Showcase of Dynamics GP Processes in Dynamics 365 Business Central (Video)

In this recorded webinar, our team members showcase familiar Dynamics GP processes in Dynamics 365 Business Central.

See side-by-side comparisons of:

• Journal entries – 2:35
• Renaming master records – 12:15
• Modifying columns – 17:20
• Dimensions – 21:40
• AP transactions – 30:55
• Purchase Order – 38:35
• Modifying a Sales Invoice – 47:30
• Integration with Outlook – 55:20

Other Resources:

• Dynamics 365 Business Central Overview (Video) 
• Dynamics GP vs Dynamics 365 Business Central Blog
• More Than an ERP | Integrated Microsoft Solutions
• Dynamics 365 Business Central | Licensing and Pricing Answers

If you have any questions about Dynamics 365 Business Central, contact us

Webinar Transcript:

Tracey: Welcome, everyone, to Encore’s presentation on Dynamics Showcase. Joining me today I have Rico Dammann, myself, Tracey. We’re gonna be doing the presentation or the demo of GP and how you do common functions in Business Central, Dynamics 365 Business Central. And we also have Tess, our wonderful Tess with us as well. If you have any questions, please type them into the chat and we will try and address them after we do the presentation. As well if you have something you’d like to see in the application, you can also type that in and Tess will be taking those questions at the end.

So, we’ll go ahead and get started with our agenda. So, introductions, which I just did. And between us all, I think, we have about 40 years’ experience in the Dynamics space, so I think you’re in good hands. Why we wanted to present this subject today is, you know, maybe you’re thinking about transitioning from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you know, in the next few months. Maybe you’re planning it out as an initiative for next year or maybe you’re just curious because you’ve been hearing a lot about Dynamics 365 Business Central and you kind of want to know, “Gee, I really…I’ve got some great skills and a lot of efficiency and I know how to use Dynamics GP. And what does that look like in Business Central?” So, we thought it would be kind of fun to take you through the tour of some of these common business processes that you do every day in one application, Microsoft application, and see what that looks like in another Microsoft application.

Now, I’m going to ask that you give me a little bit of a break, a bit of a break. It’s been about 18 years since I implemented Dynamics GP. For those of you who know me, I’m kind of working on the customer side, the inside sales side, helping customers learn more about the Dynamics world, and I don’t do implementations anymore. But Rico is amazing and fantastic and he knows everything about Business Central inside and out. So, we’re in very good hands, and I think we’ll get through this. We’ll get through this within the hour. We will get through it. Rico seems to think that an hour is not gonna be long enough, and I’m thinking, “I think we’ll be done sooner than an hour.” So, we’ll get started.

All right. The first thing I’m going to do is journal entry, which is pretty straightforward. And most of us have to do a journal entry sometime during the day or the month, maybe it’s that month, then we’re doing some journal entries. And again, I’ve got my screen in Dynamics GP that I could go and do a journal entry. I’ve actually put a journal entry in here already. I’m gonna scroll to that and go through something that I did, a very simple entry, and then I’ve got another really simple entry here. And we’re gonna go and do a new entry here. So, I’ve got a few journal entries in this batch GP webinar. Then I can go through the fields and I put my reference in here. And, again, I’m gonna go down here to my accounts and I know that I’m doing a lot of work right now in our travel expenses, trying to catch up from last year. So, I’m gonna go ahead and put some transaction amount in here. And I know I wanted this to go to accrued because I’m accruing for something that’s gonna be coming up.

So, I’m gonna go to my accrued expenses. There we go. Very simple entry. And again, if I wanted to put that down distribution reference in there, I could do that as well. So, again, I’ve got something really simple here. And I can go ahead and say Save. Another way to get a journal entry in is to do copy and paste. So, I’ve got my template here, and I’m gonna simply go and copy that, and I go back into my journal entry here and say Paste. Yay, it worked. For those of you who have tried it before and it doesn’t work, it’s really kind of handy because it has a document that prints up, lets you know where your errors is, where your errors are, is. I could speak. See, I’m so nervous doing this. Here we go. So, we’ve got our couple of journal entries, Rico, that I’ve done. So, I will hand it back over to you to show how we would do that in Business Central.

Rico: Okay, perfect. So, let me get my screen over. And now you see Business Central. If you have seen our other demonstration that we did for the last couple of weeks, we were doing this all in Business Central in the business owner mode. Now, today, I changed myself to be in the accountant mode, so you can see the few here is a little bit different than before, but, in general, it’s the same thing. But I don’t wanna go over this again. What I wanna do today now is to go and enter a journal, just like Tracey did, and to give you an idea of what it could look like on the Business Central side of things. So, first of all, I wanna start with something that looks pretty familiar with you. This is the journal in the shortened version. So, I think it looks pretty familiar to what you just saw, like you have a batch name, you have the document number, you have your posting date, and specified, and then in the lines you would see the actual accounts, you would see the account name, you can override the description here. So, let’s say it is a cash like a transfer, and you can store the information here. So, it is store description. You have your debits and your credits. And if there were dimensions applied, all that kind of good stuff would also come over here. And if I would go to the next document, all I need to do is go to the next document number and it would show me the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And if I would enter a new one, I would simply click New Document Number, it would create a new document for me.

