Note: This blog post was updated in November 2024.
Ever since Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central was launched back in 2018, Microsoft has released product updates for the ERP software on a regular twice-yearly basis.
With each update, Microsoft has incorporated the feedback of end users like yourself into new features and functionalities for Business Central, all in a continuous effort to serve your needs better.
The 2024 Release Wave 2 update, the second of two major updates for Business Central this year, will introduce many new features and functionalities to make using the cloud ERP software easier than ever for the end users in your business.
The update introduces new innovations that equip you with powerful tools to revolutionise your business. This release includes hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, such as Sales, Customer Service, Contact Center, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, cross-app capabilities for Finance and Operations, Human Resources, Commerce, Business Central, Remote Assist, Customer Insights - Data, and Customer Insights - Journeys. Additionally, it enhances Copilot for business features in Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance.
Let’s take a look at the updates of the 2024 Release Wave 2 for Business Central, which will be rolled out progressively from October 2024 through to March 2025.
Note: This post was originally published in April 2020, and was updated to reflect the changes that came with the latest updates from Microsoft.
1. Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales continues to improve customer insights and increase sales by leveraging data, intelligence, and intuitive user experiences. This release focuses on integrating natural language Copilot for summarising information, developing a new full-screen Copilot Home with tailored insights and role-specific actions, and utilising AI-driven insights to identify leads.
Microsoft Copilot for Sales continues to advance and refine state-of-the-art generative AI features for sales professionals by enhancing Copilot in M365 with workflows, data, and actions tailored specifically for sales. Our focus will be on leveraging AI-driven insights to generate leads, strengthening the integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365, and employing natural language capabilities to enable sellers to query their CRM about data-related matters.
2. Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service will further enhance agent efficiency with new Copilot features, including proactive prompts, secure access to external system data via plugins, improved email functionalities, and AI-driven routing.
Microsoft Copilot for Service is now widely accessible, offering new features to improve user experiences. These enhancements will be incorporated into Outlook, Teams, M365 Chat, and Copilot integrated within third-party CRMs.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center will introduce new features for voice, messaging, Copilot, AI-enhanced routing, and contact center operations, including built-in support for additional CRMs.
Dynamics 365 Field Service facilitates a transition from reactive to proactive and predictive service, driving digital transformation and fostering innovative business models. With the help of Copilot, frontline workers can access essential information and start mixed reality remote assist calls within Teams. Managers can easily create, update, and manage work orders across web, Outlook, and Teams platforms.
3. Finance and Supply Chain
Dynamics 365 Finance is advancing its leadership in autonomous finance by leveraging AI to revolutionise standard end-to-end financial processes. This update emphasises in-app copilot features, engaging persona-based user experiences, broader country coverage, improvements in electronic invoicing, enhancements in business performance analytics and planning, and capabilities for autonomous reconciliation.
Microsoft Copilot for Finance is enhancing data reconciliation in Excel by introducing assisted data cleaning and preparation processes. The upcoming wave will also focus on broadening variance analysis with additional data sources and fostering collaboration on findings with stakeholders. Furthermore, Teams integration will streamline collections calls by providing suggested scripts and automatically logging action items in the financial system.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is progressing towards a fully autonomous supply chain by embedding intelligence, automation, and analytics into all aspects of business operations, thus boosting user efficiency and enhancing organisational flexibility. This update focuses on enhancing order promising capabilities for manufacturers. Demand planning now includes forecasting with external signals, and Copilot integrates insights and analyses directly into workflows, identifying trends and anomalies while enabling specific data queries at the cell level. Furthermore, Traceability Copilot monitors actual products in production and compiles a detailed historical record of related activities.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations is dedicated to improving usability, performance, and scalability in essential areas like project planning, invoicing, time entry, and core transaction processing. The focus is on AI-assisted enhancements in core functionalities such as estimation, proposal generation, journals, approvals, and contract management, along with new mobile capabilities and scalability improvements to manage larger projects and invoices more effectively.
Finance and operations cross-app capabilities will continue to enhance features applicable to Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Human Resources, and Project Operations. Microsoft is integrating Copilot experiences throughout these applications, incorporating natural language chat, embedded AI, and intelligent process automation, while also supporting extensibility for Copilot scenarios. Additionally, Microsoft will deliver greater value and insights to finance and operations app data, along with improvements to maintain enterprise-grade security and compliance at scale.
