10 Years Challenge (Summary of the main features from NAV 2009 R2 to NAV 2018 and D365 Business Central)

Let's walk through 10 years challenge of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Usually when we ask for upgradation to our customers. They just don't blindly say OK. They would like to know the advancement that happened in each versions.

So, here today we'll discuss about the various features added in NAV start from NAV 2009 R2 to Dynamics 365 business central 2018.

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2
This was a major release for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and builds upon their success in delivering solutions that help business productivity.

• Role Tailored Client Access -  Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 allows direct access from the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Role Tailored Client online. Roaming users and remote users will be able to take full advantage of the many integration features connected to local resources, including the operating system and Microsoft Office.
• Multitier Architecture (First 3 levels release)
• Web Services (with separate Service)

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration - Sales managers should be especially excited about this new feature. In today’s fast-paced business world, a company needs instant access to customers and vendors. Microsoft will be providing built-in integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Sales people will have the ability to access detailed business information, regarding contracts, pricing, and product availability in mere moments.

• Online Payment Service - Users will be able to process payment transactions from the Microsoft Dynamics NAV interface across multiple channels – including e-commerce, point of sale, and call centers.  Payment service accepts all major credit cards.

• Virtualisation Support - This feature cuts IT costs by centrally managing Microsoft Dynamics NAV client installations and allows automatic deployment to the desktop after an update.

• Treemap Visualisation - It’s efficient. And fast. Being able to see the comparison between your sales and profits is a must for business! Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 Treemap Visualization enables the comparison of any two values through rich ad hoc visualization.

• Zeta Doc Express integration

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 and NAV 2013 R2

• Cost accounting improvements
• Automated Cash Flow Forecast
• Redesigned kit assembly and management
• Improved Excel integration for reporting
• New visual item availability views
• Supply chain planning improvements
• Better item pegging for insights into supply and demand during wip and production
• Microsoft One Note Integration
• A new web client and views within Sharepoint allowing remote employees access to much of Microsoft Dynamics NAV’s functionality via a portal
• A new ‘data pump’ allowing for better real time integrations
• Rapid Start Services for more quicky implementing and configuring Navision
• Dynamic new KPI(Key performance indicator) and other visualizations
• Powershell
• Admin Shell
• Multitenant
• Query
• New Model for Dimensions
• NAV Server multiportservices configuration and administration
• NAV Users (and multiple types of users)
• Best Charts
• WEB Client
• New NAS Technology
• Sharepoint Integration
• Single Sign On
• .NET Interoperability
• Help Server
• Cash Management
• Assembly Management
• SEPA v1.0 (Single Euro Payments Area) - make it easier to transfer money and electronic payments between the countries
• Better Service Module Integration
• Inventory Movements

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015

• RapidStart Implementation and Upgrade - Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 offers enhanced upgrade tools which help partners like Sysco significantly lower the cost and time required to upgrade customer implementations to the current version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. RapidStart implementation services helps Sysco create, set-up, and initialise new installations of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
• Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Tablets - Microsoft Dynamics NAV for tablets and touch-optimized user experience enables you to access your company data and processes regardless of location or what device you choose to use. 
• User Experience Enhancements - Faster access to information that matters with personalised home pages that let users view their most important business data and key performance indicators in a glance. Sophisticated colour coding and live data help users prioritise actions and stay productive – in BI dashboards and focused actions in the Role Center. Increased productivity by only showing what is relevant to the user, depending on the user permission sets.
• Office 365 Integration - Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides interoperability with Office 365, which enables customers to drill down, analyse, share and collaborate with peers. And with new usability enhancements that make their solution easier and more familiar to use, customers will enjoy working seamlessly and effortlessly across all applications.

• In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Microsoft continue to optimise deployment in the cloud on Microsoft Azure and with Office365 to lower costs, increase flexibility, and boost employee productivity – new enhancements include:

• Simplified email messaging via SMTP including Office 365

• Sign in to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client using your Office 365 account

• Document Reporting - Radically simplified invoice design and production through new interoperability with Microsoft Word. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Microsoft Word is used as layout editing option for document reports. A single report can now have many layouts. Power users can now create customized, branded invoice templates on their own in Microsoft Word without having to engage a technical consultant.