So, I got, like, the next number from the sequence. It’s auto-generated. And I can start, again, entering wages. So, I just type in what account I want to use. So, I want to use the wages account and I want to enter a $300 debit. And I can override the description if I want to. Let’s say it’s December 2020. And then I would go to the next line. And a similar thing that you saw in GP is that it would already populate, like, the credit amounts to make sure that the total balance is already on… It would balance in the end, but you don’t need to accept this amount. So, let’s say I have another one where it’s for salaries. So, I want to enter the number manually because I know the numbers, so I can type it in right now. So, it’s salaries, December 2020, just because I want it that way, and I just make it $500 in the debit and the credit will disappear. And now, of course, if I go to the next line, it will add the numbers together and now I can put them in my accrual account.

Tracey: Rico, I really like that how when you went to account number, you could type in the name, you could type in anything and it came up. That was really cool.

Rico: Yeah. That is why I put it in here because that’s one of the key features. You don’t need to know the account numbers and you don’t need to scroll through lists. All you need to do is basically start typing and it will shrink the lists. As soon as I go in there or remove things, it will make it larger or bigger, depending on my filter. I think that’s one of the great features. Thanks for pointing this out again. For me, it’s so natural. Okay. So, this is one way of entering a journal. Why can’t… When I say this is one way, there must be another one. So, let me go to another journal. Let me go to Rico’s batch, because I prepared another one. And let me change my view to a more column view. And for those of you who have been attending my other presentation, you kind of know this already, where the opposite, like, the difference between the one view and this one is I don’t have a header now. So, I can have many, many documents all on the same view and I can have also the balance account sitting in one line. So, I don’t need to break it down into multiple lines. So, what I can do from here and I prepared something similar to Tracey is I can actually copy and paste. Of course, I could enter it manually as well. But I can copy and paste from Excel to here. And it’s just a Ctrl+V, like, the normal stuff that you would do on Excel, Word, or wherever. And you would now have different invoices with different document numbers. A GL account is in here, so this is my revenue account. I have the amount copied over and I have my customer associated to that. And for those of you who know about the concept of dimensions or segments as they are in GP, I can also copy in the segments here.

So, that’s all, all doable. And now I could continue. If it’s worth the currency thing, I could also update the currency and it would do all the calculations in the background. And if I feel I want to modify what I have in here, I can still do that. So, even if I have already entered all these lines in here and I wanna modify them all in once, instead of doing it like line by line by line, I can export this, again, to Excel, edit in Excel, and it would open this very batch in Excel for me. Give me a second here. So, it’s downloading the file. So, now since it’s all Microsoft Office 365 connected, it will open the file. I will hit Enable Editing. And now it will connect with my credentials to Business Central to make sure that I am who I am and I’m allowed to do that. It’s verifying my authentication and now it’s connecting the data. And in a second, I will see all the lines from the journal. And this function, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about 5 lines or 5,000 lines, the amount…the time itself will be the same thing. So, what I can do now is I could go to my… Like, all the fields that I have in here, I could populate all these fields. All I want to do right now is minus 200, and then make this just sequence or whatever you have, right? So, it could be anything. And all I need to do now is to publish this back to Business Central. Writing data, publish successful. And now I can close my Excel. Yes, whatever. You can save it or not save it. It doesn’t really matter. So, if I would refresh this page here with F5, you would have all the numbers in here. So, it’s as easy as that to even modify an existing journal in Business Central. And that was my first piece of how to enter a journal in Business Central. So, back over to you, Tracey.

Tracey: Well, that makes accounting really exciting. That looked like a lot of fun.

Rico: It is.

Tracey: All right. Well, let’s go on to our next topic. We’re gonna talk about a couple of ideas I’m gonna go through in this example is I’ve got a situation where I’m looking at…I’m running a report and I notice that someone has actually gone and created another GL account for travel. And you can see here that they didn’t quite follow our convention of it’s supposed to be 6520 for travel, and I have my other departments and someone went ahead and created an account, 6529. Well, Rico, and there’s been transactions posted. So, I’m gonna go ahead and have a look at this. So, I’m gonna go actually to Account Maintenance and I’m gonna look this up. And I see here… Okay. Yeah. They went and created that and we can see here that, indeed, there is a transaction that’s been posted to this. So, again, from back on the screen, you can see I can go and change the description, but I can’t go and change the actual account number. Okay. What am I gonna do? Well, I do know that I do have something called professional services tools library here in Dynamics GP. So, I think I’m gonna go ahead and have a look at that and see if I can go and make that change. So, I’ll go over there. And I do see that there is a tool in here, Financial Tools, Account Modifier Combiner that I could use to go and fix that. So, I’m not gonna do that right now, but I could go and do that. So, that would be one way of going and seeing how we can go and fix a transaction that there was an account created, something was posted against it, and now we need to go and change that. And, again, I think this can happen quite often, Rico, with clients where they’ve gotten an account and business changes or they didn’t allow enough room for growth in a certain range of accounts. So, in GP, you know, we do have a tool that allows you to be able to do that. How would you do that in Business Central?

