Discover the Advantages of the Universal Tax Rate API for Simplified Tax Calculations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications 

Discover the Advantages of the Universal Tax Rate API for Simplified Tax Calculations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications 

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

Harness the power of streamlined integration with third-party tax solutions through the universal tax rate API, now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management and project management and accounting functionality of Project Operations. This advancement eases the complexities of managing multiple and frequently changed tax rates and rules across diverse tax jurisdictions for businesses worldwide. 

The tax calculation functionality of Dynamics 365 offers highly flexible and powerful tax determination and calculation capabilities right out of the box. It allows customers to input and manage tax rates and rules to cover complex tax scenarios across Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications. In some countries, tax rates and rules are inherently intricate, demanding constant vigilance and updates to comply with constant changes by local tax authorities across multiple jurisdictions. This complexity escalates for businesses operating internationally, necessitating the maintenance of accurate tax rates and rules for each location. Traditionally, this process has had a high potential for errors, requiring extensive manual data management and exposing businesses to risks of non-compliance, penalties, and reputational harm. 

Recognizing these challenges, many businesses opt for third-party tax solutions to automate and simplify their tax calculation processes. However, integrating these solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications could be a complex endeavor, burdened by the need for deep understanding of the ERP systems data models and business logic, along with ongoing maintenance to ensure alignment with release updates. 

Empowering Businesses with the Universal Tax Rate API 

In response to these challenges, we are releasing the universal tax rate API as a standardized solution facilitating communication between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications, and third-party tax solution providers. This API offers a consistent, reliable interface for data exchange, eliminating the need for extensive customization and simplifying the integration process. 

Benefits of the Universal Tax Rate API 

The universal tax rate API drives simplification and efficiency for users of Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications. By offering integration with third-party tax solutions, this innovative API dispels the complexities traditionally associated with managing tax rates and rules, enabling businesses to focus on growth and scalability. Harnessing the universal tax rate API enhances compliance and operational efficiency, through delivering: 

  • Simplified Integration: Connect with supported third-party tax solution providers, leveraging their expertise without the need for expensive customizations. 
  • Standardized Communication: Utilize a predefined set of APIs for various tax operations, including address validation, tax calculation, and transaction posting, all employing the JSON format for efficient data exchange. 
  • Enhanced Compliance and Efficiency: Keep your tax calculations accurate and up to date, minimizing risks of non-compliance and improving operational efficiency. 
  • Comprehensive Dynamics 365 coverage: Take advantage of the wide coverage of tax transactions within Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications, as well as within other Dynamics 365 applications that can be available through the universal tax rate API later. 

Utilizing the Universal Tax Rate API 

The process of employing the API is straightforward. Upon transaction creation or update, the system identifies taxable transactions configured for external tax calculation. It then prepares and sends a data payload to the chosen tax solution provider via the API. The provider calculates the tax and returns the results, which are then validated and recorded in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications for audit and reporting. 

Get started today 

To begin leveraging this powerful feature, select a compatible third-party tax solution provider that aligns with your business needs from the list on Microsoft Learn. Follow the detailed guide provided in the Connect to an external tax solution provider via the Universal Tax Rate API learning path on Microsoft Learn, ensuring a smooth setup and efficient use of the universal tax rate API in your organization. 

Embrace the universal tax rate API to transform your tax calculation process, focusing on compliance, efficiency, and scalability within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications.

Resources 

  1. Universal tax rate API – Finance | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn 
  2. TechTalk Recoding 
  3. Tax solution provider’s connectors available at general availability (GA):

The post Discover the Advantages of the Universal Tax Rate API for Simplified Tax Calculations in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management applications  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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Bringing Copilot to more customers worldwide—across life and work 

Bringing Copilot to more customers worldwide—across life and work 

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Continuing our vision for Microsoft Copilot to bring the power of generative AI to everyone across work and life, we’re expanding availability and purchase options for individuals and organizations and bringing new value to Copilot Pro subscribers. 

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Microsoft is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 

Microsoft is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 

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Most organizations find it’s no longer good enough to just measure successful service engagements solely on whether a customer issue is resolved. Instead, they aim to deliver personalized, fast service experiences at every touchpoint through all engagement channels. The best way to do this is by building long-term customer loyalty and transforming operations with modern, AI-enhanced capabilities across all service processes and interactions. That’s why we are continuously enhancing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to empower our customers and help them differentiate their service organizations. Today, we’re happy to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 attaining top scores possible in the business intelligence, process management, and collaboration criteria.

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Investing in AI and a unified platform for modernizing customer service 

More and more, service agents feel increased pressure to provide smart, fast, and customized answers when presented with customer issues. But finding information and experts to quickly resolve an issue can present its own challenges. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 62% of people spend too much time scouring for information during their workday. For service organizations, agents who must scramble to find information can mean both slower time to resolution for individual cases and a lower number of cases addressed per day overall. The agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The key to improving satisfaction in service delivery is enabling agents to take customer requests from any channel, handle multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools. Our answer is to provide a solution that helps service organizations harness the power of data, AI, automation, and collaboration to help agents focus on resolving customer issues quickly. Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps service organizations unlock trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work.  

What is customer Service?