• Cash Management - Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 also helps customers collect cash faster and spend less time managing it with new capabilities for electronic payments and automated account reconciliation. These enhancements include a new Bank Data Conversion Service delivered on Microsoft Azure by AMC Consult A/S that enables automated processes for electronic payments, payment reconciliation and bank account reconciliation right within Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

• Power BI - Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 also helps customers collect cash faster and spend less time managing it with new capabilities for electronic payments and automated account reconciliation. These enhancements include a new Bank Data Conversion Service delivered on Microsoft Azure by AMC Consult A/S that enables automated processes for electronic payments, payment reconciliation and bank account reconciliation right within Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

• Print reports on Job queue (OnDemand scheduling)
• Document Reporting: WORD LAYOUT
• NAV Universal APP
• Payments Area SEPA(Single Euro Payments Area) - makes it easier to transfer money and electronic payments between the countries
• Social Listening Support
• Office 365 First Full Integration

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 

• Workflows both for Developers and users- 

• For users: A set of workflow templates will be provided with NAV 2016 “out of the box”. For example approvals for purchases using a pool of approvers where 2 or more people need to approve an invoice before it can be posted. You can also extend workflows for automation and smarts such as automatically creating a payment journal after posting a purchase invoice. Or once an invoice is approved by a manager it can automatically be posted.
• For developers - Application Test Toolset, Ability to use Camera and GPS in C/AL

• New Web Client - In 2016, the Web client is much more feature rich and can completely replace the need for a windows client. With over 60 new features, some key improvements are:

• On demand scrolling

• Column selecting

• Freeze pane capability

• Hide/Show fast tabs

• Ability to Change company / timezone / Language

• Also, most of these enhancements have been carried across to the Tablet App.

• New Finance Feature - Posting preview, Vendor pre-payment report, Deferrals(postponement of posting the transactions)
• New Approvals Model (based on Workflow)
• Events & Extensions

• Eventing - This is a few days of topics to explain this. Eventing is something very common in the .Net world, but now, with Eventing in NAV, we can benefit from it as well. Eventing consists of “publishers” and “subscribers”. A publisher raises an event in code when something happens, like “OnBeforePostDocument” in codeunit 80. A subscriber is a function that subscribes to an event. In a way, we can create a function, add the property “subscriber” to it, and assign it to a specific published event where we want to assign the function to. This would mean, when the published events gets executed, all the “attached” subscriber functions get executed as well.
• Customizing Extensions - A Customization Extension can be seen as an enhanced .fob file which only contains delta’s. This is a very rudimentary description, but really. . If you hold yourself to a few limitations (which will be blogged about a lot), you are able to create a so-called “navx”-file. This navx file contains information/deltafiles/permissionset/.. , and can be published and installed to other databases. It can even be installed on specific tenants, which makes it possible that you do specific customizations to specific tenants in a multitenant environment.
   

• EDI (Electronic invoices in NAV 2016) - 

• This has been extended to be able to receive, manage, process and send digital documents in an XML-structure. The appropriate processes can be implemented in NAV on a parameter-controlled basis

• Use of specialist software for the conversion, mapping and sending of documents is an economically viable idea (e.g. Microsoft BizTalk Server or Lobster). For this, all the standard formats (EDIFACT, IDoc, VDA etc.) and special methods of transfer (SMTP, AS2, FTP, X.400, OFTP etc.) have been implemented as standard

• Dynamics CRM native integration
• Power BI
• SQL AZURE
• Document Management
• Incoming Documents & OCR
• Currency Exchange rates
• New Application Test Toolset

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017

• Richer Incoming Documents - A new field called “processed” have been introduced to reduce the huge amount of entries in incoming document list page. Filter will show only unprocessed incoming documents.
• Inventory Items - To find the right product that our customer wants we can define our own attribute types such as color, country of manufacture, size, or product dimensions and add them to our inventory items.

So, when you add items to sales and purchase documents you can view and filter on attribute values to limit the list of items to choose from or take action on.

• Smarter sales and purchase documents - Earlier we were able to cancel posted sales and purchase invoices but now we’re also able to cancel posted sales and purchase credit memos. Dynamics NAV has the capabilities to unapply the credit memo from the invoice and creates a new invoice that is applied to the credit memo. This will bring back to where we started before creating the credit memos.

• Account categories in chart of accounts - Now we can group general ledger accounts to fit our need for financial reporting in order to do so Microsoft have added account categories and subcategories. Ex. For each G/L Account, you can specify the account category so that ledger entries posted to this accounts are categorized as assets or liabilities (income or expense).

