What’s New in Dynamics 365 Finance in 2023 Release Wave 2

This post will be the first of several reviewing changes and new functionality in the 2023 release wave 2. In this post, we’ll provide an overview of Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain management and some new Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities.

For additional details related to each topic, or to view the applicable Release Plan go to:

Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Finance in 2023 Release Wave 2

Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in 2023 Release Wave 2

Plan and prepare for finance and operations cross-app capabilities in 2023 Release Wave 2

Dynamics 365 Finance

Business agility is critical in a company’s ability to achieve their growth strategies. Agility and its associated flexibility are key in today’s environment of increased competition and cost-cutting pressures.

Being able to rapidly make informed business decisions is essential in reducing risk, identifying actionable insights, and in achieving cost savings. These capabilities are prized by not only financial executives, but the entire company executive team.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance 2023 Release Wave 2 Include

Planning, Analysis, and Analytics

Extended Planning and Analysis

Extended planning and analysis merges both operational and financial planning allowing users to continuously plan, act, and analyze company performance as a team.

Business Performance Analytics

Analytics streamline financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and presenting them in an efficient, user- friendly interface.

Accounts Payable

Invoice Capture and AP Automation

Enhancements to invoice capture and AP automation, via a new AP clerk workspace, streamlines AP processing and increases accuracy and control.

AP Invoice Journal Improvements

The invoice journal option will be provisioned in invoice capture. AP staff can choose to use the invoice journal to deal with expense invoices, resulting in more efficient processing.

Cash and Bank Enhancements

Bank Foreign Currency Revaluation

Bank foreign currency revaluation (bank FCR) will be enhanced in two ways.

An organization can define whether to use all or no financial dimensions when calculating the unrealized gain or loss, reducing the number of lines included in the accounting entries for each bank FCR.

Additionally, the unrealized gain or loss calculation is revised. Companies can now provide a clear calculation definition to their auditors, while also preventing large amounts being posted to different dimensions. This is the result of all debits for cash being posted to one dimension but the credits being posted to a different dimension. The changes also ensure that a gain or loss is calculated correctly for periods where no new transactions are posted for a specific set of dimensions.

Bank Statements

Bank Statement Import and Management

In prior releases, users had to upload bank statements manually. In this release bank statement files can be shared in a SharePoint folder, with a periodical batch job being scheduled to pick up the bank statement files and upload them automatically. Several changes have also been made to bank statement management functionality.

Support More Complex Bank Reconciliation Matching Rules

Users can define more complex matching rules between multiple bank statement lines and multiple bank account transactions. Automatic bank reconciliation matching will be done for the following scenarios:

1: N – One bank statement line matches with multiple bank transactions

N:1 – Multiple bank statement lines match with one bank transaction

M: N – Multiple bank statement lines match with multiple bank transactions

Project Operations Taxes

The integration of Tax Calculation service with project operations invoice registers, approvals, and pools.

Expanded Coverage

Country coverage has expanded to LATAM countries of Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.

Regulatory Updates

Regulatory updates to comply with tax digitization requirements including e-invoicing and SAF-T for Denmark, e-reporting for France, and e-invoicing for Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.

Globalization Studio

Out-of-the-box localizations and continuous regulatory compliance are provided for 57 countries and regions in 73 languages, extended by partners. Globalization Studio services automate complex tax scenarios and allow partners and customers to easily extend localizations. As a result, customers run our solution in over 200 countries and regions.

In 2023 release wave 2, out-of-the-box country coverage expands even further by adding six LATAM countries, increasing tax automation and scalability, and continuing to address the regulatory tax digitization trend in multiple countries.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides capabilities for end-to-end processes that manufacturers, distributors, consumer product groups, and retailers can use to meet their supply chain needs.

Functionality includes product information management, planning, inventory, sales, and procurement to complex manufacturing, asset maintenance, warehousing, and transportation management.

The warehouse management solution provides rich and flexible functionality that can be combined and configured to support many warehouse layouts and operational scenarios.

Manufacturing and asset management features help companies gain agility, efficiency, and visibility in their manufacturing and maintenance operations while maximizing asset uptime and productivity.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 2023 Release Wave 2 Include

Increased Sales Process Agility

Compound charges, order classes, and advanced order holds increase the agility of the sales process, streamlining sales order entry, control, and the ability to easily handle orders with special requirements.

Export Controls

Enhanced export control capabilities help companies manage compliance with export restrictions.

Prospect Management

Companies with sales processes spanning Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management will enjoy the increased benefit of prospect management.

Purchase Orders and Purchase Requisitions Approvals

New approval functionality for POs and purchase requisitions expands the approval process and increases procurement process agility.

Inventory Accounting

Manufacturers needing to comply with multiple inventory accounting practices across multiple currencies will benefit from enhancements being made to the Global Inventory Accounting add-in.

Material Picking Enhancements

Material picking and handling last-minute manufacturing changes help to increase agility on the shop floor.

Warehouse Operations Enhancements

Increased efficiency of warehouse operations driven by optimization and automation of key processes including counting, customer returns, product receipts, order re-waving.

Interfaces and Streamlined Processes

New interfaces and streamlined processes support companies in deploying Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management using only the warehouse management capabilities. These enhancements support companies using third-party ERP or order management systems.

Product Information Management

Product information management enables companies to centrally manage information about products and product variants throughout their entire lifecycle. This information includes attributes, configurations, documentation, and identifiers needed in supporting critical business processes.

Planning Optimization

Planning optimization provides significantly improved performance and scalability, enabling near real-time insight into requirement changes. Introducing a next-generation intelligent demand planning capability powered by best-in-class forecasting algorithms and models offers immersive user experiences and effective reports and analytics.

Training and Product Proficiency

Providing a rich set of capabilities for supporting company business processes, means that end users require initial training and gain an advanced e product experience level before becoming proficient. Using innovative in-product, generative AI-based contextual help allows users to get up to speed quickly.

Finance and Operations Cross-App Capabilities

Finance and operations cross-app capabilities apply to all finance and operations apps, including Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, and Project Operations.

Platform and services supporting finance and operations apps are being enhanced with new capabilities enabling companies to accelerate their digital transformation. As enhancements are added, frequent updates are delivered to help customers stay current in a consistent, predictable, and seamless manner. Remember, the key drivers for the new core capabilities are increasing productivity and increasing the return on your ERP investment.

One Dynamics One Platform

Virtual table users accessing finance and operations data can expect to experience better performance, automation, and less management, making it an alternative solution for accessing finance and operations data on Power Platform with less effort. This is a big step forward in realizing a long-standing customer promise of “One Dynamics One Platform”.

Customers using export to Data Lake will have an opportunity to transition to Synapse Link for Dataverse, which will bring an integrated experience with the ability to choose data from all Dynamics 365 apps. For AX 2012 or AX 2009 customers planning an upgrade to cloud-based finance and operations, you’ll easily be able to query finance and operations data using Azure Synapse Analytics. You can preserve your existing data integration pipelines by accessing finance and operations data in the lake in table form, as Synapse Link for Dataverse supports finance and operations tables and entities.

Notes for Application Administrators

Features Enabled Automatically

Features impacting users should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities. 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.

You can find the applicable release plan in each of the article links provided at the beginning of this post.