Rico: That actually is a good question. And, of course, I prepared something for that. I feel a little bit like a chef here, a TV chef. So, of course, we have the same kind of troubles, but, to be honest, in Business Central, it’s way easier to change the records. So, for example, to pick that example here. In my chart of accounts, which is, by the way, also like a trial balance, let’s say I want to create another banking account here and I wanna follow, like, the 100 steps. So, I can see, there is the 300 left in between. And I have this account here, which has transactions. So, if I drill down, I can see there is a couple of transactions already associated to this GL account number. And I would like to actually rename this account to 11300 and then have enough space for another 11400 which would be, like, my new bank account. So, I can totally do that. All I need to do is go into my account. I have my number up here. All I need to do is to change that to 300. And now the system will ask me, “Do you want to rename the record?” Of course, I would say, “Yes.” And as soon as I do that, the system will find all the spots where this account has been used in the background and will rename these spots as well. That means all my history is moved over as well. And this does not only apply to my GL account, this would also apply to dimension. So, if I decide to rename a dimension value equals to one of your segments, same concept, it would rename this one as well. So, now, if I go to my ledgers which are associated to my newly renamed 11300 account, they also tie to my 11300 account. So, I moved all the history by just renaming GL account. I think that’s quite easy, isn’t it?

Tracey: Wow, Rico, that is awesome. And can you stay on that page that you’re on right now? I think that was fantastic, that master records and being able to update that. And then you said for dimensions as well, and I’m sure it’s for all the master records, the customer ID, name, etc. Because we have the same challenge in Dynamics GP. Once you create that master record, you have to use a tool to go and fix that. So, that was awesome. I really, really like that feature. I see here, like, right where you are, you see the trial balance live, like, just from the screen. That’s… Wow. I wish we had that in GP.

Rico: Yep. And you know what? I can even do more in here. Like, what else could I do here? Maybe we could pull in some categories to show us where these accounts, like, how they are grouped, right? So, we have this begin totals and these end totals, but wouldn’t it be awesome to see like a category and a subcategory here? And I can totally modify my screen here, super easy. I just personalize it. And now I can add additional fields here. Come on. Of course, it’s a demo. Here we go. So, let’s say I want to add, like, additional fields here and I talked about the categories. So, maybe just start typing. Okay. Here we go. We have account category and subcategory. I think it would be a great idea to put them here to have, like, the account category, so it would tell me if it’s an asset or a liability or, like, revenue or on COGS account. And if I wanted to see even more, I have subcategories in Business Central. And now I can see that for the assets I have the cash, accounts receivable, prepaid expenses, all these kind of things I can see already in here. It’s as easy as that to enter new fields on tables. But I can… Sorry. I can do that same thing also on the card field.

So, let’s say I didn’t like the view of the card because it contained way too many details. I could go here and, for example, say, “I don’t even know what this field is and I don’t care.” So, just go here and hide it. And then there is another option that we have here. As you can see this Show More. So, just watch what happens when I click on this field. It actually shows me additional fields. This field, the New Page, was not here before. Right? So, we can see that. So, I can actually hide fields. And if I want to see them, they are still visible if I just click on this Show More field. So, what I can do is I can say this debit and credit, I want to make this only visible when I click the Show More. And then the next feature, which is kind of cool is if you wanna collapse this entire group, you see a couple of fields which are still visible up here, even if it’s collapsed. So, we can see here that the numbers are visible, the name, the account type, and the balance. So, if I want to make sure that a certain field is only visible when it’s collapsed, I can make the Account Subcategory, for example, visible by show when it’s collapsed. So, now since this is the setup, if I collapse it, I would also see the Account Subcategory populated here, even when it’s collapsed. That, I think, is a super nice feature if you wanna save space on your screen and you still want to have access to all the details that you need.

Tracey: Yeah, Rico. That user interface is, like, amazingly configurable. And I think for people who are new to Business Central, that really shortens the learning curve. That’s amazing.

Rico: Cool.

Tracey: All right. Well, we’ll go on to our next item.

Rico: Yes, please. So, what else do you have in your bucket list that you would like to see on our end?

Tracey: All right. Well, I’m gonna go through… I’ll show my screen. And you are showing modifying columns. I can’t really do that modifying columns. On certain things I can. So, in list views, I can change columns or, for example, in smart list, I can go in. I can’t do that kind of dragging and dropping that you were doing in smart lists. I actually have to go into the column field here and go and move things around. So, I really like that ease of use. And for those of you that are on the webinar that use list views… And the list views, I’m not gonna go into them right now, but you can drag and drop the columns, again, in there. So, that’s fairly comparable there. All right. I’m gonna go through… A challenge I’m having right now, Rico, is, again, we’re gonna go look at that in our dimensions and talking about what we have out of the box with Dynamics GP.

And we know we have a segmented chart of accounts for Dynamics GP and we also have… I’ve got a task of right now, we’ve been doing a lot of travel for trade shows and there’s some more trade shows coming up next year. And we really wanna be able to understand that data a little bit better, and right now we’re putting it into these accounts that, sure, they are departmentalized and we know they’re travel, but we really don’t know exactly what’s going on as far as some of the detail in here. So, I was trying to figure out a way of, “How am I gonna go and work that out?” And I was gonna put some more description in here. I was thinking about other ways of handling it. And we had some payables information that came in. This one was a journal entry to some AP transactions that came in as well. And so I was thinking, “Well, how can I really go in?” If I don’t want to use analytical accounting, I was like, “Okay. Well, I guess I’m gonna have to just dump this out to Excel and look at it in Excel and then kind of break it down and figure out where those transactions can be, how they can be grouped easily.”

So, I was kind of wondering if you had something where, you know, again, trade shows or different projects come up and they’re intermittent and they’re throughout the year and, you know, I really want a way to be able to analyze that and be able to see things from a different perspective, a lot easier way to see the data easier. Do you have something that you can show? Because other than doing analytical accounting, these transitory things, I would have to go in, for example, if I go and look at our Account Maintenance window and I brought up that 300652000, which was one of my travel accounts for the sales department, which is Department 300, again, I have to really go into doing things a lot more in detail, and I think this is the entry that came from accounts payable and we can see that we did put… I put some more reference in there, but that’s kind of clunky.