• Payment Reconciliation - The Payment reconciliation journal now shows totals for outstanding transactions and outstanding payments. From there, we can look up the list of documents that have not been applied or used in the reconciliation process.

• Jobs - Project Manager Role Centre - A new “Project Manager” filed has been added in Job Card so now users can have a clear sense of job ownership.

• My Jobs List on the Project Manager Role Centre will now display jobs with the status of order by default based on the new project manager.

• So, now if John is assigned as a project manager to 4 jobs and those jobs have the On Order status, those 4jobs will default on the My Jobs list on the project manager role centre.

• Fixed Assets - A standard setup is provided to setup fixed assets easily. We can also modify if anytime we want. We can register fixed assets as cards with complete information, accounting details and report classification. The right accounting entries are created automatically.

• Simplified setup for using Dynamics CRM from inside Dynamics NAV - There’s a new assisted setup guide to the Business manager home page that guides through the setup process. Once that’s done, we will have a smooth coupling of Dynamics CRM records with Dynamics NAV records.
• Simplified opportunity management and CRM functionality - Dynamics NAV CRM module has been simplified in no. of ways:
• Existing CRM wizard have been replaced with card pages so that they can also run in web client.

• Worksheet pages have been replaced by list pages so we can use pages in browsers. 

• The .NET components for mail merge have been replaced with word reporting. 

• A new Sales & Relationship Manager Role Center (9026) has been created to show the relationship management in a better way. 

• For users to setup Email logging a new wizard has been created. (public folders, rules, and job queue setup).

• Smart notifications give you advice and recommendations - Suppose, we create a sales invoice for a customer that has an overdue balance then a context notification will show up in different areas of Dynamics NAV. But, it is up to us whether to react to the notification or ignore it.

• Extensions - Paypal payment standard service is installed as an extension in Dynamics NAV 2017 and ready to be enabled.
• To enable customer payments through paypal you must to following things.
• Setup Paypal payments as a payment service in the payment services window.

• Select paypal payments standard in the payment service field on the sales document if questioned.

• Quickbooks Data migration: If your business uses quickbooks then you can export the necessary information and then open an assisted setup guide to upload the data to Dynamics NAV.

• Sales and inventory forecast: The Sales and Inventory forecast extension gives you insights about potential sales and a clear overview of expected stockouts. 

• We’ve used Extensions to upgrade add-ons in NAV 2016. But that was limited to some of the object types in NAV 2016.

But here in NAV 2017, it supports for additional object types.

• Apart from table, pages we can also include reports, XML Ports, queries
• Support for .NET framework add-ins.
• Support for web services.
• We can also restore and backup data using the concept of extensions.
• Windows PowerShell cmdlet have been updated for publishing extensions.

• Office 365  
  

Suppose if our organization uses office 365, then Dynamics NAV 2017 includes an add-in so you can invoice your customers based on entries in the outlook calendar.

• There’s a calendar appointment, so from that calendar appointment you can open the Dynamics NAV add-in and get an overview for the customer associated with the appointment.

• You can create and send an invoice for the services provided in the meeting. All this will happen in outlook calendar.

• Updating add-in is also made easy. We’ll get notified that a new version is ready for us in outlook.

• From the contacts list we can manually synchronize your Dynamics NAV contacts to office 365 people. The contacts from office365 will sync back to Dynamics NAV as well.

• US Financial Reporting - In US Version of Dynamics 2017, there’re four financial reports added to the Business Manager and Accountant Role Centre:

• Balance Sheet 

• Income Statement 

• Cash Flow Statement, and Retained Earnings Statement 

• The reports uses G/L Account categories and sub-categories to group your financial data.

What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018

The core feature update includes:

1. Setup & Extensions 

The Setup and Extensions button provides a single place for settings. This new set of options has been added for the

Business Manager and Accountant Role Centers. From the list of actions, you can open setup pages, either assisted or

manual, and you can open setup pages for service connections and extensions. Third-party extension providers can add

their actions to the list.

In the Manual Setup action group, each action refers to an area, such as General, Finance, and System. The row for each

setup page has keywords allowing you to both search across setup pages and to filter the list to only see setup pages

within a given area.

2. User Tasks 

The new User Tasks allow you to create tasks to remind you of work to be done. You can create tasks for yourself and assign tasks to others or be assigned a task by someone else in your organisation.

