The December 2017 service update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is now generally available, and offers a pretty thorough and across-the-board menu of enhancements.
Muhammad Alam, general manager, Dynamics 365 for Finance& Operations detailed some highlights in a blog post, with more updates outlined in Microsoft’s online documentation.
Among the updates:
- Enhanced financial and operational reporting. This release includes a new set of default reports built on Power BI. The Power BI-based financial reporting experience is now embedded within the Dynamics 365 UX, allowing users to drill into supporting documents. Default reports, such as a trial balance, balance sheet, and profit and loss, are shipped out of the box. These reports can be customized using the Power BI desktop. (Report Designer is still available and fully supported for financial reporting.)
- Vendor collaboration. A new vendor portal offers vendors self-service capabilities to view and selectively maintain their own companies’ information, such as contact information, business identification data, procurement categories, and certifications. Microsoft has also enhanced vendor onboarding with a new workflow-supported process to make it easier to add new vendors using invite-based registration and signup. The update also includes support for vendors to view and respond to RFQs, and lets them receive and upload attachments.
- End-to-end process integration. Companies can now maintain data synchronization of processes between Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations using data integration templates without a third-party data integration tool. These improvements enable additional end-to-end business process integrations focusing on customer, quote, sales order, invoice, and order fulfillment data.
- Implementation efficiency. Microsoft has enabled a new capability to create legal entities based on configuration data from an existing legal entity, reducing the setup time for new legal entities. The company has also enabled a “soft-seal” mode for the application functionality to help customers and partners recognize undesirable customization development patterns as warnings during compilation.
- Global coverage – India regulatory functionality. Microsoft has added and updated important regulatory functionalities for India to accommodate a new goods and services tax (GST). Fixed asset depreciation, value-added tax, withholding tax, custom duty and India GST are all supported. Additional retail regulatory functionality is currently in public preview.