Rico: Yep. Field is not the easiest thing in the world, but to be honest, it feels like what you would need is, like, a hashtag for your transactions, right?

Tracey: Yeah.

Rico: So, something where you have, like, you enter something and then you just hashtag it and say, “Okay. Now I wanna be able to find everything that has this hashtag.” And you know what? That’s what we do with dimensions. So, of course, we use dimensions as you use them, for example, for departments. So, classic with our implementations is we have a department dimension, we have a jobs dimension, potentially, maybe you have a customer region and whatnot. But you get a good example, a trade show. So, let’s say we have these trade shows and I want to be able to maintain these values and they come up, and once the trade show is gone, you will never have any additional transactions for this trade show again. Right? So, instead of creating, like, a new GL account to, say, travel expense for trade show spring 2020, and then another one for trade show fall 2020, we would just create one of those hashtags, and once we don’t need it anymore, we just terminate it. So, what we do is we go into our dimensions, it’s a setup. If I could type, that would help a lot. So, dimensions. And now you would see a thing that we as consultants usually help you with in the beginning. So, you can see that I have a dimension for jobs. So, for jobs, I have a couple of dimension values. And now you can see that these are all my jobs. But I also have a dimension which I already set up for trade shows. So, this is a common thing that we do in dimension values. We have, like, a dimension value for the trade show in fall 2019, then we had one in spring 2019, and we had one for spring 2020. What you can see here is that I blocked those two.

So, what if I have a new thing that I need to prepare, which is called fall 2020 trade show? And now since spring is already over, the trade show is done, I would just block it, right? So, I would just go here, block this one, and I would go back to my journal, and now you would see how easy it is to enter this hashtag against my transactions. So, I go to my journal. I just set up a new trade show. It took me like a second to do that. Of course, more explaining than actually doing here. So, let’s say this line item here was associated to a specific trade show. You can see. Of course. Where did I put it? I put it in the very end. I have this dimension as a column here, and if I go here and do the drop-down, all I can see is the trade show that is still active. All the other ones are still there in the background. And any transaction that still has this dimension value would be available for reporting, but I can’t create any new transactions with this dimension. So, all I need to do is select this one and now it’s a part of my transaction. It’s hashtag. So, if I wanna post this and run a report on that, I would totally be able to report on my trade show. Don’t matter on what account. Any account in your entire chart of accounts, any master record, any sub-ledger, any ledger that is associated with that one will have this hashtag. So, you can run your analysis on this trade show everywhere.

So, when I’m talking about these dimensions, I wanna give you a little bit of an insight what you can do with dimensions and how you could analyze them. So, if I would go out of here for now and if I go to my Analysis Views, this one. I have prepared something where I have a couple of more ledgers already prepared. And this is… My example is my job sales. So, let’s say I have recorded all my sales that I did during the year against a particular job, but at the same time, I also figured out that on a specific job, multiple departments work, so I want to be able to run a report to show me per job how much revenue was done by a specific department, like, in the pivot table. And instead of exporting all the data and running like an Excel on that, I can totally do that all in here. So, what I want to do… Sorry. That was wrong button. I want to do an analysis by dimension.

So, what I want to do is I want to see in my lines my jobs since I have this view already prepared. I want to see my jobs in the lines. And in my columns, today, I don’t want to see periods, but I want to see my departments. So, let’s say I want to see all my revenues that I did from January this year to June this year. So, I would just, in period one to period six, this would translate to an actual date filter. And all I need to do now is click on Show Matrix, and it would show me exactly what I was looking for. Show me the jobs and show me the departments. If I would go and say “Show me the revenue only for P1,” I can even see more detailed view that I don’t have, like, records for every single month, and it will still show up in here. So, every job has a transaction but not for every department. So, I think that’s a super easy way to report on these what I’ll call dimensions, but I refer to them as hashtags because that’s really what they are. They are tagging your transactions and you would be able to build reports based on that.

Tracey: Wow, very cool. That’s awesome. So, that would really help me in those kind of, like, intermittent or temporary projects or trade shows or events that come up and I wanna track costs by department.

Rico: Correct. Yes. Exactly the same concept with jobs, right? A job, per definition, has an end. And once the job has ended, you wanna make sure that you don’t track cost against it anymore. Like, if somebody is coming late, you immediately at least want to know that he was coming late. The job is already closed.

Tracey: Right. Gotcha.

Rico: Yeah. So, that was what I could tell you about dimensions and I hope that would help you with your trade show and the analysis for that.

Tracey: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay. All right. Let’s go on to our next common item that we would be doing on a daily basis as the accounting team, as the finance team, and that’s entering AP invoices. So, for us, we’re not… Some things we do POs, but a lot of things we don’t do POs for. So, we’re just gonna go in and we do payables transaction entry. And when we go and enter information up, again, to hit back on that trade show thing, I’ve got information about this and I wanna capture that. So, again, I’ve entered… I’ve got the invoice from the supplier, I could go and attach that invoice and see that, but maybe there’s specific information I wanna communicate, maybe it’s internally or I wanna make a record of that.

