Dynamics 365 aims at improving collaboration and innovation through enhanced productivity over your finance and operations application. Dynamics 365 has a CRM that improves the productivity of its users to manage their official relationships with their customers and entirely revolutionize their marketing and sales processes.
We know that ERP systems have continuously seen improvements over the years, however, Dynamics 365 has brought about a change that we only dreamed of. It can give deeper insights into performance, opportunities, and customer relationships. It can also keep track of your inventory and other non-financial resources.
Dynamics 365 has a collection of specially developed applications capable of managing all business processes that can be used individually or as a group based on the needs of your business. Additionally, you can choose to increase the number of applications you need based on the growth and need of your business.
The application is designed to monitor and drive the performance of all real-time financial operations globally. This data is then used to make decisions and predict future outcomes and strategies. In a nutshell, it helps you completely automate your financial operations, minimizing the complexity and labor needed for these tasks.
Top 10 productivity-enhancing Microsoft D365 Finance and Operations features
Here is a list of the top 10 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operation features that will help you boost productivity and minimize the complexity of your financial teams’ processes:
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
Understanding the GAAP rules is important for any financial consultant. The GAAP rules form an integral part of transactions as they govern the preparation of financial statements. The statements describe the performance of your company with the net cash flow. With Dynamics 365, you can always ensure that your statements as well as your client’s statements follow regulatory standards.
Deploy new subsidiaries or product lines in record time. Copy an existing legal entity’s setup to a new entity with onboarding that’s quick, cost-effective, and consistent with the company’s best practices. Use subscription billing to adapt to complex billing and pricing scenarios, gain actionable insights, and automate reporting for recurring revenue streams. Go paperless, speed processes, and improve traceability with a no-code, configurable electronic invoice document submission and exchange with flexible formats and automation workflows for business to government and business to business.
Integration of third-party applications
The Dynamics 365 F&O enables you to integrate third-party applications to enable smoother and easier collaboration. It possesses a feature known as ‘add an app’ on the personalization toolbar that enables you to collaborate with your customer on different applications to streamline your workflows. Furthermore, this feature is helpful as it does not cause any kind of halt to your processes, thereby giving the best experience.
Event-driven integration is a new feature that provides a framework to allow Finance and Operations business and workflow events to be consumed by Microsoft Flow and external systems. For example, it will enable a PO confirmation to trigger fulfilment by the vendor earlier; or enable a receipt of a damaged part to trigger the vendor claim process in real-time.
Integrate financials into core processes and automate tasks to boost productivity, support evolving business models, and maximize financial performance. Create a rules- and prediction-based collection automation that helps increase on-time payment, improve cash flow, and save time. Connect data and processes across Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and partner applications to establish a centralised source of intelligent information for more effective cross-functional collaboration.
Advanced bank reconciliation
The need for precise reconciliation between bank accounts and the ERP system is growing and the solution for this requirement is the advanced reconciliation feature that allows you to boost the productivity of finance teams. Prior to Finance and Operations, reconciliation used to be a tedious and labor-induced task where every transaction from the bank statements needed to be paired with the transactions on the system, manually. Or you can set up a customized process to achieve the same. With the advanced bank reconciliation option in Dynamics 365, industry-wide accepted bank statements can be imported into D365 F&O with specific rules to pair the amounts or the dates. Thus, almost no manual effort is required for the task. Therefore, financial productivity is largely improved with this feature.
Financial resource management
The Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations also has an in-built feature to help you manage your financial resources. It can easily draft up budgets to help you control your expenses. It also has multiple levels of workflow stages for approvals. When the controls of your organization are in place, it also helps you manage and forecast your financial resources for that fiscal year. Furthermore, you can also set up a notification and alarm system for your expenses to alert you when you are spending overboard. This helps you keep in check and control your resources.
Financial reporter
The management reporter feature in D365 was created to help you make financial reports to meet your needs. The reports created can be customized to meet the requirements of your organization by creating high-volume and presentation-quality reports in no time. It also has an in-built feature i.e., the report wizard to help you store your template for next time. Hence, you do not need to re-create this every time. You can also set up a recurrence timeline to automate the report generation. This is up to your needs, it can be done bi-monthly, weekly, daily, or even quarterly.
The audit workbench
The audit workbench module is a brilliant feature that allows you to scrape down to documents attached to anything with relevance to any violations given by the system. The audit policies do not run as a bunch in D365, they are all run simultaneously as individual policies. Thus, the feature enables the auditing team to even have conventions with the person in-charge in entering the expense reports. It also brings resolutions in cases of violations.
Cost accountability
The cost accounting feature is essentially a tracking feature that keeps track of all resources that have flowed in and out. It collects data from sources like ledgers, sub-ledgers, statistics, and budgets. It also summarizes, evaluates, analyzes, and manages all the costs incurred to make the wisest and most feasible decisions for cost control, budgets, price updates, etc. It is the control tool for cost estimation and analysis purposes.
Cost distribution and allocation
The defined ledger allocation rules are used to calculate the allocation journals for ledger balances. The allocation is completely dependent on the value of the currency. With Dynamics 365 F&O, this can be done automatically upon setting the necessary data and ledger rules. It eliminates the need for manual allocation and distribution. It minimized the labor-induced task of creating multiple journals and allocating the necessary funds.
Integration of exchange rates
Another truly brilliant feature of the Dynamics 365 is the integration of exchange rates. You can import the exchange rate values from trusted exchange rate providers and use them in your processes. The tedious task of conversions is taken care of accurately with these features of Dynamics 365. As the exchange rates are constantly changing, it would be troublesome to manually update them. The integration into a trusted site allows you to automate this process as well. The complexity of trading in different currencies is now easier with D365.
Global entry forms
You can easily create, edit, and design forms on Dynamics 365. It is a brilliant customer engagement tactic that allows you to interact with your customers and employees. You can create managed and unmanaged solutions for form creation based on your needs. Furthermore, you can also download all the responses into a single document for ease of use. In the financial world. The forms can help you seamlessly create or purchase invoices with ease.
Final Word
The bottom line, Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations is a game-changer for all organizations. It is beneficial not only to the finance departments but also to every other section as it promotes efficiency and productivity with ease of collaboration. Apart from the features mentioned above, it also encompasses several other features that help you minimize administrative workload. It is a one-stop shop to meet all the needs of your organization. Since it is a cloud-based ERP and CRM solution, it barely requires any maintenance and therefore has a lower downtime always making it accessible to your financial team.
Microsoft will manage the continuous updates of Platform, Application (Finance and Operations, Retail), and Financial Reporting with no costly upgrades required. A set of tools and experiences to support this experience (called One Version) will be made available in Lifecycle Services and will enable predictability, reliability, and continuous delivery. The service will be made available in the China Sovereign Cloud with all customer data maintained within the region.