Read here 

More recently, we’ve brought Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases and other sources. Agents can use Copilot to respond to incoming email, factoring in other relevant customer data to produce a personalized, accurate, and editable reply. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. In addition, service agents are empowered with additional AI experiences and automation to help fuel collaboration and productivity for delivering world-class customer service at scale. We recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for our own Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high-volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22% reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.  

At Microsoft, we strive to enable our customers to empower their customers to engage on their terms, at their optimal times, and on their channels of choice. We believe we have earned our position as a Leader by developing a customer service solution that enables agents to focus on delivering more cutting-edge service experiences by harnessing available data and using the power of generative AI to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences; maximize their productivity; and optimize service operations. And with our comprehensive service platform that includes automation, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, service organizations can streamline case management, enable more personalized service, and get a clear, 360-degree view into how their service organization is performing. As Forrester points out in its report, “Microsoft’s vision is broader than just customer service, and it’s firmly grounded in three principles: Engagement must be personalized via AI; customer service must be highly collaborative; and outcomes must drive improvements. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service actualizes this vision.” 

Building on next-generation AI that’s enterprise ready 

Learn about Dynamics 365


Read here 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, so our customers can rest assured that it offers data privacy and protection. Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage, enabling organizations to control access to their data, and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities.  

Creating responsible AI solutions 

Most importantly, we are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. 

Collaboration between a developer and professions consultant, sitting on a couch looking at a tablet

The Forrester Wave™

Microsoft is a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024.

Learn more about customer service 

We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative customer service platform capabilities to help our customers continuously improve their own customer service offerings. 

Learn more about: 

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investment, and consider trying Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free by visiting. 

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Bringing Copilot to more customers worldwide—across life and work 

Ability Summit 2024: Advancing accessibility with AI technology and innovation

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Today we kick off the 14th Microsoft Ability Summit, an annual event to bring together thought leaders to discuss how we accelerate accessibility to help bridge the Disability Divide. There are three key themes to this year’s summit: Build, Imagine, and Include.

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Bringing Copilot to more customers worldwide—across life and work 

Data residency in the AI era: New capabilities to manage your data 

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We’re excited to announce the expansion of Microsoft’s data residency capabilities by adding content of interactions with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to our portfolio of data residency commitments and offerings. We are expanding our product terms and Microsoft 365 data residency offerings to contractually guarantee that we will store the content of your interactions with Copilot for Microsoft 365 in the same country or region in which you store your existing Microsoft 365 content.   

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Ready to elevate your project management game? Unlock Efficiency and Insight using Copilot for project in Dynamics 365 Project Operations 

Ready to elevate your project management game? Unlock Efficiency and Insight using Copilot for project in Dynamics 365 Project Operations 

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

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, efficient project planning and insightful execution are essential for success. However, the manual processes involved in project management can often lead to inefficiencies, delays, and increased risks. That’s where Copilot for project comes in, revolutionizing the way organizations approach project management. 

With the latest update, this trailblazing feature is Generally Available to all Dynamics 365 Project Operations enabled geographies and languages, ensuring that organizations worldwide can leverage its transformative capabilities. Whether you’re a project manager in a professional services organization or leading projects across various industries, Copilot for project is designed to meet your needs. 

Copilot for project empowers users to enhance project management efficiency by generating work breakdown structures, assessing risk registers with suggested mitigations, producing comprehensive project status reports, and enabling natural language commands through the sidecar chat feature. 

Copilot for project capabilities

Insightful Project Status Reporting

One of the most time-consuming tasks for project managers is the production of project status reports. Gathering data from multiple sources, summarizing project health dimensions, and highlighting risks are all essential but repetitive tasks that can consume valuable time and resources.

Copilot for project changes the game by automating key components of the project status report, allowing project managers to focus on crafting narrative text and refining project-specific insights. Using Copilot for project, the project manager can produce project status reports that integrate concise summaries of scheduling and financial data, as well as generate insightful content that highlights the overall project progress, financial performance, and schedule performance. There are two types of reports to address the reporting needs of both internal and external stakeholders: an internal report that provides a work summary by resource, along with financial data including estimates and actuals, and an external report that excludes the financial data. All reports are saved and can be recalled with all prior edits maintained. 

Efficient Task Planning

Streamline project planning with auto-generated work breakdown structures, saving time and effort in creating project delivery plans. Enter the project name and description, and Copilot will provide the suggested task plan for your project. You can tailor further this task plan to suit your project’s needs. 

Risk Assessment and Mitigation Planning

Given the disposition of the project’s scope, schedule, and budget, Copilot assesses risk registers, provides mitigation suggestions, and gauges probabilities for each identified risk. 

Call to Action

With Copilot for project, project managers can now achieve significant time savings, especially when juggling multiple projects simultaneously. By eliminating mundane tasks like manual data aggregation, maintaining multiple data pivots for collecting insights, and summarization, project managers can allocate their energy towards strategic decision-making and driving project success. 

Overall, Copilot for project represents a significant leap forward in project management efficiency and effectiveness. With its advanced AI capabilities, organizations can optimize project delivery times, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth and profitability. Embrace the future of project management with Copilot for project and unlock a world of possibilities for your organization. 

Learn More 

We are making constant enhancements to our features. To learn more about Project for copilot feature, visit  Copilot for project

The post Ready to elevate your project management game? Unlock Efficiency and Insight using Copilot for project in Dynamics 365 Project Operations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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