It’s here! Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 release wave 2 (Version 21) is now generally available. Read below for an overview of what’s new.
Microsoft Power Platform
Building on top of the work delivered so far, Microsoft continues to improve the way Business Central integrates with Power Platform: Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Logic Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Dataverse.
This includes improvements to the Power BI integration as well as the Power Automate connector and the Automate action—bridging Business Central and Power Automate with a modern toolset that empowers makers and citizen developers to easily extend and connect Business Central with other systems.
Microsoft also continues improvements for Dataverse virtual tables data change events so that partners can use Dataverse as a platform for more ambitious integrations.
Application
In 2022 release wave 2, Microsoft delivers updates based on the most popular requests for improvement.
In the financial area, Microsoft continues to improve bank reconciliation. In this release wave, Microsoft improves the test report, adds a statement report with two sections for outstanding reconciliations, and provides better automation for check ledger entries.
Users will be able to reverse the journal entries from posted payment reconciliation journals. This way, they can more efficiently recover the books from mistakes that may happen. Just like with other journal entries, the user must unapply the entries manually first.
Businesses that use check payments will now have multiple remit addresses available for vendors.
To make financial reporting more transparent for newcomers and experienced users alike, Microsoft is renaming account schedules to financial reporting. They’re also changing the feature slightly to give a better overview of the available reports. A financial report is now defined as a combination of row and column definitions plus a few parameters. This means that variants of the same report can now be stored as separate reports. The core functionality is the same, but the name changes make it easier to grasp the concepts. New templates for row and column definitions will become available in updates over the next release waves, making it easier for business users to get started and get productive.
Onboarding
In 2022 release wave 2, Microsoft is adding an in-product experience that will make it easy for users to find relevant connectivity apps that are available in AppSource. Microsoft also makes these apps easy to install and easy to set up. They start with the apps that offer online bank connectivity.
The apps that are shown in this in-product experience will have certain requirements imposed upon them, such as usage and quality criteria, as well as a minimum set of features and capabilities. More information about what is required for ISVs to get apps listed will be published at a later stage.
Foundational improvements to installation and setup of AppSource apps will be added in this release, to the benefit of all ISVs who have published apps to AppSource.
Country and Regional
More countries and regions are added to bring Business Central to more than 100 countries and regions. Expansion to more countries and regions is achieved through partner-led localization. Microsoft partners create the relevant localization apps and publish them to AppSource. In combination with the built-in language offerings, Business Central is available to serve customers in more than 100 countries and regions worldwide.
Governance and Administration
In 2022 release wave 2, Business Central provides a set of admin and governance capabilities to help admins and IT pros set up, secure, manage, govern, and monitor customer environments. Microsoft adds and improves several capabilities to make it easier to keep up with important service notifications, to automate and manage operations at scale, across many customers and environments, with service-to-service authentication to the Admin Center API. Admins will be able to recover any environments that were recently deleted, which keeps customer data safe.
Productive with Microsoft 365
This release wave gives more control to administrators to manage OneDrive and Excel, while business users benefit from enhancements to report layouts and how they can edit data in Excel.
Reporting
With 2022 release wave 1, Microsoft introduced Excel layouts for reports. In 2022 release wave 2, they continue to improve this experience.
When a business user runs a report with an Excel layout, they can now choose the Excel layout in the report’s request page. For example, if a report has several Excel layouts, the user can choose the exact layout they want when they run the report.
In addition to the Excel layout capability, Microsoft will release a new set of APIs for the finance area that can be used in both Excel and Power BI. This way, users can create their own more detailed analysis on data from the general ledger and G/L budgets with dimensions. Microsoft will provide new template Power BI Desktop files with examples based on the new API.
You can check out the full release plan here.
Contact TrinSoft to learn more about the latest Business Central release.