And, again, I could have a Word document or something that I could go and attach there if I wanted to do that. Now, these attachments that you do that, again, can have a date that they’re no longer available, so you can put that kind of that…have that library function. But, you know, sometimes I just wanna have some more information in here. And all I can really put in here is who I bought it from and document number and the amount. And then I can go to distributions. Now, in distributions, I have that ability to kind of put some additional information in here. And I was putting this. Okay. For this one, it was for two trade shows, four trade shows, three trade shows, etc. And there’s my distributions. So, it would be nice to be able to have something a little bit more explanatory without having to do a bunch of attachments there. But, yeah. And I can only enter… Again, if I wanted… And we do do that. We have POs where we do a purchase order for an inventory item or a purchase order for fixed assets. But our payables transactions we use when we don’t have, for example, a purchase order, it’s not for inventory. So, how would I kind of work that through in Business Central?

Rico: Yep. I totally have something for you in this regard. So, let me share my screen again. And we could… Of course, we could do it in a journal as well, like that’s the thing that I just demoed before, but since when… Like, when we get purchase invoices, we would have an invoice which is, like, from the structure, pretty much the same thing as you get like in proper invoice. So, when you create a new purchase invoice, when you get it, you usually have, like, header information, then you have a couple of lines, which I think is what you do in distributions. And then there is, like, bottom information where, like, you have the totals and who to pay it to and all that kind of stuff. So, when we enter a new invoice, of course, I can go and start typing my vendor name, my vendor number, or I can just browse in here. So, I’m selecting my Fabrikam vendor, which is, like, my favorite demo vendor. I can enter the invoice number. It must be unique for vendors, so this prevents me from having duplicate entries there. Again, here is the Show More.

If I want to enter more information, I could totally do that. Usually, I don’t need that. That’s why I usually work with this kind of shortened queue here. And now let’s go over to our…what you would call distribution, what we would call the line items. So, in the line, you can see I have different types. I can not only record GLs. So, let me just record, keeping…like, staying with the example of a trade show. Let’s say I have travel expenses that I need to enter against this. I can get, like, in quantity and then have, like, $300. And I maybe want to put in… This is the hotel for management. It’s like $600 for that. Let’s say on the same invoice… I don’t know what this company is. But let’s say on the same invoice, this company would charge me for a table that I want to buy for this trade show.

So, I can also select item and now I can get a desk because I need a desk on my trade show, right? So, I can do and select, “I wanna order one desk,” and since it’s an item, it already has, like, populated pricing. This comes all with the inventory module. I can put that right here on the invoice. Let’s say there is a freight associated to that. So, I can go and, again, do a GL account and associated freight. And again, this is, like, $55. And now let’s go really crazy. Let’s say for this trade show we also need a car. So, I set up a fixed asset in my system because I want to reuse it, but I buy it right now. So, I wanna make sure that it’s all associated to this thing. So, I wanna buy a blue Ford Mustang. So, what I do is I can select my fixed assets here and I can say, “I’m buying a Ford Mustang from here, $60,000.” I don’t even know if this is real, but, you know, you get the idea. So, I can enter, like, all kinds of different things on my invoice and I can also provide the header a description. I think that’s what you would have on your site, like, on the not distribution one.

Tracey: Yeah, for sure. And then also you have the ability to do your comments on those lines as well with the line items.

Rico: Correct. I can have the line items with the comments. I can do attachments here. I can leave comments. I can have incoming documents. There’s tons of things where I can still attach all the pieces, but I think the main thing that kind of struggled me a little bit when I saw you was that you couldn’t see all this all in one view. You have to go to the first one, then you have to go to distribution to find all the pieces, right?

Tracey: Definitely.

Rico: So, that’s all on the invoice…

Tracey: And you could do everything on one form. I wouldn’t be able to do a combination of fixed assets, inventory items, and GL accounts all on the same thing. So, awesome. Awesome. That’s super valuable, super useful, for sure.

Rico: Yeah. And if I were to attempt to post this guy, since we have to preview a posting, I can totally do that, so it’s not really posting right now. But it would already tell me, even though I’m not selecting a GL account, it would tell me which GL accounts would be affected if I post this invoice. So, if I would go down here, I would not only see, of course, my two GL accounts that I selected, but I would also see, like, the purchase account. I would see my travel, I see my expenses, I see the taxes, and everything that’s related to that, all the sub-ledgers and everything will be translated. So, you can double-check before you post if the GL account, which will be used when you post invoice, is correct. So, you still have full control over the entire thing, even though you’re not using the GLs directly on the line levels.

Tracey: Great. Thanks, Rico. So, since we’re talking about purchasing something, we were in transaction entry. Let’s go ahead and talk about purchase orders. So, I’m gonna go ahead and I’ll go through doing a purchase order, and then we’ll talk about how we would do that in Business Central.

Rico: Perfect.

Tracey: Great. So, I’m gonna go to Purchase Order Entry. And again, Rico, just to touch on the previous one, so, if I was gonna order inventory or fixed assets or buying those things, I would do that in here?

Rico: Mm-hmm.

Tracey: And in this example here, I’m using my favorite vendor, which is ACE Travel, and I had to go and purchase something from them. So, I did a standard purchase order. Again, we got different purchase order types. And I’m selecting an item. I could have a purchase order for inventory items or non-inventory, so either one would be fine. And at this point here, I would go ahead and email off that purchase order to the supplier or print it off and mail it if I was doing it that way, but probably I’d be emailing it. And so I’d create that. Now, at this particular moment, I’m not doing anything after that, but, again, I could bring up this purchase order or I could go into a separate screen to do the receiving and invoice matching. But, again, it’s a different screen. So, I’ll just walk you through that. So, for example, if I wanted to go ahead and set up an entry to receive the PO, many ways I can get to the screen.

