Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP system designed for small to medium-sized businesses that enables them to run their entire business—from finance, operations, sales, service, and marketing – from a single platform. While Business Central is relatively new, having been released in 2018, the familiar suite of business applications that encompasses Microsoft Office has been relied upon and trusted by businesses for many years. In fact, Office’s newest subscription-based version, Office 365, is the most widely used cloud service by user count.
Dynamics 365 Business Central, formerly Dynamics NAV is a single database Cloud solution ideal for SME’s. You only need a web browser to access and process real time.
Dynamics 365 Business Central offers full financials, manufacturing and contact management and benefits from different types and levels of licensing to meet the needs of your business.
Business Central and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)
By design, Business Central and Microsoft 365 integrate logically ensuring that users do not need to continually switch applications or windows in their working day.
Integrating Business Central and Microsoft 365 simplifies business processes thus ensuring your workforce is more efficient (and less frustrated).
Microsoft 365 Applications and Business Central
Outlook
Contact Insights enables emails received from a Business Central contact with a recorded email address to prompt the Business Central contact card to pop up in Outlook enabling the user to view any relevant information relating to the email.
The email will also be recorded in the contact card of Business Central along with any attachments.
There is also the option of creating a quote directly from Outlook which is generated in the background in Business Central. Using AI quotes can be set up to recognize text in a customer’s email which then pre-fills a quote that can be polished and returned from Outlook.
Users can also create sales documents from calendar appointments.
Document View allows users to access Business Central documents from Outlook where an existing Business Central document number is recognized in the text, a quotation number for example. Users can then modify the document if required from Outlook (with Business Central in the background) and return it to the customer.
In summary the relationship between Outlook and Business Central support several job roles by enabling users to work within Outlook for numerous tasks and remain confident that Business Central is capturing documents effortlessly in the background.
Excel
Business Central’s integration with Excel allows users to take advantage of Excel functionality to organize their financial data. Users can export data such as transactions or vendors to Excel and use the filtering, sorting, charting, and graphing features to make better sense of it and format it in helpful ways. Because the two applications are integrated, users can modify Business Central records directly from Excel via an ‘Edit in Excel’ button and re-publish it back to Business Central all without leaving Excel.
Word
Business Central by design integrates with Word so that your documents can be formatted and finessed as you require. Whether creating a custom report from scratch or using a standard template from Business Central, users can create documents suitably formatted to be customer facing ready.
The integration also enables Business Central data to be pushed into a standard Word template.
SharePoint
Our articles regularly extol the virtues of SharePoint. Once you are using Business Central a SharePoint library can be set up so that users can access related files relating to customers or works orders (drawings for example) from within Business Central. Permissions can be set in the usual way to limit access rights to sensitive documents. As your files are stored external to Business Central but are available to access from it, data levels within Business Central are not increased. This will mean that storing and accessing large files such as CAD drawings will not affect the performance of Business Central as you use it on a day-to-day basis.
Thought for the Day
Microsoft 365 is a powerful set of ever developing tools that will support your business activities Call Qi to find out how to implement it or optimize how you use your current Microsoft 365 or Business Central licenses.