Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Release Wave 2 Plan

Microsoft puts a focus on Business Central (an ERP system for SMB). In Q3, a lot of new features are planned and prepared to be released – additional app functionalities, new administration and governance capabilities, improvements in integration and inter-app capabilities.

And again, the user interface (UI) and user experience (UE) are always first priority. Users are helped to get on board, whether new or existing customers, by giving them easy access to the right apps to get started. There are a number of improvements in tooltips to help new and existing users. To help more users be more productive, Microsoft’s team applies enhancements of the automation story with Power Automate. Microsoft will continue to improve performance and usability by making menu navigation easier. Also, the geographic expansion of Business Central will be continued.

Let’s take a deeper look at Мicrosoft’s list of enhancements:

Functionality features

• Financial reporting – To make financial reporting more transparent for newcomers and experienced users alike, we’re renaming account schedules to financial reporting. We’re also changing the feature slightly to give a better overview of the available reports. A financial report is now defined as a combination of row and column definitions plus a few parameters. This means that variants of the same report can now be stored as separate reports.
• Use multiple remit-to addresses for vendors – Vendors can have multiple remit-to addresses for payments. For example, a vendor might supply an item from a subsidiary company, but wants to receive payment at their headquarters. Business Central lets you set up multiple mailing addresses for each vendor, making it easy to choose the correct location to send payments on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

Development, governance and administration

• AL Visual Studio – We are investing in building new AL constructs for writing more performant code, as well as defining a more flexible and more consistent action pane structure in our customers.
• Governance and administration – In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central provides a set of admin and governance capabilities to help admins and IT pros set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor customer environments.
• Recover deleted environments – Admins will be able to recover any environments that were recently deleted, which keeps customer data safe.

Microsoft Power Platform

• Power Apps – Building on top of the work delivered so far, we continue to improve the way Business Central integrates with Power Platform: Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Dataverse. This includes improvements to the Power BI integration as well as the Power Automate connector and the Automate action—bridging Business Central and Power Automate with a modern toolset that empowers makers and citizen developers to easily extend and connect Business Central with other systems. We also continue improvements for our Dataverse virtual tables data change events so that our partners can use Dataverse as a platform for more ambitious integrations.
• Power Apps and Power Automate support for document attachments – The new capability of the connector allows for easy access to document attachments (for instance, an original order request linked as a PDF to a sales order), related record media (for instance, images linked to items) and other data linked to business records. This enables Power Automate flows or Power Apps to support additional scenarios where rich external data is entered into Business Central. For example, this could be an app allowing service workers to take photos of inventory and upload them to Business Central. Or, it could be an automated flow that creates a sales order from an attachment received earlier as an email, which is further processed and linked as a PDF document to the Business Central order entry.
• Telemetry data – Get telemetry data for different admin events in Power BI. Admins can get information about the Azure usage of the application, the performance of BC, the most used reports, forms, pages by the users and other useful information.

Onboarding

• New field descriptions improve clarity – We are making it easier to get started and unblocked with Dynamics 365 Business Central by providing better tooltip descriptions for sensitive and essential fields.
• Easily find apps to connect to core services – In this release wave, we add a new Business Central experience so that users can easily discover and install third-party apps that connect to external business productivity services, such as banks. This capability is powered by AppSource and provides an additional layer of app suggestions to let users filter by category, so they can easily find the type of app they are looking for.

Productive with Microsoft 365 (office)

• Configure OneDrive integration – Admins are in control. With 2022 release wave 2, organizations can easily manage which OneDrive-related features are enabled for Business Central, so that people can collaborate on business documents and work with other files in the browser.

Reporting

• Embedded Excel and pre-defined layouts – The 2022 release wave 1 introduced Excel layouts for reports. In 2022 release wave 2, we will continue to improve this experience. When a business user runs a report with an Excel layout, they can now choose the Excel layout in the report’s request page. For example, if a report has several Excel layouts, the user can choose the exact layout they want when they run the report. In addition to the Excel layout capability, we’re creating a finance API that can be consumed in both Excel and Power BI. This way, users can create their own more detailed analysis on data from the general ledger and G/L budgets with dimensions. We’ll provide a new Power BI app template based on the new API.
• Run, send reports from the request page – From the request page, a user can run a report and send it directly to the report inbox. This allows the user to continue working and then pick up the report from the report inbox later when it has finished. On the request page, users can select Send to inbox to run the report in the background and continue working in the customer. Similar to printing a document in Windows, the user is no longer blocked by waiting for the report to finish.
• Choose the report layout on the request page – Users can choose which report layout to use on the request page. This will make it easier to use different report layouts for different purposes, especially for Excel layouts.

On the request page, users can use a dropdown menu to choose from available report layouts for the report. This feature will enable your organization to have multiple layouts (like Excel layouts) for the same report dataset. For example, you could have a layout for a planning meeting, another layout for mail merge, and a third layout for a board meeting.

A lot of UE and UI enhancements that give small visual improvements, but greatly facilitate daily work.

• An easy to switch between companies panel
• New UI design elements

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