Use generative AI to drive customer engagement with 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

Use generative AI to drive customer engagement with 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In today’s unpredictable market conditions, companies are looking to do more with less, and delivering exceptional customer experiences is necessary to both acquire new customers and retain and increase the lifetime value of existing customers. Faced with a larger set of choices, customers expect the companies they do business with to know them, anticipate their needs, and deliver personalized interactions. To earn their loyalty, it’s critical that every interaction, digital or in person, exceeds their expectations. 

To win against their competitors, companies need to deeply understand their customers, personalize every interaction pre-sale and post-sale, and use data and AI to deliver proactive and continuous value to win the hearts and minds of their customers. Marketers and sellers must work closely together as a single unit to deliver experiences where every interaction builds upon the last. Marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals are being tasked with orchestrating these experiences seamlessly across every department, for both new and existing customers, and are being asked to do this with even fewer resources.

At Microsoft, we aspire to empower every company to create amazing experiences for their customers that translate into business success. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, companies can orchestrate real-time, end-to-end journeys designed by business users. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can use all its data as an enterprise asset and get insights that can be actioned across the customer’s lifecycle. AI assists every step of the way, so employees can be more efficient and have more time to focus on the things they really want to do. Companies can:

  • Gain deep insights into their customers to deliver relevant interactions.
  • Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences.
  • Unify sales and marketing teams to accelerate the pipeline.

Discover how 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you delight your customers while increasing your team’s efficiency. Let’s look at some of the features in this wave that I am most excited about.

Gain insights into your customers to deliver relevant interactions

Understanding your customers is key to delivering relevant interactions that drive engagement and loyalty. The use of generative AI empowers companies to understand customers like never before. While analyzing vast amount of data previously required deep knowledge of the data and took time to prepare, thanks to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can now get insights faster and more easily by using natural language. Marketers, sellers, and data analysts can ask questions in simple everyday words to explore, analyze, and instantly understand their customerssegment sizes, preferences, and new insights to uplevel every interaction.

While Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables the speed of getting to insights, these insights are only as good as the quality of the underlying data. That is why users can now better understand data quality with an overall data quality grade to unlock better insights. AI analyzes the imported data and makes suggestions on which out-of-the-box predictions the data can support, giving companies the opportunity to remediate data issues and increase the value they can get out of the data.

To get value from insights, these must be available where they can be actioned. With the latest customer interactions compiled into a unified timeline and made available directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing, each team can be guided by a complete understanding of their customers and their recent activities. Armed with relevant customer information accessible directly within the flow of their work, sellers and marketers can orchestrate next best experiences that exceed their customers’ expectations.

Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences

To run successful campaigns, marketers must target the right customers. Often this means finding that one person who understands the underlying data set and can create the right segment to target. Now, using query assist, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can build segments in minutes by simply describing audiences’ characteristics in natural language,for example, create a segment from contacts living in Seattle.

Creating compelling emails can be hard and often getting started is the hardest part. Copilot can assist marketers in finding inspiration and generating engaging emails within minutes. With Content ideas, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can easily craft engaging emailsit’s like brainstorming with their team. After marketers specify the type of email they want to send and select the tone of voice that is the right fit with their brand, Copilot generates high-quality content that marketers can easily adjust. With the assistance of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can significantly reduce the amount of time spent copywriting, and shipping engaging emails is faster, more efficient, and fun.

In order to maximize marketing ROI, it is important to know what activities are having a positive impact. Out-of-the-box AI-powered dashboards help marketers understand how their activities contribute to defined milestones, for example, number of webinar registrations, qualified leads, or opportunities created. Thanks to AI-powered milestones and rules-based attribution models, marketers can easily identify their best performing activities and journeys, drop ineffective tasks, and optimize their marketing spend.

