Prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in the 2024 Release Wave 1

Business Central users, get ready for an exciting update! One of the many perks of using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is its automatic bi-annual updates.

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 introduces a whole host of enhancements and new features, aimed at boosting productivity, compliance and global reach, while also enhancing the development environment and admin capabilities. Never short of plenty of impressive new features here’s an overview (a little further down we pull out our favourite new features too!):

Key Enhancements and Features – Overview

Adapt Faster with Power Platform: Enhanced integration with Power Platform simplifies workflow setup and expands automation capabilities, bolstering productivity with more out-of-the-box templates for a broader range of scenarios​​.

Application Improvements: Investments in project and service management capabilities, alongside improvements in financial consolidation experiences, mark a significant upgrade in application functionality. There’s a clear focus on enhancing inventory management, service and project management and improving Dynamics 365 application integrations​​​​.

Country and Regional Expansion: The availability of Business Central is extended to over 155 countries and regions.

Governance and Administration: Additional self-service features empower admins with granular access control and auditing capabilities, including customer-managed encryption keys and Azure Lockbox for reinforced data privacy​​.

Legislation Compliance and Reporting: New tools for VAT date access, sustainability journals for reporting and an overall enhancement in compliance with regulations set by government agencies are introduced to ease the regulatory compliance burden​​.

Reporting and Data Analysis: Enhancements in Analysis mode, along with ready-to-use Power BI and Excel Layouts, aim to provide deeper insights and a richer analysis experience directly within the Business Central interface​​.

AI and Copilot Innovations: One of the standout features of this release is the extended use of AI and Copilot capabilities, designed to reduce repetitive tasks and boost productivity across various SMB roles. This includes new functionalities like starting Power Automate flows with Copilot, generating analysis tabs and creating product information faster, alongside a host of other AI-driven improvements​​.

User Experience Enhancements: Improvements in user experience are evident through features like drag-and-drop for attaching multiple files, enhanced navigation to pages with field errors, mobile access to worksheet pages, and easier sharing of error details for troubleshooting​​.

A few exciting things to note from us…

Big Change: Jobs are now called Projects!: This is only a cosmetic change and not a structural change. There’s also a new Project archive, to archive jobs on a job by job basis or if its deleted/status change as system control.

Update to Billing: Billing has changed in that you can bill multiple projects for the same customer on 1 invoice now, or bill multiple customers on the same project e.g. if you needed to bill an insurance company for some of the work and a customer for the rest.

Service Management: You can now attach documents to service items. You can also block items being available in Service so if you have items which are “new” only and not “parts” you can disable them from being able to be added to tickets. Service invoices can be reverted so you can make contract changes then rebill the contract if needed too.

Data Management and Navigation: Lots of change here… It is now possible to set Sales Person at the Site (Ship to Level) on a customer. This is a really powerful tool for businesses who deal with national companies and need to track Sales people at different sites.

There’s now package tracking on Inventory Stock Takes/Stock Checks. Deferrals functionality has been extended to Sales/Purchase Journals. Promised Pay date added and ability to set the hold status automatically based on dispute codes on Customer Ledger Entries. You can also share error details to Teams to allow you to send to internal administrators or to relevant person who can solve the issue, it shares a link to the page with the issue.

Worksheets will be available on phones, which is great for people entering timesheets or stock takes, making it a much more user friendly interface.

Many of these are part of the April update, with some features being available for use into 2025. You can see all of the new features and timelines here.