Features & Capabilities
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business management solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of features to streamline operations helping businesses improve productivity, make data-driven decisions, and scale operations effectively.
Business Central 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Features
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business management solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of features to streamline operations helping businesses improve productivity, make data-driven decisions, and scale operations effectively.
Customer Relationship Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central
1. Contacts
Contacts are used as master data in customer relationship management and encompass personal and company information, based on which marketing related activities are initiated. The functionality is used to record quotes for contacts, manage duplicate contacts and synchronize contacts with customers and vendors.
2. Segmentation
In Dynamics 365 Business Central, segments are groups of contacts that are assigned in compliance with specified criteria. The solution facilitates contact segmentation. Users have the ability to create segments based on types of collected data, as well as record segmentation criteria and reuse them for various marketing campaigns.
3. Opportunity Management
With the relational management functionality available in Dynamics 365 Business Central, users can track sales opportunities, classify sales activities into different stages and manage sales opportunities based on unified data.
The solution provides tools that enable them to link sales quotes directly to opportunities and effectively manage sales channels and your customer journey.
4. Campaigns
Marketing campaigns are planned and carried out based on segments set up for contacts and involve a number of customer-centric activities, such as preparing catalogs, launching promotions and special offers and arranging marketing events. Contact responses to campaigns can be registered as interactions.
5. Interactions
Apart from contact support features, the relationship management functionality empowers users to track interactions (phone calls, invites and emails) and documents (sales quotes, orders, reminders, invoices and many others).
Financial Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central streamlines the handling of information as well as typical finance processes, such as posting financial transactions, generating financial statements, managing inventory and manufacturing costs, fixed assets and bank accounts.
1. Chart of Accounts
The chart of accounts displays all the accounts (balance sheet accounts and income statements accounts) used to post transactions to the general ledger. Apart from default setup, advanced features for VAT or tax processing can be used. It is possible to define dimensions and add values in entries, which leads to increased report accuracy, as well as to create custom general ledger accounts. Such accounts are used in sales and purchase documents, and in general journals for posting transactions in the general ledger.
2. Dimensions
Once the appropriate setup is complete in Dynamics 365 Business Central, dimensions can be used in complex financial analyses. Default dimensions can be assigned to customers, items, vendors, G/L accounts, jobs or resources and numerous dimension values can be created for each dimension defined. For example, a customer group dimension can be assigned to a sales document before posting a sales transaction. A department can be assigned when posting expenses in order to facilitate the analysis and comparison of expenses in regard to specific departments.
3. Process Payments
Dynamics 365 Business Central provides enhancements in the area of payment processing. You can enter and manage the payment on the same page. The option of marking your invoices as paid and running automated account reconciliation is just a few clicks away. The payment journal, covering advanced features such as vendor priority setup and payment due dates, is used to settle payments for vendors, as well as to process and reconcile bank statement transactions at the same time. To process payment reconciliation, run the suggest vendor payments batch. Payments can be made electronically or by check, if needed, after modifying the payment journal lines. To do this, simply import bank statement files and transactions will be settled automatically, in accordance with all the advanced rules that you have defined.
4. Cash Flow Forecast
For companies, to ensure a deeper insight into cash availability, improved cash flow forecasting is a must. As part of Dynamics 365 Business Central, the cash flow forecast functionality enables users to calculate estimated cash flows. A variety of cash sources can be considered, such as sales orders, purchase orders, receivables, payments. The system analyses the possible implications of planned loans or investment based on expense and revenue information. With in-built Cortana Intelligence and machine learning tools using historical revenues and expenses, users can generate cash flow forecasts.
5. Budgets
Users can take advantage of budgeting features that are available for costs, sales, purchases and general ledger accounts.
6. Deferrals
The system provides the ability to set up deferral templates that allow users to automate the deferral settlement process for revenues and expenses, in compliance with a predefined schedule.
7. Fixed Assets
You can get an in-depth look into the fixed asset management by monitoring fixed asset transactions, such as appreciations, disposals, acquisitions, depreciations and write-downs.