Unify sales and marketing to accelerate your funnel

It is no longer enough for sales and marketing teams to just be “aligned,” they must now be unified so together they can effectively nurture leads, close pipelines, and build a loyal customer base. With the new lead scoring model and qualification model in real time marketing, marketers can define criteria and identify leads to prioritize so every single qualified lead gets attention at the right time from the sales teams.

Furthermore, to make sure leads are actioned immediately, marketers can automatically assign leads to the seller in Dynamics 365 Sales. Leads are identified, prioritized, and while they are still hot, they are seamlessly passed to the relevant or available expert on the sales team to increase the chances of closing the deal.

To ensure the seller is enabled to deliver value in every interaction, sellers can access valuable insights directly within their Dynamics 365 Sales workflow. They can for instance use average transaction amount, total sales, loyalty reward points, and customer lifetime value for each contact, account, or lead and use these insights to hyper-personalize the interaction. This kind of interaction builds relationships, exceeds expectations, and leads to loyal customers.

Start using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights wave 1 2023 features

We aim to help you capitalize on your data to better understand your customers. We aim to democratize the use of generative AI so you can deliver experiences that build customer loyalty while improving employee productivity. We aim to facilitate seamless collaboration across departments so your organization can operate as one seamless unit. And we are excited to bring solutions in this wave designed to do just this, while making your work easier and enabling you to transform customer experiences so you can grow your business.

Business Applications Launch Event

Discover new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

Read the release notes to discover all Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights new capabilities.

The capabilities highlighted above are planned to be released from April 2023 through September 2023 either as previews or generally available.

Visit the website to sign up for a free trial for Dynamics 365 Marketing and for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Note: The product visuals are only for illustrative purposes and might not reflect the general availability feature.

The post Use generative AI to drive customer engagement with 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Spend more time selling—new sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1

Spend more time selling—new sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The role of the seller is evolving. Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. To achieve this, sellers must be efficient and effectiveprioritizing who to engage, identifying how and when to connect, and spending more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. Sellers can’t be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather, they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can improve their sales by prioritizing their best bets, collaborating with their sales team in the moment with Microsoft Teams built-in, knowing when they should engage with prospective customers, and then seeing how it went after ending the call. Sellers are given the gift of time, plus intelligence, so they can close more deals faster than before.

For years, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have asked sellers to enter data so sales managers could forecast revenue and assess seller performance. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales, we have put the applications to work for youusing AI to simplify data capture and recommend in-the-moment interactions whether selling from Dynamics 365 Sales or in Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Starting today, we will begin to roll out new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales that use the power of AI to help sellers:

  1. Prioritize your work to land more deals faster.
  2. Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work with Viva Sales.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in store for sellers in the weeks and months ahead.

Woman using a Surface Pro inside a library.

2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

Learn about the new sales capabilities helping sellers with the power of AI.

Prioritize your work to land more deals faster

The sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers to sell with intent by building a prioritized worklist and surfacing automated activity recommendations to speed the sales process. Sequences enable sales organizations to automate these processes, tailoring them to their unique sales approach and best practices. Sequences are powered by our common customer journey orchestration engine shared across Dynamics 365 applications. We are enhancing the sequence capabilities to support account-centric selling with multiple sequences to a record, improve effectiveness with actionable AI-powered suggestions, and analyze performance using sequence insights.

Time with customers is precious, so every sales interaction matters. Conversation intelligence helps sellers make the most of their sales calls by transcribing the dialog and using AI to detect sentiment, questions, and actions to ensure no follow-up is missed. In this release, we have enabled text message as an additional channel for sellers to engage with customers and added additional AI capabilities to redact sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data from phone calls and provide in-the-moment suggestions to guide sales conversations.

graphical user interface, application

Sellers are routinely managing many deals at the same time. As sales engagements progress and sellers learn more about their customers, they need to regularly adjust and review this data while, at the same time, keeping an eye on how they are performing. Sellers can easily maintain the various stakeholders for an account with the new org chart capability, identify and analyze the activity of key decision makers, and ensure they stay on top of their performance and update their pipeline with the new opportunity management experience. The new opportunity experience eliminates many processes that sellers would normally need to do and streamlines everything into a single workspace.

graphical user interface, application
New pipeline view to manage opportunities in Dynamics 365 Sales

Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work

Not all sellers spend all their time in a CRM system. Many spend much of their time in productivity tools, emailing, calling, and collaborating with colleagues and customers. In October 2022, we launched Microsoft Viva Sales. We are empowering salespeople with AI-driven insights and data automation right in the flow of workin the productivity and collaboration tools millions are already using every day: Microsoft 365 and Teams.

