AI and Automation Help Finance Teams Increase Their Strategic Role

To help finance teams play a more strategic role within their companies, Microsoft is leveraging next-generation AI to automate common activities in Dynamics 365 Finance. This gives more time back to end-users and reduces resource costs—while also providing valuable insights for faster decision-making.

With Microsoft announcing the 2024 release wave 2 plan for Dynamics 365 Finance, customers can expect even greater visibility, evidence, and autonomy as they navigate complex and constantly changing regulations while looking for new ways to grow, control costs, and increase cash flow. In this blog, we cover the new functionality for Dynamics 365 Finance that Microsoft plans to deliver between October 2024 and March 2025.

You can expect to see a steady stream of enhancements. For example, Microsoft will augment Finance processes with in-app Copilot AI capabilities, persona-based user experiences, electronic invoicing enhancements, and other autonomous capabilities. Other improvements include business performance planning, analytic capabilities, and data management that allow for complete visibility across an entire organization.

Business Performance Insights

The business performance suite of capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance brings together analytics, planning, and insights onto a single platform so users can continuously analyze and act on financial and operational data. With release wave 2, here are some of the new functions you can tap into using Microsoft Copilot AI:

Create drivers, formulas, dimensions, and cubes for business performance planning.
Track performance planning change management.
Set dimensional row level security for business performance analytics.
Refresh data frequently to update business performance analytics.

For further insights into business performance, Microsoft is enhancing several data models to define and structure data in the context of relevant business processes:

Analyze data using the record-to-report data models.
Manage assets using acquire-to-dispose data models.
Use procure-to-pay data models to analyze vendor transactions.
Implement order-to-cash data models to analyze sales transactions.

You can also analyze Finance data in Excel and extend the data models to Microsoft Fabric, which encompasses data movement, processing, ingestion, transformation, real-time event routing, and report building. In addition, the managed extensibility of the data models will allow you to integrate data from Dynamics 365 Finance with proprietary data sources.

Streamlined Core Financials

The enhancements to the core financials in Dynamics 365 Finance leverage Copilot AI to automate end-to-end business processes and analytics:

Create default financial tags.
Reverse posted purchase order invoices.
Increase the length of invoice numbers.
Correct receipt matching errors in vendor invoices.
Access batch log summarizations of sales invoices.
Clear bridged transactions automatically.
Manage vendor invoice exceptions.
Make payments in advance with prepayment sales invoices.
Enable financial tags for purchase order invoicing.

With these capabilities, accounting teams can reduce month-end financial close times and streamline bank reconciliation reports with matching rule enhancements. They can also streamline account lifecycle management.

Expanded Globalization

Dynamics 365 Finance is also expanding its global presence to help international companies meet multiple tax compliance and local government requirements with out-of-the-box support for 200+ countries in multiple languages. The integrated no-code/low-code Globalization Studio module provides services to automate and scale complex tax processes to address regulatory digitization trends and legislation changes.

With the 2024 release wave 2, Microsoft is expanding localization for Latin-American countries. These include Ecuador, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Venezuela.

Microsoft also continuously monitors legislation in all covered countries and applies multiple regulatory updates for Finance according to government deadlines. As a result, other new features include a regulatory compliance immersive homepage, support for new e-invoicing in Spain, and updates to the Interface API for e-invoicing in Mexico.

Help for Evaluating All the New Features

With Microsoft constantly rolling out new features, it can be a challenge to know which ones can most help your business. To navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 2 enhancements, Velosio is here to help.

We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners, with thousands of active customers. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We will be glad to advise you on when each Dynamics 365 Finance enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the financial functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.