If you want to bulk delete all or some user tasks, you can use the Delete User Tasks report. In the request page, you can set filters to determine which tasks must be deleted.

3. Employee Ledger Entries

In general journal lines, there is a new account type and new balancing account type, Employee. Posting a general journal line with Employee as account type or balancing account type will generate an employee ledger entry.

When posting a general journal line for an employee, the Document type field must be either blank or set to Payment.

You can also post payments against employees from payment journals. On payment journal lines, there is a new account type, Employee. You can use this account type to post a payment to an employee. You can apply payments to an employee ledger entry either via the Applies-to Doc. No. field on the payment journal line or by choosing the Apply Entries action on the employee ledger entry. You can un-apply payments from employee ledger entries. Do this by choosing the action Un-apply Entries on the employee ledger entry.

4. Image Analyser

The Image Analyser extension uses powerful image analytics provided by the Computer Vision API for Microsoft Cognitive Services to detect attributes in the images that you add to items and contact persons, so you can easily review and assign them.

Contact persons Recognise a person’s gender, or age.

Items Identify attributes like type and colour. For example, whether it’s a table or a car, or red or blue. Image Analyser suggests attributes based tags that the Computer Vision API finds with a confidence level.

5. PowerBI Reports

Dynamics NAV provides Business Intelligence in the place and time you need it. With the new Power BI reporting control, you can gain awareness to your Power BI reports by making them visible from within the most highly-used lists in Dynamics NAV.

Not only are you able to view Power BI reports you select, but you can also interact and filter the reports by selecting records from the associated list page.

If you use Azure Active Directory as your authentication method, connecting with Power BI is simple. No more manually finding and entering connection information. Just sign in with your Azure Active Directory name and password and we’ll do the rest. During the sign in process, the Dynamics NAV connector will auto discover any tenants you are associated with and automatically create the connection to them. That’s it!

6. Updated integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales 

Connect to your Dynamics 365 for Sales solution in a few easy steps. The assisted setup helps you synchronise your data across the two apps, including sales orders, item availability, units of measure, and currencies. The existing integration with the app formerly known as Dynamics CRM has been re-branded and simplified to work better out of the box.

To streamline your marketing reporting, you can specify a salesperson/purchaser code for user accounts. When you create sales or purchase documents, the default salesperson/purchaser code is the one specified for your user account. To increase sales people’s productivity in managing opportunities and to provide a more fluid experience for phone and tablet devices, you can set default chances of success in the sales cycle stages in opportunity management.

You can send a sales quote to a contact without having to create them as customers first. Filter exactly which contacts you want to export from a segment and send to a marketing agency. With contact profiling, you can create profiles for your contacts to help segment and classify contacts according to different profile attributes. You can then add these profiles, manually or automatically, by answering user-defined questions for each contact.

You can get sales orders from Dynamics 365 for Sales with write-in products transferred to Dynamics NAV. When transferring write-in products, you can map each product to a specific item or resource in Dynamics NAV.

Sales orders from Dynamics 365 Sales can be automatically converted to sales orders in Dynamics NAV without manual intervention. While transferring sales order from Dynamics 365 Sales, the Name field is transferred and mapped to the External Document Number field on the sales order in Dynamics NAV. Long product and sales order line descriptions from Dynamics 365 Sales are no longer truncated but are transferred to Dynamics NAV as additional sales order lines of type Comment. You can also transfer invoices in foreign currencies from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Sales.

7. Synchronising vendors with Lexmark ICS for better OCR results

Take advantage of vendor synchronisation when using Lexmark ICS. This will improve the vendor recognition rate in the Lexmark ICS and allow manual selection of vendors when performing visual training of new invoice layouts.

Vendor information including number, name, address, VAT registration, phone, and bank account data is transferred to Lexmark ICS when synchronising.

Out of the box, synchronisation is not enabled. It must be enabled in the OCR Service Setup window as shown in the second image to the right.

8. Preconfigured Excel reports

The Business Manager and Accountant Role Centers have a new option in the ribbon for Excel Templates.

From the Excel Templates list, users can choose a preconfigured report that is ready to print from Excel.

9. Cancel or correct job related posted invoices

In earlier versions, it has been easy to cancel a posted sales invoice, such as if you made a mistake like forgetting to specify a discount or choosing the wrong dimensions. However, it was less straightforward to cancel invoices that you created based on planning lines of the type Billable. If you spotted a mistake, you had to open the Job Planning Lines page, add lines with negative values for the lines that you wanted to cancel, and then use the Create Sales Credit Memo action.