Selling is a team sport. Enabling sales team members to collaborate with each other effectively with the right tools is key to their success. Collaboration spaces bring together the right users, contextual insights, and productivity apps to boost seller collaboration in Teams. Collaboration spaces makes internal and external collaboration take center stage. Sellers can use sales templates to create a collaboration space. Sales templates speed up structured team/channel creation with predefined channels, pre-pinned apps, and integrated access to CRM data.

For sales teams, the adage “time is money” is more relevant than ever before. Sellers are busy people who find it challenging to balance the time and effort required to respond to customer emails with their other responsibilities. Pain points include:

  • Pulling data from a CRM system is time-consuming with complicated navigation and menus.
  • Keeping track of customer opportunities and the history is difficult and increases for sellers managing many accounts.
  • Responding to a high volume of emails can be overwhelming and might cause the seller to miss important details.

With the help of Copilot in Viva Sales, alongside the context of the email or meeting and CRM data, we will now generate suggested email content for a variety of scenariossuch as replying to an inquiry, creating a proposal, or summarizing the action items from meetings. Viva Sales brings together Microsoft 365 data and CRM data to help sellers quickly generate responses using the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.

graphical user interface, text, application, email

Organizations have taken pride in the customization of their CRM systems, considering it to be critical to their business success. These customized experiences allow sellers to engage and capture customer data effectively within their CRM system. In October, we introduced Viva Sales, which lets sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data into any CRM system, eliminating manual data entry and giving more time to focus on selling.

In February, we released the ability for CRM administrators to customize CRM forms, fields, and behavior in Viva Sales for accounts, contacts, and opportunities. With this release, we will add the ability to configure additional out-of-the-box entities as well as custom entities using queries defined in the CRM system. CRM administrators will be able to add or remove relevant custom and out-of-the-box entities to Viva Sales forms and control filtering and sorting behavior of lists using CRM-defined queries. Sellers will be able to see custom and out-of-the-box entities in the Outlook side pane in Viva Sales, share custom entities with colleagues in Teams, search for custom entities in the Teams messaging extension, and connect Outlook email and meeting activities to custom or out-of-the-box entities.

Learn more about 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

These are just a few of the new capabilities that we are rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 1. To learn more about these new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, click on the links below.

If you are not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post Spend more time selling—new sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Mixed reality experience now more intuitive in Dynamics 365 Guides

Mixed reality experience now more intuitive in Dynamics 365 Guides

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Microsoft aims to make mixed reality accessible and intuitive for frontline workers everywhere. With Dynamics 365 Guides, deskless workers use step-by-step holographic instructions to ensure process compliance, improve efficiency, and learn on the job. In 2022, new Microsoft Teams capabilities in Guides combined anyone, anywhere, seamless collaboration with the “see what I see” magic of HoloLens 2. In real-time, participants on a call could see what the HoloLens user saw, annotate their colleague’s three-dimensional space, and share files easily. We’ve just released another set of features in Guides to make this new experience even more intuitive and reliable.

Draw anywhere with digital 3Dannotations

Imagine being able to draw on any object, any surface, or in thin air. With our recent annotation improvements, you can. Previously, a HoloLens user could only draw on a flat or semi-flat surface some way off in the distance. Now HoloLens users can draw 3D images anywhere using digital inkand in Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist, an expert working on a PC or mobile device on the other side of the world can draw in your world in 3D.

