Community Summit: Dynamics 365 Business Central leaders show off multi-company and reporting advances

Microsoft showed Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV users the latest usability and functional updates at last week’s Community Summit 2023, including new features designed to improve in-app reporting and financial management.

Microsoft leaders did not offer any new metrics on Business Central’s growth at the event, citing 105% year-over-year customer growth for customers that have more than 100 paid users.

Copilot “really is a game changer,” Microsoft VP for Business Central Mike Morton told the audience, not just for BC but for Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. But Microsoft devoted more time at the Summit keynote to matters like performance, security, business continuity and disaster recovery, and core financial and reporting updates than they did to AI. “We’ve invested in a big way in terms of availability,” Morton said, noting the redundancy that customers now get within a region but across physical locations.

Microsoft program managers Søren Friis Alexandersen and Kenny Nybo Pontoppidan demonstrated multi-company improvements, new reporting capabilities, and telemetry enhancements to the NAV and Business Central audience.

The new multi-company capabilities in Business Central, which received an enthusiastic round of applause, are designed to support businesses with separate environments in multiple countries that need to trade between each other. The separate environments may have their own localizations, regulatory and tax rules, e-invoicing settings, and more. The enhancements allow them to synchronize master data, support sales from headquarters to a subsidiary, and even support transactions between companies in different organizations with the proper setup. It is designed with an inbox/outbox approach. For example, an HQ could post a transaction that goes to their outbox. An appropriate user will see that transaction in a role center and can trigger it to send to the other company. The intercompany partner receives and accepts the transaction via their inbox.

Nybo Pontoppidan presented the Report Explorer, calling it, “the beginning of something more to come.” He noted that while BC already has a lot of standard reports, many have both an outdated look and limited interactive value. The new analysis mode for report building allows users to drag fields into a new analysis report interface where they can select fields for rows and columns, do grouping, and set other details in a way that is much closer to Excel. He demonstrated an Aged Accounts by Quarter report with a pivot directly within Business Central.