d have to use the demo license file that comes with it. Because I’ve originally have to transition your license file, which you wouldn’t want to do until you’re definitely kind of migrating. But those are two options that can give you access to Business Central SaaS as well as Business Central for a trial.

Tracey: Yeah. If you just Google, you just D365 BC trials, and actually there’s a direct link or if you’d like the link, I can send it, you just drop me an email.

Tony: We can’t see the questions here, Tess. If you see them, if you could chat them out, that’d be great?

Tess: Yeah, we just have another one here. Are there any resources for using the BI reports?

Aran: So the BI reports that I showed or just briefly showed are the ones that are kind of built out of the box from Microsoft. So they tend to be food for thought for an organization. In almost every case, organizations will take the Power BI views and kinda create some of their own either by changing the ones that are provided by Microsoft, or just building brand new Power BI reports that are relevant to their business and their configuration.

So what you see in the demonstration is really more of representative example. Sometimes there are pieces that the clients will actually like to use in that. I did demo this morning where I took actual data in Business Central and kind of made it represent, and quite nicely my sales over the course of time as well as the types of products that I was ultimately selling, and then did the half decent job of kinda picking that up. So they are getting better but most clients will make them their own anyway.

Tess: That’s all for questions that I can see.

Tony: Okay, perfect.

Tracey: Great. Thanks, Aran. Thanks, Rico. Thanks, Tony.

Tony: Thanks, Tracey.

Aran: Thanks, everyone.