What's new in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2

We’re fast approaching the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2 in October, and Microsoft have now published the new and planned features that they are making available between October 2023 and March 2024. Today we’ll take a look at some of our favourite elements of the forthcoming release.

Note that delivery timelines may change, and projected functionality may not be released (see the Microsoft policy).

Intercompany Transacting

By choosing the environment that a business unit uses, it is now possible to consolidate financial data for companies that have different Dynamics 365 Business Central environments without having to handle files.

To increase control and reduce errors in intercompany posting, you can include intercompany general journals in an approval workflow. The approval workflow gives someone, like a manager, the opportunity to review intercompany general journals before they’re posted.

It’s now easier for businesses to handle transactions when they have multiple companies. Intercompany postings help you do accounting for multiple companies operating in multiple Business Central tenant environments, eliminating the need to manage files.

Availability Overview

Access real-time information about inventory levels, locations in your warehouse, processing stage and other factors that affect available quantities. From source documents such as sales orders, you can access information about the availability of items in your warehouse including factors that can affect availability such as dedicated bins, locked bins and items that are not available for picking. The new picking log lets you review the items that Business Central didn’t include in pick documents and take the necessary actions.

Reservation Worksheet

The new reservation worksheet helps you reserve and allocate incoming goods in bulk, so you can be sure that quantities are available for your sales and production orders. Based on the quantities reserved in inventory, Business Central displays a status on the documents so that you’re quickly aware of the next step. For example, Business Central will indicate that you can ship a sales order or start to work on a job, assembly, or production order. The status also helps reduce the risk of accidental partial shipments or hold-ups due to missing stock for production and assembly orders.

Edit in Excel on Item Journals and Warehouse Journals

The Edit in Excel functionality has been added to the item journals and warehouse worksheets to allow users to change records in Excel and then publish the changes back to Business Central. This will provide massive time savings for warehouse users that work a lot within the item and warehouse journal screens by enabling you to use your favourite Excel features to manipulate journal data quickly and easily.

Copilot and AI Innovation

Artificial intelligence is certainly the hot topic of 2023, and Microsoft’s Copilot offering is making its way into Business Central slowly, but surely. With the latest release wave of Business Central, Microsoft are expanding on the first round Copilot capabilities:

• AI driven bank account reconciliations means automating those cumbersome tasks where the standard matching tools did not find a match.
• Suggest marketing text for items based on their setup to save time and effort when bringing new products to market.

Alongside what Microsoft are doing, we’re also updating our product sets to introduce AI capabilities that will help our evo-supply users with their everyday tasks.

Read our Using AI as and Accelerator in Business Central blog to learn more about how Copilot for Business Central can be used to enhance your day-to-day activities.

Analyse, Group, Pivot

Interacting with data on list pages has never been easier with analysis mode, which was offered as a public preview feature in 2023 release wave 1. Instead of running reports with different options and filters, you can simply add additional tabs that reflect different jobs or views on the data. With the wave 2 release, Microsoft are taking the concept further:

• It’s possible to analyse data from any query the same way as on a list page.
• From any analysis tab, you can share a link to the tab with co-workers.
• Shared links can also be used as a click-once installation of good out-of-the-box analysis.

Performance

Microsoft are continuing to invest in the fundamentals of the cloud service, with a focus on performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance. This focus lets Business Central continue to grow in scale along with customers’ needs:

• Improved data loading speed on the server benefits all usage scenarios, including web service integrations, background jobs, and interactive sessions.
• Users will experience a Business Central application that’s more swift and responsive through optimisations of select scenarios within the application.
• Pages have been optimised to allow them to open more quickly and be more responsive.
• By minimising the use of database locks when running business logic users will benefit from overall performance gains across all usage scenarios.

To learn more about what’s new and planned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, visit the main Microsoft Website.

Find out more about how BCN can help streamline your operations with custom and out-of-the-box application development services built on Microsoft 365 Business Central.