So, typically, I wouldn’t be in here. I’d be either looking at a list of POs that need to be received or I would just go straight to this screen here, which is the receiving transaction entry window. So, again, it’s a window where I’m gonna go ahead and select the purchase order and decide what I need to receive. And maybe I’m going to do receiving an invoice matching at the same time. So, I’m gonna go ahead and… I’m gonna go back over here because we’re not going to go ahead and receive that. But, again, I could do shipment and shipment and invoice or maybe just shipments. So, again, maybe I don’t have the invoice number. Again, different types of screens. I’m gonna go ahead and delete this because I’m not going to go and receive this. Just so you can see that we do have in Dynamics. If we go into Transactions and Purchasing, we have an order entry window, Receiving Transactions, and Enter/Match Invoices. And so they are functionally different screens. So, my purchase order, again, I can do two-way matching or three-way matching. Can you kind of show us in Business Central, like, what you would do there for purchase orders?

Rico: Yes, absolutely. So, what you just described is really depending on the process. So, in Business Central, we have multiple ways to do that. So, first of all, you still can do the same thing that you just do, like, you have a purchase order, which is usually done by a purchase manager, you would create it, you would send it out, then a couple of days later the goods arrives, so, you have the warehouse manager or warehouse worker who basically pulls the lines from all the purchase orders which are about to be received. And then the next step could be a person that is sitting in the AP who needs to pull in the lines from all the receipts. So, this three-way matching can still happen in Business Central, but we also have a shortcut. So, I can totally show you how you could create those. So, let’s go and create a purchase order on our site. So, I would go here, create a new purchase order, again, using my same favorite vendor, Fabrikam. I’m just typing in Fabrikam, which would populate all the details that I would need. I don’t need all the other pieces. I don’t need invoice number and stuff like that right now. But I want to receive or I want to purchase order for an Athens desk.

So, again, I want to buy this desk here. So, now I can say, “Where do I want to receive it to?” That’s all, all easy enough. So, I want to receive this guy against my main warehouse. I want to enter that I want to have it, like, once. And then, in here, you can already see in the columns that I could receive directly from the PO. Again, this would be a shortcut, just saying what if you want to open the purchase order and want to receive it directly from here. You can totally do that. You would enter all the information that you need, maybe you would enter a vendor shipment number. So, that’s delivery note. And then you would go here, posting, and you can select if you want to receive invoice or receive an invoice. Right now I only want to receive the products, and it would go into my inventory, and the number moves from quantity to receive to quantity received. And by the way, if you had a purchase order for 100 and you want to receive 20 or 1 or 80 or whatever, you can do that. But, like, anything that’s lower than the actual quantity can be received. And even if it exceeds there’s a new feature in Business Central which allows you to over-receive quantities under certain circumstances. But, again, that’s way too detailed for now.

So, let’s say the next piece that we wanted to do is invoice it. I could go either to my invoice now and pull in the lines similar to what you would do, like the two-way match or three-way match, but I could also post the purchase order directly from here. So, I could, again, go here. I need to enter an invoice number, of course. So, this is a weird invoice number, but it is one. So, posting post. And now I could invoice everything that has been received before. So, this would make sure that I’m not posting anything in my invoices, which is not real…which has not been received before. And now I could go to my posted invoice and I would see everything that I posted in my posted document. But as I said, this was just a shortcut. I have another way of doing it and I wanna show you that just to give you a reference because this is sometimes not working for you if you have this segregation of duty. Again, my favorite Fabrikam vendor. My item. I wanna receive the Athens desk. And this time I’m not receiving this against my main warehouse. I’m receiving this actually against my real warehouse. So, now I could even go and specify the bin already. But what I can do now is I will directly from here saying, “Create me a warehouse receipt.”

So, it would create a warehouse receipt for me, so the guys in the warehouse just need to pick it up once the product arrives. Or what I can also do is release the document. This will make sure that… Did I not… Oh, I didn’t enter a quantity. Sorry about that. Release, release the document. So, now this purchase order is released. That means it is available for my warehouse receipt guys to find it. So, if I go to Warehouse Receipts, so I would be, like, in the warehouse right now. Warehouse Receipts. I would create a new one, auto-generated number for my warehouse. And now I could go and process, get source documents, and now I would see all the purchase orders which are outstanding and wait on receiving. So, I would just click here and now I can process my stuff from here. So, same concept. You could go and create this from a warehouse receipt. Once it’s received, you would go to the invoice and pull in the received lines. So, we could do the same thing as in GP. We could do it in a shortcut. It depends on the process, and that’s what we usually figure out during our analysis.

Tracey: Great. Awesome. Thanks, Rico. Thanks for taking us through that.

Rico: No worries.