8. Audit Trails
With Dynamics 365 Business Central, it is possible to assign audit trails and transaction posting descriptions automatically. Furthermore, users can set up customized reason codes that are used to create additional audit trails.
9. Bank Account Management
Dynamics 365 Business Central helps to respond to various demands from multiple business sectors and supports handling of different currencies, empowering users to set up and manage numerous bank accounts.
Project Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central
1. Resources
A resource is a person or a device that can be tracked individually or as part of a resource group. The resource functionality helps to group resources and record resource prices and sales. Resource management and jobs functionality are often used in tandem.
2. Resource Capacity and Availability
In Dynamics 365 Business Central, the resource management is handled based on a capacity defined by the user. By tracking the resource usage, you can gain a comprehensive overview of both the capacity and availability of resources.
3. Projects (Jobs)
The job functionality is essential for registration of resource and material usages on specific jobs. The same data is required to generate invoices. However, in invoicing both – fixed-price jobs and time and-material usage may be considered. The functionality helps optimize typical tasks related to project management such as job setup, resource planning, budget management and job progress tracking. It also provides tools for managing long-term projects, recording the manhours and machine hours used, as well as monitoring the consumption of inventory items. Users can also obtain precise data about individual jobs, as well as the allocation of employees, machines, and other resources used in all projects.
A job card stores all the information that is necessary to manage the job from an administration and financial point of view. The actions the job involves are defined as tasks. For each task, you can set up capacity and sales, taking into account the resources and inventory usages. By applying the cost and price of items or resources used for the job, the system calculates actual job budgets, which ensures you can monitor the profitability of a job. When working on a job, you can post item usage as soon as the items are purchased, by assigning a job number and task number in the purchase line, purchase order and purchase invoice. For resources and stocks, the usage is recorded and posted in job journals. To invoice a job, you need to set up an invoicing period. Job statistics provide you with an overview of job costs, enabling you to stick to the budget. The job functionality supports many types of services and consultancy tasks.
4. Time Sheets
Dynamics 365 Business Central provides a simple and flexible tool that facilitates the registration of time worked and the approval of time consumption by approvers. Time sheets are integrated with the service, job and resource functionalities and allow employees to enter the time spent on specific projects. They are managed by a timesheet administrator who appoints employees responsible for filling in time registration data. To set up time sheets, the administrator uses job planning lines. The employee is only required to confirm if the time worked on a job or task is the same as the budgeted time. After entering or confirming the hours worked by an employee, the time sheet is sent for approval. The time sheet administrator or project manager can post the time consumption for a relevant task. Upon approval, all expenses and sales revenues are posted in the profit and loss account, whereas work in progress is included in the balance sheet. For this purpose, a valuation method has to be set up. Several valuation options e.g. progress, are available in the application. The job card provides the ability to easily track the work- in-progress status as well as the approved costs and sales.
Service Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central
The Service Management functionality can be used only in the Premium licensing model and supports the whole service process, including service and product supply chains and the delivery of services such as repairs. With Service Management, users can quickly and effectively carry out a number of tasks, such as responding promptly to service requests, planning and scheduling repairs, tracking repair statuses, monitoring and invoicing repair costs, handling warranties, setting up and using service contracts, optimizing inventory levels for spare parts, and improving spare parts for costing.
1. Service Items
Service item management functions are the key components of the Service Management module. The equipment or items that need to be serviced or repaired can be defined as service items. The functionality helps you record and keep track of all your service items data including contract information, component management, BOM reference and warranty information.
2. Service Orders
Service orders are created for equipment or services and they are used to record any maintenance activities or submitted repairs. Service requests can be initiated by the customer or created automatically according to the terms set out in your service agreement. Call center employees or your repair shop can be responsible for service order data entry.