These drawings stick where they’re placed in the space and remain still. Users can walk around them and view them from different angles. On surfaces, the digital ink stays where intended, regardless of whether the user changes location or position. With HoloLens, the entire world is inkable, allowing you to annotate and share in real time.

Join mixed reality Teams calls more securely

In Dynamics 365 Guides, HoloLens users now have more options when joining a Teams call. Before entering the call, you can turn video on or off and join muted or not. As before, you can also change these settings once you’re in the meeting. In spaces where confidentiality is core, this allows frontline workers to use HoloLens as their main calling devicewithout compromising on security.

Further driving our efforts to help you keep your company and your information secure, we also recently added restricted mode features that enable your admin to restrict who can log on to the device and make calls.

Link to Guides from inside a Guide

Navigating through the steps of a guide is as intuitive as paging through a document or scrolling through a file. What about jumping from one file to another? You can do that now, too. We’ve added the ability to navigate directly from one guide to another by linking the second guide in an action step. Navigating between different sets of training materials or guides is as easy as jumping to a new web page from a hyperlink.

What’s next?

Learn the details of all our recent additions in the Dynamics 365 Guides release notes.

Stay tuned for more updates coming soon as we continue to build on the intuitive and frontline worker-focused features in Dynamics 365 Guides!

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post Mixed reality experience now more intuitive in Dynamics 365 Guides appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Insert templates faster with email template views

Insert templates faster with email template views

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

If you are a customer service agent, you know how important it is to respond to your customers quickly and effectively. You also know how frustrating it can be to waste time searching for the right email template to use for each situation. That is why you need to use email template views while selecting an email template. 

We have upgraded enhanced email template selection to help agents efficiently use email templates. With integrated record selection and email template views, finding the right email template is easier than before. 

Image of email template search bar with an email template in the right panel

With email template views, just create a view with your choice of filters and then have it available when selecting the templates. Creating a view with your favorite or most used templates will help save a lot of time when working with emails. 

In Customer Service workspace and Customer Service Hub, the enhanced template dialog is enabled by default. Administrators can disable the enhanced email template selection option if they want to display the default email selection dialog. When using enhanced email template selection, admins can determine whether to show the record selection within the email template selection window. This saves the agent extra clicks when selecting a template. Regarding is selected by default and can be easily changed by navigating to the record tab. The list of templates will automatically get refreshed when Record is changed.

In short, when agents use email template views, they can use preconfigured views to find the right templates quickly, switch between views of templates that have persisting filters, and save time with the integrated record selection in the template selection dialog box.

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

To find out more about email template views, read the documentation:

The post Insert templates faster with email template views appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Non-deductible VAT coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central worldwide

Non-deductible VAT coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central worldwide

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

You asked for it and we’re delivering: With 2023 release wave 1, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will expand the non-deductible value-added tax (VAT) feature to our customers worldwide. It’s required by almost all countries where VAT is used and was previously available only to our customers in Belgium, Italy, and Norway. We’re excited to make it available everywhere our Business Central customers are.

VAT is a tax that businesses must pay when they buy things. They can usually recover the tax by buying goods and services relating to their business activities. However, there are some situations in which a business incurs VAT that can’t be recovered and isn’t deductible.

The expanded functionality covers the most common scenarios and can be easily extended if you need more features.

Non-deductible VAT options

You can use proportional VAT to calculate VAT when you have both deductible and non-deductible VAT. Non-deductible VAT is included in purchase documents only. Depending on your settings, you can use fully or partly non-deductible VAT or a combination with different deductible percentages per line. You can use it configured as Normal VAT, Full VAT, and Reverse Charge VAT with or without deferrals. Before posting the purchase document, you can adjust the VAT amounts if VAT rounding in the external system and Business Central differ.

a screenshot of a cell phone
Workflow for VAT Amounts rounding

Reporting non-deductible VAT

After posting, the VAT Entry table shows separate details for deductible and non-deductible amounts and bases. When it’s time to report VAT amounts to your authorities, the Amount Type column in the VAT Statements view offers options for non-deductible and full amount or base. The Day Book VAT Entry report features new columns as well. Other reports will be updated in later releases based on our customers’ feedback.