Tracey: All right. I’m gonna switch back over to me. And we’re gonna go on to our next topic, which is modifying layouts of documents. So, this would be documents that could be vendor-facing or they could be customer-facing. There’s a couple of things that in GP which are newer to some people. It came out many, many versions ago, but the ability to do Word templates. So, again, in this particular one, I wanted to do a blank invoice…the sales order blank invoice form, Rico, if SOB doesn’t ring a bell with you. So, I’ve got… I’ve created one for GP webinar. And again, I can assign that…I could assign it to a customer or a group of customers. It could just be the default, etc. So, in this report template maintenance, that’s where you can see that. And I’ll just bring up some examples, the couple of examples that I did, and then we’ll go and generate them. So, I’ve got one of them I created, I called it Test 1. And again, I highlighted this to make this look different and put a different message in there. And then I’ve got our GP webinar one. Another example, that I made a form and it did some changes to it. So, again, for most of you, you’ve used this before. And when we’re into bringing up a document, we have choices. And, again, when we bring up an invoice form, we go to print it, and we say Print. And at that point, I’m picking of what type of invoice I’m doing. In this particular one, I’m going to do just blank paper. And you can see that because I’ve set it up that it’s gonna default right to template, not to standard. So, template, and I can go ahead and have that print to screen. So, that’ll bring up that Word document. And there we have that doc, one of the templates.

Rico: That’s a cool feature. But you know what? We have quite a similar thing on our end.

Tracey: Awesome.

Rico: It’s a little bit different, but it’s still Word which does the heavy lifting. So, let me show you what we could do. So, let me go to our Posted Sales Invoices. So, in my Posted Documents I have the Posted Sales Invoice. It’s all, of course, already prepared because I don’t wanna start from scratch here. So, I would go to my invoice here to Relecloud, and they got an invoice for, I think, two items that we sold them. Oh, it’s just one item. So, we sold this item to them. And if I would go… I could go and print and send it directly. Right now I don’t wanna send the email right now. All I want to do is print it. And what you can see now is a canned report. So, this comes out of the box with the system. And maybe you like it, and maybe you don’t like it. So, this is a report that comes out of the box. It has, of course, all the details that you would need, like an invoice number, it has a logo on it. It has a couple of references. The line information is all here, GST, PST, all the things that you need. But maybe you feel, “This is like all gray-ish. I wanna pep it up a little bit. I wanna make it nicer for the customer.” I hit the wrong button here. So, sorry. Let me get this back to 100%. So now we have… Let’s say, for this customer, I want to actually make a custom template only for this customer. I can make it… I can change the template for everyone, but I can actually define a template for a specific customer. So, let’s go and do that. So, for this customer, I can go and open up the customer directly from here, and in the customer itself, I can navigate to my customer, to my customer document layouts. And then in that screen, we can see all the layouts that will be used.

So, right now this is all the standards, like, all the report IDs and everything that we are defined for every customer. That’s what it’s applied here. But now, let’s say, for this customer, I want to modify the layout. So, the system comes already with, out of the box, a couple of additional layouts. So, let me just select this guy here, and let’s see what it looks like if I would use this as my template. So, if I could run a report, I could just run it. So, it’s the same invoice number. Preview. We can see that this is already a totally different layout. So, now at least it’s a little bit more colorful, it has still all the details that I would need, but at least it has some color because I don’t like all the gray and stuff. So, it’s a little bit better. But you know what? I prefer actually to have, like, the stuff in green because green is more positive. So, let me just create a copy of that and make it my own template. So, what I would do is I would go and select Process. I would copy this one. I would give it a proper name. And it lists… So, this is my green one. And now I would go to Layout and export the layout. It takes a second to download the file itself.

And now if I open this, this, I guess, would look pretty familiar to what you would do in GP. So, it’s exporting the Word layout. And it’s also containing the entire XML structure, like the structure behind the fields. You don’t need to worry about, like, where it’s coming from. All these fields are already predefined. So, all I wanna do for now is make this a different color. So, I would change this guy to green and I also want to have this shaded all in green. So, I would go to Table Design, put a shade here in green. So, that should be a little bit more positive. And now I would like to actually have a frame around these tables because I don’t like when it’s all sitting a little bit in limbo there. And I don’t need a job number on my invoice because I don’t even have jobs in my system. So, all I would do is basically just delete these values here and leave this blank. So, that would be all my modifications for now. I could go crazy and add more fields, move fields around and stuff, but I think you get the idea that this is how you would modify a layout. All I need to do now is to save this layout. So, this is saved in my downloads. What I will go do now is import the layout. Choosing the layout from my downloads. And if I were to run the process from here, let’s do a test run to see if I like it. Preview. Now, I’m getting the invoice all with my modifications with my green, my lines around on this one. So, all my changes have been applied. So, if I would go now back to my customer, I would say, “Okay. For this customer, please always print this one, but for everyone else, still do with the old layout.”

Tracey: Awesome. That seemed pretty straightforward, Rico.

Rico: Yep. It’s super helpful.

Tracey: So, Rico, we’re almost out of time and I thought maybe we would jump to our last item, which you’ll just be able to show because I can’t show that, the connectivity with Outlook. Do you mind if we jump to that because in case our questions at the end?

Rico: Absolutely. So, let me go to my Outlook. And the scenario that I want to talk about is let’s say you have a customer who is sending you an email and asking you for a new quote or asking you for, like, new things to go on and you have a gut feeling saying, “I don’t know. Did this customer pay all the invoices? And I feel like I sent a quote exactly for this, like, two weeks ago. Let me just check.” So, right now I’m in my Outlook, and depending on the email address, the system is actually capable of connecting Outlook to Business Central. So, all I need to do is go from here and find my Outlook, my contact insights. So, it will connect to Business Central, even though I’m not opening my browser. Right? So, my browser is still in the corner here. And I can see all the details which are associated with your customer with this email address.

