Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Business Central is a business management application for small and mid-sized organizations that automates and streamlines business processes. Highly scalable and adaptable with a rich set of capabilities, Business Central enables companies to manage their finances, supply chain, manufacturing, projects, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that's relevant to their specific industry or region of operation by picking apps from industry-leading ISVs and customizing the app to fit their business needs. Business Central is fast to implement and easy to configure. Simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.

This release will again demonstrate our commitment to Copilot. We continue to look at how Copilot can help optimize business processes so you can complete tasks faster. We'll enable Copilot to help with creating sales orders directly from Chat. Additionally, we will also make it faster to create product information faster with Business Central using Copilot to create information like Variant, Unit of Measure, and other information. We are also investing in piloting Chat extensibility to help users learn from 3rd party content.

Developers are already improving their productivity with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, and there's more innovation to come from these world-leading development tools for AL developers. We've also enabled developers to enrich the application metadata with more details to use for a better Copilot experience.

We'll help organizations focus on their primary business while staying compliant with various government regulations by automating regulatory tasks. Expanding core functionality is always a focus, and this release will enable customers to use installments on sales documents. To support customers with international business, we'll enable support for multiple VAT numbers.

Additional updates in 2024 release wave 2 include:

• Application: Our e-document feature provides more capabilities for sending documents. The last release offered integration between projects in Business Central and Dynamics 365 Field Service, and in this release, we're expanding this integration to cover service orders in Business Central. We'll also deliver more reporting capabilities for sustainability to help companies track their greenhouse gas emissions for reporting.

• Country and regional: We've expanded Business Central's global availability. Business Central is now available in more than 170 countries and regions.

• Development: We'll continue to invest in areas that enhance productivity for developers who work with GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and AppSource marketplace. We're adding new code refactoring capabilities, an easy path to functional and performance testing, and ISV and custom code with AL GO for GitHub.

• Governance and administration: Business Central delivers a set of additional self-service features to help administrators manage access to environments at a more granular level, and audit critical admin operations using Microsoft 365 Audit Log. Audit Log provides strong options for reinforcing data privacy with customer-managed encryption keys and Azure Lockbox.

• Legislation: We'll continue to ensure that Business Central is compliant with local accounting laws, which means we'll make several improvements to Microsoft's localized versions.

• Reporting and data analysis: We'll add over 70 Power BI reports and continue to invest in our overall reporting capabilities.

• Service and platform: We're continuing to invest in the fundamentals of our service, focusing on high availability, performance, stability, resource governance, security, and compliance.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Adapt faster with Power Platform
Business Central's seamless integration with Power Platform lets you improve efficiency in your organization by automating repetitive tasks. Use Power Automate templates to automate workflows that optimize your business processes for your unique requirements.

We'll continue to invest in a tight integration with Power Platform to make it more powerful and give you more ways to use your business data effectively. For example, you can use the Copilot capabilities for cloud flows in the Power Platform products to create connected business workflows and experiences. What's more, you can do so through quick and easy natural language expressions.

Application
To determine what goes into the application in every release, we prioritize the top requests from customers and respond to market trends. For example, our investment in helping customers use Copilot to optimize their business processes.

For the last couple of releases, we've invested in multicompany capabilities because an increasing number of businesses use Business Central across borders and to manage multiple companies. We're committed to enhancing the Business Central experience by integrating Copilot capabilities that significantly boost productivity in financial data entry tasks.

Copilot and AI
According to our recent survey on business trends, nearly 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce repetitive tasks in their jobs. But until recently, AI has been a commodity that few SMBs could truly invest in.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot enables professionals to perform their day-to-day work with the assistance of cutting-edge AI by their side. With Copilot in Business Central, our customers empower their workers with intuitive AI tools to get more done with less effort, without needing to become data scientists.

This wave expands on our use of Copilot capabilities, enabling customers to orchestrate and automate business processes with the help of AI agents. These agents can autonomously perform tasks, respond to events, analyze data, and handle errors using both user input and contextual data from the Business Central environment. Agents operate with minimal user intervention, involving users only when needed, and can act on behalf of a company, department, or team, while maintaining full transparency and bringing humans into the loop when their attention is required. To showcase this capability, we’re introducing the Sales Order Agent, our first out-of-the-box agent that automates the end-to-end process of capturing sales quotes and orders from customer emails.