Dynamics 365 Human Resources is advancing its intelligence, automation, and analytics in the hire-to-separation process, boosting user productivity and fostering business agility. Microsoft is enhancing recruitment with AI-driven assessments and offer management, improving the experiences of employees and HR business partners in benefits and performance management, and advancing analytics, insights, and planning through business performance planning and analytics capabilities.
4. Commerce
Dynamics 365 Commerce harnesses AI to help retailers optimise their operations, boosting customer loyalty and conversions. With Copilot, retail managers, sales associates, and merchandisers receive AI-driven insights into customer purchasing behaviours and preferences, along with recommendations for product positioning and sales strategies, and business intelligence on store performance. Enhancements to the self-checkout POS improve the efficiency of customer checkouts, while updates to the Store Commerce app enhance daily tasks for quicker, more effective sales and service.
5. SMB
Dynamics 365 Business Central is committed to upholding service reliability and security standards. Microsoft will continue to boost productivity by refining core processes with Copilot, expanding our reach to over 170 countries, and providing enhanced reporting with more than 80 Power BI reports. Furthermore, Microsoft will broaden integration with Dynamics 365 Field Service and introduce new financial management features. Microsoft will also improve development tools and governance, alongside enhanced data privacy and compliance management.
6. Remote Assist
Dynamics 365 Remote Assist will significantly enhance the quality of Mixed Reality annotations on Teams mobile for both iOS and Android users. This update will improve the precision of MR ink on uneven and complex surfaces, facilitating seamless collaboration for remote experts and technicians. Mixed Reality annotations on Teams mobile will become generally available in the upcoming wave, alongside continuous investments in stability, performance optimisation, and usability enhancements across HoloLens 2 and iOS and Android applications.
7. Customer Insights
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data empowers organisations to consolidate and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. This release allows you to streamline data integration with Dataverse and Fabric, link your data in OneLake to Customer Insights, speed up insights with data in Data Lake format, gain more control when connecting to data in Dataverse, and effortlessly generate insights from marketing interaction data.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys leverages AI to transform marketing workflows, enhancing productivity for marketers. This release allows businesses to optimise customer interactions through comprehensive journeys spanning departments and channels. You will gain increased flexibility and control over journeys, manage web forms more effectively, and customise Copilot to suit your business needs.
Questions About 2024 Release Wave 2 For Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?
The 2024 Release Wave 2 update for Business Central brings many new enhancements to the cloud ERP software, building upon the improvements introduced with the previous update in the first half of the year.
These will improve the user experience in various ways such as enhancements to the user experience, improvements to intercompany functionalities, and the introduction of generative AI technology through Copilot amongst others.
For a detailed list of changes that are coming with this update, here are the release notes for 2024 Release Wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Otherwise, if you’d like to learn more about Business Central and what it can do for your business, click the image below to learn more about the cloud-based ERP software from one of the big brand names in computing today.
Highlights of 2024 Release Wave 1
The 2024 Release Wave 1 update, the first of two major updates for Business Central this year, will introduce many new features and functionalities to make using the cloud ERP software easier than ever for the end users in your business.
These include further improvements to Power Platform, expanding on the capabilities of Copilot within the ERP software, improved access to report and data analysis content, and enhanced user experiences amongst other enhancements.
Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of the 2024 Release 1 update for Business Central, which will be rolled out progressively from April 2024 through to September 2024.
1. Improvements To Power Platform Integration
The 2024 Release Wave 1 update will build upon previous work to further improve the way Business Central integrates with Microsoft Power Platform, giving you more ways to use your business data effectively. This includes leveraging the recently-added Copilot capabilities in the ERP software to create connected business workflows and experiences in Power Platform products.
Improve Approval Processes via Power Automate
Previously, Microsoft introduced several new approval templates and a simplified experience on Power Automate. With this update, several new changes will be introduced.
- The Approval User Setup page has been updated and exposed to Power Automate. You no longer need to define approvers manually in Power Automate anymore; the flow execution takes the relevant approver directly from Business Central.
- Information about user actions in Power Automate will be passed back to Business Central, and the respective events will be properly logged.
- More templates are enabled for Power Automate approval integration.
Manage Work Orders In Field Service, Invoice Them In Business Central
Field Service has now been fully integrated with Business Central, streamlining the end-to-end process of managing service operations and ensuring a seamless flow of information between the two systems.