So, I can see that he owes me, like, $12,000. I can see the balance. I can see all the statistics that I need to see for this customer right from my Outlook. And then my gut feeling tells me, “I sent this quote a little bit earlier. Let’s go and dig into it and figure out what quotes we had.” So, let’s go through this one. And so he’s asking for, like, two swivel chairs and a conference table. And guess what? This is exactly what we have on here. So, this quote basically shows me all the things that he’s asking for, so I wonder if I should send him a new quote. I’ll just make it a little bit bigger here. Or if I just send him the quote again. So, I would go send the quote via email, and it will generate a new email for me attaching the quote from here directly to my Outlook email. It takes a while to render a report to create the email. Here we go. It gives me, like, the summary in my email directly, so I can still modify all this. But it also has the layout for the quote already attached. So, I can just shoot over the email with the quote again and off we go. It saves me a lot of time because I don’t even need to go to Business Central and navigate in there.

Tracey: Wow. That’s very impressive, Rico. I really like that feature. That’s great to be able to see the statistics about that customer right from your Outlook. That’s awesome.

Rico: Perfect.

Tracey: All right. Well, I’m gonna go back over to… If, Tess, you can make me a presenter and we’ll just finish up with the PowerPoint. And, Tess, if there are any questions, you can read them out. I’ll just kind of go over this. And we’ll share out some information. There’s lots of great information up on our website. Again, if you’re interested in learning more about Business Central, or you’d wanna go read some of our blogs, we’ve got lots of great articles up there about Dynamics GP and about Business Central. We just finished publishing an eGuide. So, lots of great information in that eGuide for you as well in moving your business forward. You can have a free trial of Business Central, and there’s also a CSP-EP offer when your renewal comes up that you can look into. And we have published up our overall demo that Rico did a few weeks ago, and those are up on YouTube. So, you can access all of that great information. Tess, were there any questions?

Tess: Yeah, there are. So, I’ll just read out the first one here to hopefully answer them in the time that we have left. So, the first one is, is there a report or audit trail to provide our auditors at the end of the year if account segments are changed?

Rico: Account… You mean, like, the dimensions? So, I guess this question ties into if you renamed the entire account for…

Tracey: Yeah. Like, when we had to rename those accounts.

Rico: I think there is no audit trail on the actual transaction. However, there is an audit trail on… Like, we can turn on and change log on all the master records. So, if you would change, like, the description or the name or even the number of the account, you would see who changed the account from what value to another value. So, yes, there is an audit trail, not on a transaction, but on the master record itself, for sure.

Tess: Okay, sounds good. The next one is, can you show how you would handle multiple pairs for a service? And then there’s an example that I’ll say. So, a service is provided… For example, a service is provided that cost $150 to a client. The client is invoiced for $75, the insurance company is invoiced $50, and the balance is paid by another party. We would like to show all three payers recorded. Separate invoices sent to all payers and the payments would settle to the exact service provided for the client.

Rico: I think there are ways around it. It sounds a little bit… From what I’m hearing, it sounds a little bit like a job, where it ties together. It might be… When you say service, it might be just a dimension, it might be something in the jobs module that there are definitely ways to charge from one particular instance to multiple customers. It’s definitely possible.

Tony: Yeah, we’ve done that for other insurance companies that…or restoration companies that experienced the same thing. So, it is possible to do it. There was a bit of some more minor adjustment to the system to allow it because it’s typically expecting one invoice from payer.

Tess: Awesome. The next question is, in GP, we use a third-party tool extender to add user-defined fields. How will Business Central handle this? Do we need third party tool or can this be done out of the box?

Rico: Business Central has come up with two approaches on that. So, for example, on the item cards, what I see a lot is or I’ve seen in the past is that we had to build, like, a ton of fields on the item card where you want to put, like, a category, like, a measurement, like, weight, color, and all that kind of stuff on there. And for a couple of versions or since a couple of versions, Microsoft introduced the attributes. So, in this case, we have, like, an additional table which is relational information through the item. So, you wouldn’t create, like, actual fields on there, but it is enhanced information, which is where you are able to put these additional information, so you wouldn’t need to do that. If you really need to have, like, a total different custom field on that, this is usually a piece that we would do on the developer site. And there might be tools out there. So one thing that is…a good piece of our Business Central is that you have all these enhancements and all these additional extensions that you could plug in. I’m pretty certain that there is a tool which would also allow you to add custom fields in these areas. But I don’t know a tool for that from the top of my head, but I’m pretty certain there’s something that would help you with that.

Tess: Awesome. Thanks, Rico. The next question is, can you show how smart lists look in Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Rico: That’s the good one. I bet you you googled if there are smart lists in Business Central. And they are coming and they are in the system already, but I can’t really demo them because they are not 100% rolled out yet in my demo environment, but I know that they are there and there will be enhancements, but they are not released yet. So, unfortunately, I can’t demo it right now.

Tracey: That is a great question. And that’s a tool that you’re familiar with in GP, and you’ll have that tool available to you in Business Central and you’ll use that tool to look at your history that comes from GP.

Tess: That’s awesome. So, there’s no other questions that have come in. We’ll give everyone another few seconds to finish typing if they are, but otherwise, we will be sending out a recording of this and Tracey’s PowerPoint early next week. And check out those links in her PowerPoint. There’s a lot of information on our site about this topic. So, no other questions have come in. So, thank you, Rico and Tracey.

Tracey: Well, thank you, Tess. Thank you, Rico. And thank you, Tony.

Rico: A silent listener.

Tess: Yes. Thanks, everyone.

Rico: Thank you.

Tess: Great. Have a great day.

Rico: Talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Tess: Thank you. Bye.