In Dynamics NAV 2018, we’ve eliminated some of the steps. Now you just choose the Cancel or Correct actions on the posted invoice and a credit memo will be created. The job planning lines will be created automatically in the background. Remember, though, that you may need to review the planning lines later if you decided to modify a corrective invoice. You are not allowed to post corrections for jobs that have the status Blocked.

10. Posting setup improvements and missing posting notifications

You can now see a visual indication of mandatory G/L accounts that must be set to cover most of your scenarios related to specific posting setup. For example, in Inventory Posting Setup, you’ll see the Inventory Account having mandatory asterisk, while in General Posting Setup, the Sales and Purchase accounts.

Open posting setup cards to see only accounts needed for features you’ve enabled. For example, if you don’t have the payment discounts posting feature enabled, your payment discount G/L accounts won’t clutter your view while setting up general posting.

A new smart algorithm suggests posting setup accounts on posting setup lists. Simply add combination of posting groups you want to set and click Suggest Accounts. The algorithm will analyse existing posting setup you already have and suggest G/L accounts from similar posting setup. You can however disagree with the suggestion and change it to fit your needs.

Better control of deleting posting setup has been added. If you have posting setup used somewhere, you can check to see if it is already being used somewhere by inspecting the Used in Ledger Entries field. You can also get notified while preparing a document that posting setup is missing which removes frustration at moment of posting.

11. Bulk posting of orders, invoices and credit memos

Are your sales going so well that you can’t process the avalanche of invoices fast enough? Is this luxury problem becoming a drain on resources? No worries, now you can process batches of orders, invoices, or credit memos in one go by choosing the documents, and then choosing Post selected.

12. Change global dimensions improvement

In earlier versions of Dynamics NAV, the Change Global Dimensions report posted one exceptionally large transaction that blocked all activities.

Now, the Change Global Dimensions report behaves as follows:

The whole task is paralleled and executed per table in separate independent background jobs.

Other users can work with read all data in tables that are not involved in the update of global dimensions. Note, however, that all changes to tables in the list are blocked until all of them are completely updated.

Any failed task can be rerun from the place of failure. For example, if a failure occurs when 95% of the records are processed, the rerun task will finish the final 5%.

13. Submission of EC Sales List with more than 9999 lines

You can now submit the EC Sales List report with more than 9999 lines. All you need to do is set a threshold on the number of lines in the VAT report configuration for the EC Sales List report. Set the Maximum No. of Lines field to 9999, and we’ve got you covered. When you submit such large EC Sales List reports, we’ll generate messages and send them to the government gateway. You can see the results of the submission in the Log Entries window.

14. Posting directly to general ledger accounts from documents

If you need to add an additional fee or service of some kind to a sales or purchase document, but the item isn’t in your item catalog, you can now add it on the fly in the document and post the revenue to the correct general ledger account from the document lines.

15. Intrastat reporting improvements

You can now indicate that you’re required to prepare Intrastat reports and set the default transaction types for normal sales and purchases as well as sales and purchase returns to make your Intrastat reporting faster. Whenever you enter a document that must be included in your Intrastat report, Dynamics NAV uses the default transaction type values from the Intrastat Setup window.

Use the Intrastat Checklist report and see a visual indication of which Intrastat journal lines that contain errors that you must correct before submitting the Intrastat report. You will see the exact details of the error, and you can toggle Intrastat Journal lines to show lines with errors only or all lines.

16. Enhancements for North America Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) functionality

With Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), you can pay vendors using electronic payments. You’ll be able to modify the format that is used to create the EFT file to suit your needs. You can assign a file layout to each bank account, and then when EFT payments are processed, each EFT file uses the specified layout. The default layouts will include a PPD and CCD file layout.

The existing support for EFT has been moved to the data exchange framework.

17. Address validation in the UK

The GetAddress.io UK Postcodes extension uses the getAddress API to find addresses in postcodes in the UK. To use the extension, you need to get a plan and an API Key for the getAddress API. That’s easy, and we help you do that when you set up the GetAddress.io UK Postcodes extension. Plans are based on use, or what’s sometimes referred to as calls.

A call, in this case, is when Dynamics NAV displays a list of addresses in a postcode. Depending on how often you add addresses, choose the plan that is best for you. If you just choose Get API Key in the page, you’ll use the Free plan, which lets you add 20 addresses per day, and is valid for 30 days.