You can now easily create and manage work orders in Field Service, track the progress of service tasks, assign resources, and capture consumption details. The integration enables the smooth transfer of data to Business Central, which facilitates the invoicing and fulfilment of work orders in Business Central.
With the service activities performed and consumption recorded in Field Service, you can generate accurate invoices in Business Central. This ensures timely and accurate billing, improving financial management and customer satisfaction.
Through this integration, you benefit from a unified and efficient workflow which eliminates the need for manual data entry or duplication, reducing errors and saving valuable time. It also provides a comprehensive view of service operations and financials, which improves your decision-making and operational efficiency of your business.
Use Virtual Tables To Expose More Business Central Data In Dataverse
When synchronising data between Business Central and Dataverse, you can now enable virtual tables in Business Central. This lets you add a synthetic relationship between a synchronised entity and the virtual table, making
When you synchronize data between Business Central and Dataverse, you can add a synthetic relationship between a synchronized entity and a virtual table if you enable virtual tables in Business Central. Virtual tables let you enrich the data you've set up to synchronize from Business Central with data you haven't, without help from a developer.
2. Enhancements to Service And Project Management
For the past couple of product update releases, Microsoft has invested in bringing multi-company capabilities to Business Central in order to serve the needs of an increasing number of customers that are using it across borders to manage multiple business entities. 2024 Release Wave 1 sees additional features geared towards helping you manage your multiple businesses, as well as enhancements to service and project management features.
Set Up Financial Consolidation Runs More Efficiently
When running a financial consolidation, the Set Up Business Unit Currencies page gives you the last rates that were entered for average, closing, and last closing rate. You can modify the rates being used for the current run by either entering the values, or copying values from previous runs with the Select from previous consolidation option.
You can use the option to find the relevant last run to copy values from, or just look up the rates that were used when you’re troubleshooting.
The Run Consolidation batch job with the new parameters is not available on the Business Units list page. You can also find the Set Up Business Unit Currencies page by selecting the Exchange Rates action.
Block Item, Item Variant Or Service Item From Use In Service Management Transactions
Toggle on Service Blocked to stop items or item variants from being used in service management transactions. Source: Microsoft
If you want to prevent an item or item variant from being used in service management transactions, you can turn on the Service Blocked toggle on the Item Card, Item Variants, and Item Variant Card page. You can also set this field on the Item Template page, and it will be copied to the items created from that template.
Doing this makes an item or item variant unavailable for selection on the following pages:
- Service Line (except for service credit memos, where you'll see a notification that the item or variant is blocked, but allowed on this type of document)
- Service Item
- Service Contract Line
- Standard Service Line
If you manually enter an item number or variant code that's blocked, you'll get an error message that states, "The field contains a value that cannot be found in the related table."
Toggle on Service Blocked to stop service items from being used in service management transactions. Source: Microsoft
You can also do this for service items by going to the Service Item Card page, in the Blocked field, and selecting one of the following options:
- Service Contract: Block the service item from being used in service contracts and service contract quotes, but not in service orders or other service documents.
- All: Block the service item from being used in any service management transaction, including service contracts, service orders, and other service documents.
This stops you from selecting the blocked service item on the following pages:
- Service Contract Line (if blocked for service contract, or all)
- Service Item Line (except for service credit memos, if blocked for all)
If you manually enter a service item number, you'll get an error message that states, "The field contains a value that cannot be found in the related table.
Additionally, if you have service contracts, service contract quotes, or service orders that include blocked items, item variants, or service items, you can't use the following actions:
- Lock or Make Contract on the Service Contract Quote
- Lock Contract, Sign Contract, Create Contract Service Orders or Create Contract Invoices on the Service Contract
- Make Order on the Service Quote
- Release to Ship or Post on the Service Order
- Post in the Service Invoice
Use Standard Terminology For Project Management
Jobs have been renamed to "Projects". Source: Microsoft
Previously, project accounting features in Business Central were referred to as “jobs”, which has confused users as it’s not the term that people who work with project accounting would expect. With this update, the term “job” has been replaced with “project” in the user interface and documentation in order to clarify the true nature and purpose of the project accounting features for various types of businesses.
