13 Upcoming Business Central features you don't know about

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is being updated every month with minor updates and twice a year with major updates. This makes it one of the most adaptable ERP software available. Here are 13 new features you may have not known about.

Control item creation from lookups on documents

When you enter an item that does not exist on a document line, you are prompted to either create a new item card or select an existing item. In some cases, such as when importing many new items, this prompt blocks the process. Therefore, you can now select to skip the prompt.

Copy templates used to create customers, vendors, and items

You can now copy existing data templates when you create new ones. Data templates (configuration templates) can be used to quickly create cards for customers, vendors, items, or contacts.

Merge duplicate customers, vendors, or contacts

When a duplicate customer, vendor, or contact record is created by mistake, you can now merge such duplicate records to a single record, given that you have the MERGE DUPLICATES permission set.

Bulk import item pictures

You can now import multiple item pictures in one go. Simply name your picture files with a name corresponding to your item numbers, compress them to a zip file, and then use the Import Item Pictures page.

View payment information on customer and vendor statistics FactBoxes

Information about payments and last payment dates is now available on customer and vendor statistics FactBoxes.

Look up SWIFT codes

You can now keep a list of SWIFT codes for banks that you work with and use it on pages where you use bank accounts. This allows for accurate preparation of payments and forces users to pick from predefined lists of SWIFT codes rather than entering SWIFT codes as free text.

Configure reports for warehouse documents

You can now configure which reports will be printed for warehouse documents such as Pick, Put-away, and Shipment by using the Report Selection feature as for documents in other areas.

Personalize the UI to skip over the Address field on documents

Address information on document pages is typically auto-filled based on the selected customer or vendor. In most cases, users therefore want to skip over the Address field when keyboarding through documents. With the Quick Entry feature, you can now define that the cursor skips over the Address field on sales and purchase documents when you press the Enter key.

View document attachments on customer and vendor ledger entries and during payment application

The Document Attachments feature allows you to attach any type of file to a sales or purchase document within Business Central. This is useful, for example, when settling vendor payments so that you can quickly view the original invoice that the vendor sent you. Now, attachments on sales and purchase documents can be viewed on the resulting Customer Ledger Entries and Vendor Ledger Entries pages and you can view them on the Apply Entries pages as you apply payments to ledger entries.

Set up default ship-to addresses

Customers can have multiple addresses but they usually have a central warehouse that goods must be shipped to. You can now define a customer's default ship-to address in the Ship-to Code field on the customer card, which will automatically be inserted on sales documents for the customer. You can still change the ship-to address on sales documents.

Schedule background jobs with a date formula

When correcting posted sales invoices, you are now notified if a corrective credit memo has already been created for a posted sales invoice and whether it is fully or partially applied. From the notification, you can view which documents have already been applied to the posted sales invoice, and you can choose which documents and amounts to apply it to. This helps to avoid duplication and to see if posted sales invoices to correct have been fully or partially applied.

Change descriptions of G/L entries

If you entered the wrong description during posting or if you just need to change a description on an earlier G/L entry, you can now edit the Description field on the General Ledger Entries page to overwrite the original posting description. On the Change Log Entries page, you can view a log of changes made to the Description field.

Review data imported

While migrating your data to Business Central with RapidStart Services, it is useful to see errors that occurred for a specific table within the configuration package. This works fine when you are importing a low number of tables. However, when you are importing a large number of tables, you may need to distribute data-cleaning tasks to different teams because it is cumbersome to do this for each table. When importing and validating your configuration packages, you can now see errors per package. You can choose the Show Errors for Configuration Package action to see all errors in a configuration package. On the new Config. Package Errors page, you can filter by error text, field, or table, and you can export such filtered lists to Excel. You can also drill down to a specific error to see the exact data that is causing an error