18. Retrieve customer, vendor and contact name and address from VAT Registration Number [UK only]

You can validate the VAT registration number of new customers, vendors, and contacts against the EC VAT VIES web service and get the name and address details from the web service response.

19. Migration from QuickBooks

You can now import payroll transaction files in the QuickBooks IIF format by installing the QuickBooks Payroll File Import extension. Aggregated payroll data, including date, payroll account, description, and amount, will be imported to your G/L accounts according to mappings that you perform once per payroll account.

The extension also contains a sample payroll file that you can use to try out the functionality, for example, in a demo company.

20. Bulk invoicing from Bookings

For companies using the Bookings app in Office 365, we have added the ability to do bulk invoicing for bookings. The Uninvoiced Bookings page in Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides a list of the company’s completed bookings. In this page you can quickly select the bookings you want to invoice and create draft invoices for the services provided.

What's new in Dynamics 365 Busineess Central?

1. Per Tenant Customizations

What? Applying an extension to a single tenant without going through AppSource.
Why? To enable customization for a single customers running in Business Central.

How? An extension can be applied to a single tenant in Business Central.


2. Sandbox with Production Data and Isolation


What? When creating a Sandbox it is possible to create a copy of production data with it. When creating the copy all outgoing communication is blocked to avoid external integrations and keep running.

Why? To enable several scenarios that would require downloading a copy of the database:

Troubleshooting/Debugging on real data outside the production environment;
Developing Extensions that needs the real data to run.
When copying the data outgoing communication is blocked:

To avoid integrations to external services to keep running when not in production;
Each integration can be enabled one at a time to test specific integrations from sandbox in a controlled manner.
How? Snapshot copy of database. Blocking HTTP communication.

3. Event Recorder
What? Event recorder allows a developer to run a specific scenario and record which events are fired.


Why? Microsoft has added 1000+ of events a developer need a way to discover the events that are available for any given scenario. Event Recorder will record all events that are run and generate code snippets for a developer to quickly subscribe to events.

4. Debugging in Sandbox
What? Debugging from Visual Studio Code against a sandbox environment is enabled.

Why? To allow a developer to step through code to debug while running in the sandbox environment. Stepping through Base App code is enabled by default and possible on other extensions if allowed by a developer of the extension.

How? .dal (debug all) for base application as well as extensions that allows it.


What’s New in the Application?
1. Late Payment Prediction


What? Inform user about potential issues with customer invoices to be paid late.

Why? Late payments lead to less accurate cash flow forecasts and liquidity problems. Risk of setting up the sub optimal payment methods for sales documents help AR team to focus on risky invoices and avoid not-needed contacts with customers that pay on-time.

How? Late Payment Prediction  extension. Azure ML model via ML Prediction Management API.


2. Support of Items of Type “Non-inventory”

What? Add support for non-inventory items.

Why? Use pricing/discount structure from Items, but keep out of inventory (in addition to pricing: unit of measures, default vendors and additional vendors, extended descriptions, replacements, tariff numbers and etc.).

How? Create new item type along Inventory and Service Enable item of type Non-Inventory in consumption scenarios.

What is Non-Inventory items? It is items, that you can buy or sell, but don’t want to keep as inventory.

3. Editable Permission Sets


What? Enable Editable Permission Sets (on par with on-prem capability). Give the admin an overview of a user’s effective permissions.

Why? Bringing Business Central on par with NAV 2018. Strong partner request. Partners need to be able to fine-tune the permission setup for a given company. To mitigate future permission issues, such as when users get permission errors.

How? Making Permission Sets/Permissions editable:

4. Lock MS Permission Sets;
Allow copy of MS Permission Sets;
Show message when changes to MS Permission Sets.
New page gives consolidated overview of how permissions have been calculated. It indicates that the entitlement overrides the permissions given by their  SUPERs. Permission error has been enhanced to remind users to lock at this.


5. Application Areas


What? Tag “Advanced” replaced with “Suite”. Requisition worksheet and most of planning related functionality moved to “Essential”.

Why? Strong partner request.

How? Changing tagging in objects.


6. Simplified Journals


What? Simplified layout of General Purchases and Sales Journals. Ease of data entry.

Why? Based on customer feedback / NPS.

How? Support of two view modes for journals.