For example, entities such as job tasks, job journals, and job planning lines are now project tasks, project journals, and project planning lines. The renaming won’t break existing integrations and customizations because only the captions in the user interface and the terms in the documentation are being updated.
3. Copilot And AI Innovation
In the previous update, Microsoft introduced Copilot to Business Central to empower users with intuitive AI tools, helping them get more done with less effort without needing to be data scientists.
With 2024 Release Wave 1, Copilot capabilities in Business Central has been expanded to boost productivity for businesses.
Complete Bank Account Reconciliation Faster With Copilot
While Business Central already uses rule-based transaction matching to reduce manual work when it comes to importing bank statements and reconciling transactions, residual work to process the unmatched transactions every week still takes a significant amount of time. Copilot reduces bookkeeping effort by matching more transactions and suggesting G/L accounts to post the remaining transactions.
Bank Reconciliation has been enhanced with Copilot. Source: Microsoft
The bank account reconciliation feature in Business Central has been enhanced with:
- AI-powered transaction matching: Complements rule-based matching, and further reduces the remaining unmatched transactions that require review.
- AI-powered G/L account suggestions: Copilot suggests the most likely ledger account to post any residual transactions to, and offers the opportunity to remember a specific transaction description for the next reconciliation.
- Built-in demo data: Makes it easier to experience and demonstrate this Copilot capability to others.
Get To Insights Faster With Copilot-Generated Analysis Tabs
Copilot can help you reduce the time needed to identify trends and anomalies in your business data, by enabling you to express your analysis as a simple sentence without ever leaving Business Central.
Copilot speeds up your analyses and helps you acquire insights faster. Source: Microsoft
Here’s how Copilot can speed up your analyses:
- Create: Starting from any list in Business Central, provide Copilot with keywords or a description indicating the columns, groups, pivots, filters or sorting that you want to use to present fields from the table. Copilot will then generate your desired layout, and help you refine and build upon the generated analysis when you provide more keywords.
- Update: Quickly adjust an existing analysis tab by expressing your desired changes in natural language.
- Explain: Copilot summarises the information presented in the analysis tab as a concise sentence. This can be a useful reminder or quick overview whenever your coworkers share analyses with you.
This feature can be accessed from the specific list page that you want to analyse. Copilot can work with most fields that are already present on the list page and corresponding table, including summing up totals, but cannot create new fields or correlate data across tables.
Introduce Power Automate Copilot Integration With Business Central
Building Power Automate flows without predefined templates can be a mundane and complicated process. With Copilot in Power Automate, this process is much smoother because flows can be built based on just the natural language input from the user.
Wit this update, Copilot in Power Automate is integrated with Business Central, allowing you to start creating automation flows based on natural language. This allows for open-ended and conversational experiences while authoring flows that use your Business Central data. You can ask questions and get assistance to improve and change those flows.
This helps you streamline your business processes and improve productivity by shortening the path to automation.
4. Investment In Modern Development Tools
With 2024 Release Wave 1, consultants and developers can easily open Visual Studio Code for a production or sandbox environment to investigate and understand objects across installed extensions, view code for owned extensions, and perform troubleshooting—all without having to set up Visual Studio Code manually.
Debug The System Application
Many developers miss being able to debug the System application, which is why in 2024 Release Wave 1, Microsoft has enabled it with the introduction of the SecureText data type. This benefits both development and troubleshooting of applications, as well as Open Source contributions to the System application itself through https://github.com/microsoft/ALAppExtensions.
Now, your developers can now step into the System application code base when they’re debugging it to understand the code flow and inspect variables, unless protected by SecureText type.
Remove Friction When Working With External App Dependencies
It’s common for AppSource app publishers and resellers who develop per-tenant extensions of customers to build on the work done by other publishers. However, they need access to the AppSource apps they depend on to do that, and this involves the tedious manual process, of contacting the publishers which own those applications to ask for symbols to develop against, or runtime packages to test with.
And this is not a one-time thing, but an ongoing process every time Business Central receives a new wave of product updates; making the whole process even more tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, for 2024 Release Wave 1, Microsoft plans to unblock developing and compiling against external applications in containers and test in online sandboxes.
This involves allowing resellers and publishers to download symbols for AppSource applications for their own development. It will also include the provision of GitHub actions to make it easy to provision online sandboxes with the required applications installed, for the purpose of running tests on.
