What’s New In Business Central Wave 2024

Microsoft continues to make Business Central ERP a massive beneficiary of their impressive Research and Development budget. Great news for businesses using Business Central as their ERP. Wave 2 benefits will start rolling out in October and appear in existing instances of Business Central over the next month or so.

New Business Central Release Benefits Include:

MULTIPLE USER REAL TIME WAREHOUSE DATA POSTING

In busy warehouses where lots of things are moving around, it’s important that warehouse employees don’t get in each other’s way or slow each other down. That includes registering their activities in Business Central. Multiple workers can now work on transactions that involve warehouse entries without locking each other out, which means less waiting time and more productivity.

FINANCIAL REPORTING SCOPE BECOMES WIDER STILL

The list of standard reports for financial reporting is expanded to include five new reports. In addition, a set of five new row definitions and 12 column definitions are provided. You can combine them to create more than 25 new reports.  The new reports are provided as demo data for Business Central which means you can use them as ready-to-use or as templates to create your own financial reports.  The ability to generate demo data means that you can get a better idea of the data the new reports display and hence what that is telling you, prior to using them as part of your regular financial reporting regime.

SUBSCRIPTION BILLING MANAGEMENT

Increasingly, businesses include in their model some kind of subscription, whether that be for licensing software or providing support.

This release lets you manage subscription contracts in Business Central, so you can spend more time selling and less time organising and invoicing contracts.

The subscription features come with:

  • Contracts for which you do recurring billing for items and services.
  • Billing schedules with flexible parameters that cater to typical use cases for recurring billing.
  • Usage-based billing.
  • Automated billing.
  • Deferral integration.
  • Revenue recognition based on billing schedules.
  • Contract updates (parameters and prices).
  • Standard reports for contracts, customers, billing schedules, recognised revenue, future billing dates and amounts, and so on. Most reports are available as Power BI reports.

Service Contract Management Improvements

Service documents often change and evolve during their lifecycle. The archiving capability gives you control over your service data through audit trails and version control.

Archiving capabilities for service management are similar to the functionality you might already be familiar with from the sales and purchase areas. You can set up documents to archive automatically, so that you don’t need to think about it. With automatic archiving, Business Central creates a new version of the archived document when people do the following:

  • Delete service quote or service order.
  • Post a service order.
  • Convert a service quote to an order.

Consolidation and Fixed Assets Excel Reporting

In this release Microsoft has added four Excel report layouts that cover the consolidation and fixed assets areas:

  • Consolidated Trial Balance (Preview)
  • Fixed Asset Details (Preview)
  • Fixed Asset Analysis (Preview)
  • Fixed Asset Projected Value (Preview)

The report layouts are available through search and the Accountant home page.

BUSINESS CENTRAL FOR PROJECT BASED BUSINESSES

Smarter Ordering against Specific Projects

On the Project Card page, Wave 2 allows users to create purchase orders for the items by choosing the Create Purchase Order action. Afterwards, you can review and edit the orders before you send them to your vendors.

The process of creating purchase orders from projects is similar to the functionality you might already be familiar with from the sales area. The process lets you create purchase orders right from a project. It shares the same algorithm as the Order Planning worksheet, which means it doesn’t require elaborate setup to produce recommendations, but it’s intelligent enough to analyse demand and supply for required items.

Put Away and Pick for Projects

When you want to specify either a default Location Code on the Project and Project Task Lines Subform pages, or enter a Location Code on Project Planning Lines, you can now also use locations where the Directed Put-Away and Pick toggle is turned on.

Shopify Powerful E-Commerce for Business Central

  • Business Central offers closer integration than ever for the e-commerce Platform Shopify.
  • Add an item as a Shopify variant
  • Synchronise product translations to Shopify
  • Use specific prices and discounts when synchronising prices in Shopify
  • Export posted sales invoices to Shopify
  • Reconcile payment transactions in Shopify with invoices
  • Enable locations in Shopify refunds
  • Import, export product info using Shopify Metafields

Please be aware that unless specifically included in your support contract with your Business Central partner – support for Shopify should be accessed directly with Shopify   Qi Ltd, for example does not offer Shopify App support, further than assisting with the connector. Whilst the Shopify icon now appears automatically in Business Central – it remains an app rather than core functionality.

CoPilot and AI Innovation for Business Central

Microsoft continues to expand on the capabilities of AI within Business Central.  The ambition is to make the life of the every day user more efficient. 

Explore the topic here

Power Platform and Business Central Integration continues to strengthen

Microsoft are continuously investing in a seamless experience for customers who use Business Central together with Power Apps, Power Automate or Power BI.

The consistency of the tooling for building PowerApps for Business Central, simplifies the build and deployment and hence a reduced lead time to completion.

Qi expands the existing Reporting and Analysis Department!

Increasingly our Business Central customers are choosing to leverage the additional power that Power Platform provides and we are happy to help you all. In line with demand we have increased our resource in this area and we now have a dedicated QiReporting and Analysis department. Please get in touch and ask for Mike in the first instance.

Thought for the Day

Investing in Business Central guarantees new functionality throughout the year, every year, based on customers’ requests (upvoting) and developments in technology (AI, CoPilot, Power Platform). Using Business Central as your ERP, puts you and your colleagues in the best position possible to make smart business decisions, every day.