Country and regional
Business Central continues to become available to businesses in more countries and regions. This expansion happens largely through partner-led localizations. Our partners create and maintain apps for specific countries and regions, and publish their apps on AppSource. In combination with built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more than 170 countries and regions worldwide. Additionally, in the countries where Microsoft is responsible for the localization, we provide updates for all regulatory features.

Development
Our focus with these releases in on bringing powerful new extensibility features that empower developers to create adaptable, resource-efficient solutions while offering greater flexibility to meet evolving business needs.

With the introduction of the ability to define profile extension objects, developers can modify and customize user profiles without duplicating code, enhancing productivity and maintaining code integrity. Developers can also now include resources in extensions and access them from AL, streamlining data initialization and setup. Enhancements to the Explore in Visual Studio Code feature allow seamless access to GitHub repositories, making it easy to pull, inspect, or hotfix code versions, even with IP protection in place. The full-text search metadata on table fields allows developers to provide data search capabilities that deliver faster, more accurate results to boost user satisfaction and efficiency.

Resellers and publishers can save time when they validate their solutions by running multiple AppSource apps through a public NuGet feed that provides downloadable symbols and AL-Go for GitHub handling this automation. Additionally, a rule-based scheduling mode for performance profiling enables background profiling to pinpoint and address performance issues, reducing troubleshooting time.

Governance and administration
We're giving Business Central administrators more tools for managing environments, apps, and data migrations. The goal is to help administrators be self-reliant, able to solve their customer needs, and easily handle a variety of administrative scenarios.

New features in Business Central improve security, flexibility, and partner management for multi-environment customers. Administrators can now easily assign partner access to specific environments, simplifying control and compliance. Customer-managed encryption keys enhance data protection, allowing businesses to align with privacy standards. Extended update windows provide flexibility in scheduling upgrades during convenient times. A unified interface for managing per-tenant extensions (PTEs) alongside AppSource apps streamlines deployment across environments, saving time for administrators. IPv6 support future-proofs connectivity, ensures seamless service, and enhances data security, preparing businesses for a growing, interconnected world.

Legislation
Business Central offers updates to regulatory features based on popular requests for improvements and ever-changing requirements from local authorities. To give our customers peace of mind and enable them to focus on their core business, we automate many processes and ensure that features comply with the regulations set by government agencies. For example, if local regulations require that you create vouchers that serve as proof of transactions and a detailed audit trail, you can automate the process. Business Central can automatically generate and attach vouchers to general ledger entries, so that accountants can rest assured that they’re compliant, without extra steps. The retention policy features let you specify how long you need to store vouchers before you clean them up, giving you more control over the amount of data you store.

We’re working to make regulatory features a standard part of Business Central, so that we can deliver improvements out of the box across the countries and regions where they’re relevant. For example, the E-documents module is a foundation that supports processes for sales and purchase invoicing, and it’s easy for partners to extend by building country-specific apps for e-invoicing.

Reporting and data analysis
In the modern world, data is an invaluable resource, forming the foundation of decision-making and progress across all sectors. Recent advances in AI technology and data analytics tools bring radically new ways for businesses to distill complex information into actionable intelligence, reveal hidden patterns and trends, and find correlations that were previously concealed. The critical insights gained from data analysis empower organizations to optimize their strategies, enhance customer experiences, identify potential risks, gain unprecedented insights into the details of their operations and environments, and innovate in ways that were once inconceivable.

As data continues to fuel innovation and drive transformative advancements, harnessing its potential has become essential for staying competitive and shaping a more efficient and sustainable future for SMBs.

Our reporting strategy revolves around building universal BI and analytics within the Business Central experience. We aim to seamlessly integrate in-context, rich, and immersive BI and analytics content from first and third parties into Business Central. Alongside flexible self-service capabilities, you can effortlessly access and leverage your data for maximum value.

User experiences
Business Central offers a broad portfolio of user interfaces that enable our customers to work with their data from anywhere, and on any device. User interfaces include an installable desktop app, a browser-based web app, and mobile apps. Whether you need to enter data at high speed, casually update entries, or analyze relational data, Business Central offers numerous features that are easy to get started with and powerful when needed.

Every release includes enhancements to usability, accessibility, performance, and reliability. In this release wave, we're boosting efficiency when you're working with actions across selections in lists of records and viewing summarized data to help you easily fix data entry mistakes.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Business Central below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Business Central