Any business which makes transactions must keep records of sales and purchases and sign off on the accounting. Some businesses do this in-house within their finance teams, some choose to employ external accountants for the role.
If you need to perform the role internally, you can use the role-specific Accountant Role Center as your ‘Home’ dashboard in Business Central. From here, you can access all pages that you need to properly perform your role and easily manage your outstanding work tasks straight from the dashboard. Alternatively, follow the steps below for adding an external Accountant to perform the role.
Inviting Your External Accountant to Your Business Central
If you use an external accountant to manage your books and financial reporting, your administrator can invite them to your Business Central so they can work with you on your financial data. Business Central includes three licences of type External Accountant.
Once your accountant has gained access to your Business Central, they can use the Accountant Role Centre that gives easy access to the most relevant pages for their work. They can also use the company hub in their own Business Central to manage their work.
Steps to Inviting Your Accountant to Business Central
It’s easy for you to invite your external accountant. Simply open the Users page, and then choose the Invite External Accountant action in the ribbon. An email is made ready for you, just add your accountant’s work email, and send the invitation.
Note: This requires that you have set up SMTP email.
Important: The accountant’s email address must be a work address that is based on Azure Active Directory. If the accountant uses another type of email, then the invitation cannot be sent.
This task requires access to managing users and licences in Azure Active Directory. The user who sends this invitation must be assigned the Global admin role or User admin role in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
Adding your accountant to your Microsoft 365 in the Azure portal
If your administrator or reselling partner do not want to use the Invite External Accountant guide, they can add an external user in the Azure portal and assign this user the External Accountant licence.
To add your accountant as a guest user
Open the Azure portal.
In the left pane, select Azure Active Directory.
Under Manage, select Users.
Select New guest user.
On the New user page, select Invite user and then add information about your external accountant. Optionally, include a personal welcome message to the accountant to let them know that you are adding them to your Business Central.
Select Invite to automatically send the invitation. A notification appears in the upper right with the message Successfully invited user.
After you send the invitation, the user account is automatically added to the directory as a guest.
Next, you must assign the new guest user a licence to Business Central.
To give your accountant access to your Business Central
In the Azure portal, on the newly added user, choose Profile, and then choose Edit.
Update the Usage Location field to the relevant country, and then choose Save.
Choose Licences, and then open Assignments.
Choose the Dynamics 365 Business Central External Accountant licence. If this licence is not available, contact your reselling partner to add the licence to your subscription. Specifically for evaluation purposes in a trial tenant, you can use an available Dynamics 365 Business Central for IWs licence instead. However, you cannot use this type of licence if you have already purchased Business Central.
Save the assignment.
If successful, the licence is assigned to the guest user, and the guest account is created.
Importing the new user into Business Central
The accountant will receive an email that notifies them that they have been given access to your Active Directory. Next, you must give them access to the right company in Business Central.
To add the accountant to the right company
- Open the Business Central company that you want to give the accountant access to.
- Choose the ‘Search’ icon, enter Users, and then chose the related link.
- Choose the Get New Users from Microsoft 365 action.
This imports the user account that you created in the Azure portal to the company.
If you want to give access to multiple companies, then you must log into each company and repeat this process. Alternatively, you can update the permission groups for the accountant’s user profile in Business Central, such as assigning them the D365 Bus Premium user group.
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