7. Update Reports Layout


What? 30 most used reports got new and modern layout.

Why? It was long due to update report layouts since they were converted from NAV 5.

How? List of most used reports came from telemetry.



8. Blocked Items are Hidden in the Lookups

What? Block item filtered out lookups.

Why? Customers could have thousands of items with some “blocked” when they are no longer used. These blocked items still show up in lookups when adding items to Sales Invoices which makes the list of items much longer and causes confusion as to what items are actually available.

How? Modified the Table Relation property (Table Filter = Blocked =CONST(No)) in documents and journals.


9. Remind User to Release Purchase / Sales Order when Necessary

What? Improved warning for orders.

Why? If user forgot to release sales/purchase order, they are not available for warehouse handling.

How? Proper notification on closing document, which checks following conditions:

order is not released yet;
there are lines with filled in quantity;
location is selected in lines;
location requires Pick/Ship; Receive/Put-away.


10. Improve Handling of Situations when Currency Exchange Rates are Missing

What? Improve handling of situations when currency exchange rates are missing

Why? One of the top user errors Microsoft observe in telemetry.

How? Confirmation dialog that guides users to Exchange Rate page. Notification on closing currency card about missing exchange rate.


11. Copy Account Schedules

What? Copy account schedules

Why? Users often run the same financial report in slightly different versions. IT would save a lot of time if user could simply copy an Account Schedule and edit it.

How? Action on action schedule list. Confirmation on “system” account schedules.


12. Fixed Assets Appreciation Posting Available through Purchase Documents

What? Fixed assets appreciation posting available through purchase documents

Why? Any increase of fixed asset (FA) value needs to be properly documented. When FA value is increased, due to regular maintenance for example, accountant can utilize purchase order or invoice with FA posting type of Maintenance to post increase FA value or simply justify it with posted purchase invoice. If FA gets upgraded, it’s value gets increased, but not as part of maintenance.

How? FA posting type field is extended with Appreciation type on purchase documents to support for this scenario from purchase document, FA Posting type Appreciation already exists in General Journals.

13. Accountant Can Verify Accuracy of VAT Return Against GL Before Submitting it to Tax Authority

What? Ability to reconcile G/L entries vs. VAT entries based on established relations.

Why? W1 version has VAT to GL relationship implemented for years which is not being used to reconcile VAT and GL which is task executed by every accountant each time VAT Return is submitted to Tax authority. This reconciliation is implemented in different ways in every country where tax reporting is done.

How? German version of REP11 (Object Report 11009 Sales VAT Adv. Not. Acc. Proof)


14. Manage Users Option in Create Company Wizard

What? Other users can not log into new company created by administrator.

Why? Reason: admin forgot to add users.

How? Solution: Adding “Manage users” options to create company Wizard.


15. Archiving a Blanket Orders

What? You can archive and delete blanket sales and purchase orders.

Why? Align with other archiving functionality.

How? Blanket Order Archiving feature is no longer specific to Switzerland, so Microsoft have made it generally available in the standard product.

16. Refreshed User Experience and Productivity Features 

17. Business Central Store App (mobile)

• Available on Windows, iOS and Android;
• Supports on-premise and cloud;
• Works Android 6 and above or iOS 10 and above (phone/tablet)
• Works also on Windows 10
• Supports iPhone X and Android Pie;
• update available globally NOW.

18. The Signature Design

• Signature to Business Central;
• First introduced in April 2018;
• Differs visually from NAV;
• Direct adds benefit to your solutions.

19. Refreshed user experience

• Build on top of April 2018 release;
• Modernized to bring freshness to all pages in the platform;
• Streamlining page navigation and control;
• Where cloud on-premises;
• Browser and Windows Store app.

20. Keyboard Shortcuts

Search and Filter

a. Alt + Q – evolution of Page Search: actions, Pages and Reports, Online help docs from anywhere.

b. F3 – Toggle Search

c. Shift + F3 – Filter rows

d. Ctrl + Shift + F3 – Filter totals

e. Alt + F3 – Filter to current value

f. Shift + Alt + F3 – Filter to current column

g. Ctrl + Enter – Jump to row

h. Shift + Alt + Ctrl + F3 – Reset filter

Copy and Paste

a. F8 – Copy cell above

b. Ctrl + C – Copy rows

c. Ctrl + V – Paste totals

d. Alt + Q – Tell me (Your new favorite shortcut).

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