Setting up to use non-deductible VAT

Non-deductible VAT is included in the base application but isn’t enabled by default. To use this feature, you must enable it on the VAT Setup page.

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VAT Setup page

After enabling the feature, configure VAT posting group combinations for use as non-deductible VAT. Enable them and add a percentage for deduction.

If needed, you can fine-tune the settings for better results. You can choose to configure the impact of non-deductible VAT on the item cost, fixed asset acquisition cost, or job cost.  You can also configure how to treat non-deductible amounts. If you want these amounts to be posted only in General Ledger entries but use them as an additional cost in purchase, you can add it in the setup.

We added all the non-deductible VAT logic and events to the Non-Deductible VAT Management codeunit. If you need to get the non-deductible VAT percentage not just from the VAT posting setup, use the OnBeforeGetNonDeductibleVATPctForPurchLine integration event and return the Non-Deductible VAT % based on the purchase line.

Deprecating existing functionalities

As part of expanding the non-deductible VAT feature worldwide, we’re deprecating the specific solutions for Belgium, Italy, and Norway starting with Business Central 2023 release wave 2 (version 23). You’ll have three releases after version 23 to adjust your extensions to the W1 solution.

Non-deductible VAT will be available in May with 2023 release wave 2 for all countries/regions using the W1 base app and all countries/regions using local base apps other than Belgium, Italy, Norway, and Spain.

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message
Roadmap for activating non-deductible VAT feature

Next steps

If you see some obstacles in this process, please get in touch with us. The best channel for communication is our Yammer group for partners, https://aka.ms/BCYammer (requires partner credentials to log in).

To learn more, watch the on-demand session “What’s new: Non-deductible and partly deductible VAT” at the latest Business Central launch event. Register and watch here: https://aka.ms/BCLE.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 Business Central customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post Non-deductible VAT coming to Dynamics 365 Business Central worldwide appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

2023 wave 1 releases AI, automation, and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

2023 wave 1 releases AI, automation, and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We surveyed more than 500 CFOs and senior business leaders for our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report and found that many organizations continue to struggle with lack of IT resources, overwhelmed employees, and disconnected systems. In fact, while 79 percent outlined that they were shifting to owning business model innovation and empowering transformation across the organization, 88 percent said they don’t have the IT resources or tools needed to drive operational efficiency and minimize busy work for their teams. Finance, human resources (HR), and project operations leaders need to reimagine processes to help their teams achieve more, faster. 

With the 2023 release wave 1, we are delivering enhancements across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Dynamics 365 Human Resources that focus on helping our customers adapt faster, work smarter, perform better, and operate more sustainably.

Adapt faster with simplified financial consolidations and close

Financial reporting and closewhether year-end, quarterly, or monthlycan be challenging for finance teams as they must quickly aggregate data from across the organization and handle the close and consolidation process on time without compromising accuracy. With these latest updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365, we are further streamlining the close process while improving speed and accuracy, enabling organizations to adapt faster to changes.

Improved speed and accuracy

With these latest updates, we’re providing new features that take the hassle out of recording certain types of transactions, improving speed and accuracy. 

Changes in exchange rates cause the book value of open transactions in foreign currencies to vary over time. Recording these fluctuations accurately at a granular level is incredibly important, yet it’s difficult in practice. Our updated currency revaluation posting profile enables finance teams to post currency revaluation adjustments per currency and module. Accounts payable and accounts receivable subledgers are updated automatically to reflect the unrealized gain or loss, helping to ensure these adjustments are accurately recorded.

