Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the ERP of choice for many organizations as it is a robust cloud-based solution that eliminates the need for hosting infrastructure and costly servers, and Microsoft is committed to delivering timely updates to the service. There are many updates coming to Business Central in 2023 and early 2024 with Business Central 2023 release wave 2, but we’ll go over a few of the noteworthy updates that we believe are most relevant to our clients.
Power Platform
Microsoft is bringing embedded Power Apps to Dynamics 365 Business Central in Business Central 2023 release wave 2, and a few of the updates include:
- Change modification limits for triggering flows and bulk updates
Until now, there was a limit of 100 rows being changed during a short period of time, which may have caused Power Automate flows to stop reacting to certain rapid changes, but the limit is now 1000, allowing for more advanced scenarios. - Enable specific virtual tables when you connect to Dataverse
Now, when you connect to Dataverse, enabling virtual tables will make more data available between Business Central and Dataverse, enriching integrations without additional customizations and avoiding duplicate data entry. - Get control over how to view Power BI embedded content
Prior to this release, Power BI embedded content had a fixed size that only displayed the first page of a multipage Power BI report, but now you have greater control over your view.
Application
Business Central 2023 release wave 2 (or Business Central 2023) is gearing up to be heavily focused on application updates, but a few major ones include:
- Availability overview helps you calculate quantities in your warehouse
Access accurate and real-time information about the availability of items in your warehouse to increase warehouse handling efficiency. - Configure how to handle different warehouse operations
Configure warehouse processes differently by having different workflows depending on inbound (purchase), outbound (sales), and internal (production) processes. - Do financial consolidations across environments in multicompany setups
Another major update is that you are now able to consolidate financial data for companies with different Business Central environments without having to handle files. - Get more productive while entering and approving time sheets
Employees can now copy time sheets from previous periods to avoid having to manually enter data, and employers can now approve multiple time sheets at once. - Suggest the next steps for sales and production orders
Now, documents ready for processing can move to the next stage automatically and Business Central will suggest next steps to help you deliver on sales and production orders more quickly. - Sync document and posting dates for sales and purchases
In previous versions, changing the posting data always changed the document date but now ocument dates and posting dates on sales and purchases can by synchronized or decoupled to improve financial accuracy and operational flexibility. - Use General Ledger Allocations to distribute costs and revenue more efficiently
Predefine how to distribute revenue for transactions across G/L accounts, and use allocations to make this data entry more efficient.
Copilot and AI Innovation
With the rise of Copilot, we will likely only continue to see this list grow, but for Business Central 2023 release wave 2, here are the updates:
- Complete bank account reconciliation faster with Copilot
While Business Central already had automated transaction matching, Copilot can help reduce unmatched transactions and provide AI-generated explanations to help bookkeepers match remaining transactions and reduce bookkeeping efforts. - Get marketing text suggestions with Copilot
Marketing text suggestions are moving from public preview to being generally available, and will include improvements to content moderation, support for more languages, and quality improvements.
Development
Here are some updates for developers in Business Central 2023 release wave 2:
- Open Visual Studio Code from web client to investigate or troubleshoot extensions
Now, you can open a local Visual Studio Code instance for an extension or environment, and set up a matching Visual Studio Code project with just a single click for investigating or troubleshooting. - Turn off data analysis mode on pages and queries
Tenant admins and AL developers can turn off data analysis mode on list pages and query objects that it doesn’t necessarily make sense for.
Governance and Administration
Updates to governance and administration in Business Central 2023 release wave 2 include:
- Assign more granular administration rights
Business Central 2023 release wave 2 will introduce a new Dynamics 365 Business Central Administrator role that can grant access to Business Central without also automatically giving access to other Dynamics 365 or Power Platform products. - Improved update release processes
Updates will run as close to the start of the update window as possible for customers who do not manually schedule their environment updates. - Cancel Cloud Migration replication runs
Administrators can now cancel ongoing cloud replication runs if updates need to be made, when previously administrators had to wait for the run to complete before restarting it.