3. Planning & Dispatching
In Dynamics 365 Business Central, to register services as service orders, it is important to plan them first. During the planning process, job tasks are assigned and distributed between employees. While selecting the optimal planning setup, factors such as regional zones, staff skills, and priorities are taken into account. The solution also comes in handy when managing information about service teams and technicians, and filtering data according to several criteria (e.g. availability, skills and warehouse inventory).
4. Service Contract Management
Service terms and conditions, as well as performance of all contract – related activities are managed by the contract provisions. With the contract management module, you can register an agreement setting out the required service quality, manage information concerning contract history, contract renewal and contract templates and also generate contract quotes. The system also registers all detailed information service quality, response times, and discount levels, and the service history of each contract, including used service items and parts and labor hours.
5. Warranty
The Service Management module empowers users to manage warranty information concerning service items, spare parts, response times, discounts and service levels.
6. Service Price Management
The functionality enables users to define, maintain and monitor service prices. Users can also set up price calculation structures with all the parameters related to service delivery.
Supply Chain Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central
1. Sales and Purchase Order Management
Dynamics 365 Business Central provides a number of functions to configure a broad spectrum of sales and purchase documents that best respond to your business needs. You can set up and use sales/purchase orders, blanket sales/purchase orders, and sales/purchase order processes and automatically assign special prices and discounts to selected customers or customers groups if certain conditions (minimum quantity or order date) are fulfilled. If so, the best price and the highest discount for a customer are granted. As sales order registration is not required, the invoicing process is quick and simple. Moreover, you can define prices and discounts in a sales document for specific lines and set up an invoice discount, which means that the discount percentage is linked to the document amount.
In Dynamics 365 Business Central, the automated workflow is used to monitor and control the entire purchase process. The workflow process involves document entry and registration of paper documents by means of the OCR functionality. Based on notifications about available inventory and availability forecasts, replenishment orders are created. Prices and discounts are granted, if criteria agreed upon with vendors such as minimum quantity or order date, are met. Implementing advanced workflow and approval structures helps you enhance control over purchase costs and expenses.
2. Item Availability
Sales processes can be managed effectively if efficient tools to track item availability in multiple locations over time are put in place. In the case of stock shortages identified while processing sales orders, Dynamics 365 Business Central generates appropriate notifications, so you can intervene immediately – create a replenishment order or offer a substitute item.
3. Nonstock Items
Dynamics 365 Business Central enables you to set up and offer customers non-stock items, i.e. items that have not been registered in the inventory. You just need to fill in a few fields with relevant information. After that, even though the item is not available in stock, you can include it in the price list.
A new item is automatically created on the non-stock item card using the item card template, if a non-stock item is added directly to a sales document. The non-stock item template contains all the fields that are typically set up for an item.
4. Sales and Inventory Forecasting
Machine learning in Dynamics 365 Business Central combined with predictive analytics tools ensure precise sales and inventory forecasts based on historical data in specific periods and sources. If stock levels are reduced to zero, a replenishment order can be created just in the forecast chart.
5. Item Substitutions
The solution provides features to create and offer substitute items for all items. To setup a substitute item, simply create a link between similar items. If the requested item is not in stock, take a look at all the substitute items and choose one to complete the customer’s order.
6. Warehousing
Dynamics 365 Business Central supports handling of warehouse receipts, warehouse shipments, put-aways and transfers. Inventory picks are used in assembly, manufacturing and shipment processes.
Inventory management relies on bins that helps track inventory transfers including pick-ups and put-aways. It is easier to optimize inventory consumption, if transfer information is always on hand. The warehousing functionality also facilitates the assembly of items for sales orders and warehouse orders.
7. Inventory Movements
The inventory tracking functionality empowers users to collect information about locations where an item was moved, as well as its value in transit and at subsequent locations in the transfer process.
8. Locations
With Dynamics 365 Business Central, users are well equipped to manage inventory in various locations such as warehouses, production plants, distribution centers, showrooms, retail outlets, or service cars.
Powerful Features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive business management solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses. It offers a range of features to streamline operations helping businesses improve productivity, make data-driven decisions, and scale operations effectively.