Similarly, determining how certain transactions, such as the disposal of a fixed asset as a scrap, should be recorded can be complicated. Elimination of these transactions affects balance sheet accounts, such as acquisition adjustment, depreciation adjustment, revaluation, and write-up and write-down accounts, so recording these adjustments accurately is incredibly important. These latest updates provide options that allow you to determine the posting details of fixed asset disposal scrap/sale based on your business needs.

More granular tracking and reporting

While businesses need to quickly consolidate financial data to close their books, it is also essential that they have sufficient granularity in their reporting to provide finance leaders with the visibility they need to drive strategic decisions. 

After transactions are posted, it’s common for organizations to require visibility into subledger data so that certain transactions can be analyzed. With this update, we are including new ways to define financial tags. Financial tags let organizations track user-defined fields on accounting entries posted to the general ledger. Financial tags can also be used to track the subledger data and are now available for matching within ledger settlement, reducing the number of transactions to be manually matched.

In addition to supporting new financial tags, we’re also improving how vendor and customer payments are recorded to the bank subledger. This feature allows an organization to post vendor and customer payments in separate vouchers but update the bank account in summary to match the bank statement, making reconciliation easier and ensuring smoother bank reconciliation.

Accelerate global expansion and operations

As companies look to better manage the complexities of international operations, globalization studio enhances the globalization capabilities for numerous countries’ new laws around reporting. With this latest update, we are bringing new capabilities to help make it easier for companies working in certain parts of the European Union (EU), Latin America (LATAM), and Asia Pacific area (APAC). 

These updates include the extension of multiple tax ID reporting to more EU countries, which helps ensure accurate tax numbers for transactions, streamline compliance, and raise operational efficiency for global companies. We’re also expanding out-of-the-box regulatory compliance coverage to additional LATAM countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Colombia, and Uruguay. By providing localized solutions, Dynamics 365 Finance users can confidently navigate the regulatory landscape, reduce compliance risks, and fortify their operational efficiency across multiple LATAM countries.

Work smarter with automation that minimizes repetitive tasks and data entry

For many companies, financial processes still involve many manual and repetitive tasks, which require a large number of resources and take finance leaders away from more strategic work. According to our 2023 Future of Finance Trends Report, 88 percent of financial leaders feel they are primarily responsible for transactional functions, such as creating financial reports, as opposed to the more strategic functions of running a business, like advising on innovations. Similarly, 88 percent of finance leaders reported not having the automation tools they need to automate repetitive tasks (for example, digital invoicing software and online payroll) and free up their time for more innovative work. With this latest release, we’ve added new capabilities to help finance teams work smarter by using automation to minimize manual and repetitive tasks. 

Streamline invoicing to reduce the time from procure to pay

Processing vendor invoices is a manual and repetitive task in every organization. Not only is this process resource intensiverequiring a high volume of document processingit is also ripe for human error.

By digitizing and automating invoicing, businesses can save time and reduce errors. Dynamics 365 Finance includes accounts payable automation with invoice capture to provide continuous AI-driven automation with reading and recognition of vendor invoices. With this release, we added additional capabilities for non-purchase order (PO) invoices and the vendor invoice journal. We’ve also enhanced the invoice process with the ability to process free text invoices faster and invoice automation that enables the processing of vendor invoices during import, all of which save time and effort while helping to improve accuracy. This eliminates the need for additional background processing and frees accounts payable staff to focus their efforts on exceptions.

Improve processes

Working smarter as a company requires integrating systems of record to provide greater visibility and continuity across the organization. With this update, we have added some key integrations that will make it easier for companies to operate strategically.

In this update, we’ve enabled resource management integration. By significantly streamlining the project resourcing process for organizations by consolidating employee data, resource managers can swiftly identify and allocate suitable resources based on skills, certificates, and availability. We’ve also enabled learning management integration, which offers users a centralized view of training data and other employee information, streamlining workforce development, boosting productivity, and fostering a more informed decision-making process.