5. Improvements To Reporting And Data Analysis
Harnessing data to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements has become essential for SMEs to stay competitive, and to shape a more efficient and sustainable future. Because of this, Microsoft will introduce a reporting strategy that revolves around building universal BI and analytics within Business Central.
Discover Report And Data Analysis Content Easily
Because of this, end users of Business Central will find that they will now be able to discover report and data analysis content – including queries, reports, and power BI pages – more easily, starting from 2024 Release Wave 1.
The new role explorer page provides explanations on all entries, so when an end user hovers over a report, page or query, they will find:
- The title and description from the teaching tip (if defined).
- The ability to open the report, page, or query in a new browser tab without closing the explorer view.
- An icon that helps the end user decide whether this is a report that delivers Excel or PDF files, whether the page is a Power BI report, or whether the query supports data analysis.
With the role explorer, the effort needed to find report and data analysis content is greatly reduced, making it far more accessible and user-friendly for your end users.
6. Enhanced User Experiences
With every product update, Microsoft includes enhancements to the usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability of Business Central. For the 2024 Release Wave 1 update, they’ve boosted efficiency when you’re working with actions across selections in lists of records, and viewing summarised data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.
Share Error Details To Get Help From Another User
Business Central now allows you to share error details, so that they can leverage the expertise of colleagues, subject matter experts or other users to get assistance.
You can more easily share error details with your colleagues, so they know how to help you. Source: Microsoft
Some details you can share with this include the exact error message, error code, and other information that might be helpful when trouble shooting the error. This allows you to effectively communicate the specific issue you’re facing, and thus helps your colleagues provide targeted support and guidance for said issue.
Use Actions To Navigate And Highlight Or Fix Platform-generated Errors
When something goes wrong in Business Central, it’ll now be easier for you to help yourself. Microsoft has enhanced the user experience by making it easier to understand, go to, and resolve errors that originated from the ERP software.
This is done by removing the field names from error messages generated by Business Central, making them easier to read. However, the full technical details of the error, including field names, can still be found in the Detailed error message section.
Any actions on error messages take you directly to the page or field that’s causing the error, so you don’t have to find them on your own. There’s also a highlighting feature that indicates the relevant field, so you can quickly identify and focus on the areas that need attention.
Use Drag and Drop To Attach Multiple Files
You can now drag-and-drop multiple files to attach them to records. Source: Microsoft
With this release, your end users can now drag multiple files at the same time to attach them to records in Business Central.
This improvement is particularly beneficial if the user often works with multiple files and need to associate them with a specific record. The ability to attach several files at the same time eliminates the need to manually upload files one-by-one, which provides a more efficient and user-friendly experience.
7. Enhancements To Regulatory Features
Based on popular requests from users, Microsoft offers regular updates to Business Central’s regulatory features to keep the ERP software in compliance with ever-changing requirements from the local authorities of each country and region.
Moving forward, Microsoft intends to make regulatory features a standard part of Business Central, which would enable the delivery of improvements out-of-the-box across countries and regions where they are relevant.
Achieve Sustainable Compliance With Business Central
You can record data on your business's emissions using Sustainability Journals. Source: Microsoft
To help businesses comply with the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other ESG standards, Business Central is introducing Sustainability Journals and Recurring Sustainability Journals.
Using these, a business can record data based on the Chart of Emission Accounts. Different emissions groups, subgroups, and formulas can be used to make the collection of emissions data as easy as possible.
Data will be recorded in Sustainability Entries, and subsequently used for reporting. It supports carbon emissions reporting, but also supports other types of emissions.
See VAT Dates in Posting Previews
Previously, when you post a document, you can see the VAT Date field in VAT Entries and G/L Entries, but not before.
Now, when you run the Posting Preview action in your documents and journals, you’ll be able to see the VAT Date before you make your post.
Questions About 2024 Release Wave 1 For Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?
The 2024 Release Wave 1 update for Business Central brings many new features and improvements to the cloud ERP software, building upon what was already introduced in 2023.
These are sure to improve your user experience of the ERP software in several ways, including improved service and project management, enhancements to Copilot capabilities, and improved reporting and data analysis amongst others.
For a detailed list of changes that are coming with this update, here are the release notes for 2024 Release Wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Otherwise, if you’d like to learn more about Business Central and what it can do for your business, click the image below to learn more about the cloud-based ERP software from one of the big brand names in computing today.
