New and planned for Dynamics 365 Finance4 min read

Published On - February 14, 2021

Сarl Tremblay

Here it comes again – the MS team is about to release a new set of features for Dynamics 365 Finance in the nearest future, mainly through the August-September period. And we feel that it’s our duty to provide a quick snapshot of the update, which includes 4 categories, which are core financials, finance insights, globalization, and public sector. Let’s have a look at each one.

Core Financials

The category aims to deliver new capabilities related to cash flow forecast as well as some other improvements for all financial areas:

  1. Bank reconciliation & subsequent statement improvements – the upgrade allows financial teams to set the end date of one statement to be the exact same point in time as the start of the next statement. This gives more flexibility since important statements will meet the organization’s bank time frames to generate daily statements.
  2. Vendor Collaboration – we all know that setting up all the information to issue payments to vendors is not only time consuming but also creates a lot of red tape work. Now, your vendors can use D365 Finance vendor collaboration workspace to enter all the needed information by themselves to be approved and used for payments by your finance team.
  3. Cash flow forecasting – the project forecast model helps teams, automatically, show forecasted costs in the cash flow forecast, which’s easily accessible through bank management. Quite a helpful feature for better costs and revenue forecasting.

Finance insights

Since each organization is in the cold war with the competition, whereas digital transformation through optimization is the best way to corner the market and improve operations. MS team knows that and gives a variety of new AI features:

  1. Customer payment predictions – what customer will be late with the payment? When the order can be paid to close the ticket? Also, which invoice will be paid? Eventually, the feature helps to predict and answer the questions above which optimizes collection activities.
  2. Cash flow forecasting – external data – this gives an ability to import external data from other systems for better machine learning prediction model forecasting.
  3. Bank balance forecasting – similarly to cash flow forecasting and customer payment predictions, bank balance forecasting helps companies to monitor and predict bank balance as well as the availability of cash at a specific time.
  4. Intelligent budget proposal – it takes a lot of time to create a budget from scratch, creating new tabs, lines, and formulas – even when the process is already defined, the numbers should be re-done. With this feature, whoever is doing the budget will have to adjust, rather than create from scratch the budget, as intelligent budget proposals create a draft budget based on historical data.
  5. A new workspace has been added for treasures, will all the necessary tools treasures need to manage the organization’s cash.

Globalization

This set of features aims to deliver localization for Egypt, extend Italian localization with payment traceability improvements, deliver SAF-T for Lithuania as well as several other highly requested features for other regions:

  1. Electronic invoicing – we found this feature especially useful since the digitalization of invoicing is a leap for both organizations and government since it will reduce tax evasion and manipulation. Now, it’s general availability.
  2. Invoicing enhancements – there are a few invoicing updates, mainly:
    1.  date control – additional control of invoice dates before posting to tighten internal audit procedures;
    2. chronological invoice and voucher numbers have been extended to meet legal requirements regarding documents numbers chronology in more regions. The cool thing is that this feature was added based on the D365 community’s demand and votes;
    3. Country context does not control invoice crediting anymore. Invoice crediting may be used across all legal entities.
  3. Regulatory configuration service (RCS) has got region expansion to Europe including a set of features like electronic invoicing add-on and tax services;
  4. Tax withholding has been globalized for a better calculation-posting-settlement process, including a set of features like withholding tax payment and tax in account receivable, the threshold on invoice amount and etc.;
  5. Configurable business documents list has been extended with additional barcode list, mainly IMB – Intelligent Mail Barcode;
  6. Last but not least is tax service, which is an out of the box microservice which enhances the tax determination and calculation capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations. 

    It also has a multiple VAT ID feature, so organizations could determine multiple VAT ID for a single legal entity and its counterparties to provide a more flexible tax determination matrix and configurable tax calculation to meet local tax guidelines.

    Not to mention its tax-transfer order leveraging indirect tax determination, calculation, posting, and settlement on the inventory transfer order.

Public Sector

There is just one new feature really, which is the ability to restrict accounting distribution editing on vendor invoices, whereas organizations can restrict which account dimension can be edited on vendor invoices that were generated from an order.