Simplify manual processes

Organizations are often burdened by manual tasks, which draw valuable resources and are prone to error. For those tasks that require manual inputs, making those experiences as simple and intuitive as possible is critical. 

One such experience is time entry. We’ve taken steps to modernize the user experience for time entry in Dynamics 365 Project Operations, making it more efficient and user-friendly. The modernized interface optimizes usability, accessibility, and extensibility, allowing consultants to enter time more effectively and accurately.

Perform better with enhanced business performance analytics

As finance leaders continue to take on more strategic responsibilities with organizations, the need for high-quality data and insights is increasingly important. Yet getting this visibility across the organization remains a challenge for many businesses. The new Dynamics 365 features significantly improve business performance analytics. 

Turn data into insights

To be successful, business leaders don’t just need data; they need actionable insights that help drive corporate strategy. New record to report and procure to pay data models will provide financial and non-financial data and metadata into Microsoft Dataverse and transform it into analytical tables. Structuring this complex data provides a single data source for reporting, allowing users to build well-defined and readily available relationships between ledger, subledger, and source documents from multiple systems.

The new reporting hub and base reports on data governance, as well as row-level and role-level security. These features help finance teams quickly locate, edit, and share relevant reports by business process easily and quicklyhelping to put insights into action.

Advanced data gets enhanced security

Security is paramount for financial data. We’re furthering our investment in security by providing additional security controls in Dynamics 365 Finance. Business performance analytics provides row-level and role-level security capabilities to multiple users in your organization’s finance and accounting teams, as well as to the staff in other departments. This helps ensure that reports are only seen by those with appropriate permission.

When paired with the extensibility of the data model, users can be set up to view reports by dimension and legal entity. This lets teams create refreshable, prewritten reports that can be distributed beyond the finance organization, making it easier and safer to circulate data.

Making it easier to navigate taxes

Streamline tax calculation and reporting processes for import/export businesses through direct currency conversions and localized support for Indian taxation. Additionally, you can simplify interoperation with tax solution ISVs, enabling efficient management of complex tax rates across multiple jurisdictions. The withhold tax calculation during invoicing also helps customers meet their compliance obligations, reducing manual effort for businesses operating in countries with specific tax requirements.

By integrating these features into a single comprehensive solution, businesses can achieve greater accuracy in tax declarations, seamless integration between project management and accounting modules, and improved tax management across various jurisdictions. These capabilities ultimately help organizations drive efficiency, fulfill legal compliance, and make better decisions, allowing businesses to thrive in an increasingly globalized market.

Operate more sustainably

We are introducing new features aimed at helping businesses improve traceability tied to sustainability by utilizing the power of automation, digitization, and compliance with evolving global regulations. These features include archiving data and electronic invoicing services for various countries. Implementing these solutions can help organizations reduce power usage, improve efficiency, and comply with local and international regulations.

Reduce data storage energy expenditures

The archive data feature allows companies to save storage space and improve performance by reducing the data set they work against. This enables organizations to archive data consistently and securely while still allowing for reporting and analysis of historical data through standard reporting.

Eliminate paper waste

Electronic invoicing services support the move towards a paperless environment by helping companies automate the entire invoicing process. By eliminating the need for physical paperwork, electronic invoicing reduces paper waste. This newest release offers electronic invoicing services for France, Poland, and Japan.

Additionally, the global e-invoicing feature addresses the growing market driven by tax digitization and invoice automation. By interoperating with government services and intermediate-certified operators, the global e-invoicing feature helps businesses efficiently exchange electronic invoice documents with tax authorities and other businesses.

Try out the capabilities

Many users started testing the new features in an early access period starting January 30, 2023. This allowed users and partners to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. For those already in an early access non-production environment, these new features will be automatically enabled with the April 2023 upgrades.

Watch this YouTube video to learn more about these updates.

a person sitting at a desk in front of a computer

Dynamics 365 release planner

See the new features for Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations

The post 2023 wave 1 releases AI, automation, and analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.