Dynamics 365 Business Central – Finance and Sales
Business Central is a business management solution for small and mid-sized organizations that automates and streamlines business processes and helps you manage your business. Highly adaptable and rich with features, Business Central enables companies to manage their business, including finance, manufacturing, sales, shipping, project management, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that is relevant to the region of operation, and that is customized to support even highly specialized industries.
Business Functionalities
- Finance
- Sales
- Purchasing
- Inventory
- Project Management
- Fixed Assets Overview
- Relationship Management
- Human Resources
- Production Planning
- Assembly Management
- Manufacturing
- Warehouse Management
- Service Management
- General Business Functionality
- Local Functionality
Today we are going to focus on Finance & Sales features.
1. FINANCE
Business Central includes a standard configuration of most financial processes, but you can change the configuration to suit your business. The default configuration includes a chart of accounts and standard posting groups that make the process of assigning default general ledger posting accounts to customers, vendors, and items more efficient.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
To: |
See: |
| Apply incoming payments, reconcile bank accounts during payment application, and collect outstanding balances. | Managing Receivables |
| Make payments, apply outgoing payments, and work with checks. | Setting Up BankinManaging Payables |
| Make your customers submit payment before you ship to them, or submit payment to your vendors before they ship to you. | Invoicing Prepayments |
| Reconcile bank accounts and transfer funds between bank accounts. | Reconciling Bank Accounts |
| Set up intercompany partners and process transactions, manually or automatically, between legal entities within the same company. | Managing Intercompany Transactions |
| Analyze the costs of running your business by allocating actual and budgeted costs of operations, departments, products, and projects to cost centres. | Accounting for Costs |
| Manage inventory and manufacturing costs, report costs, and reconcile costs with the general ledger. | Managing Inventory Costs |
| Understand the general ledger and the chart of accounts. | Understanding the General Ledger and the COA |
| Combine general ledger entries from multiple companies in one virtual consolidated company for financial analysis. | Consolidating Financial Data from Multiple Companies |
| Add dimensions for richer business intelligence. | Working with Dimensions |
| Create G/L budgets to forecast different financial activities and assign dimensions for business intelligence purposes. | Create G/L Budgets |
| Record income or expenses directly in the general ledger without posting dedicated business documents. | Post Transactions Directly to the General Ledger |
| Post reversing entries to undo value postings in the general journal or quantity postings on purchase and sales documents. | Reverse Journal Postings and Undo Receipts/Shipments |
| Allocate an entry in a general journal to several different accounts when you post the journal. | Allocate Costs and Income |
| Assign extra costs, such as freight and physical handling that you incur during trade, to the involved items so that the cost is reflected in inventory valuation. | Use Item Charges to Account for Additional Trade Costs |
| Post employees’ personal expenses for business-related activities and reimburse employees by making payment to their bank account. | Record and Reimburse Employees’ Expenses |
| Recognize revenues and expenses in other periods than when the transactions were posted. | Defer Revenues and Expenses |
| Learn about the available options to automate sending subscription invoices to your customers and register recurring revenue. | Recurring (subscription) Revenue |
| Learn how to use additional currencies and update currency exchange rates automatically. | Update Currency Exchange Rates |
| Import salary transactions from your payroll provider into the general ledger. | Import Payroll Transactions |
| Use functions to calculate value-added tax (VAT) on sales and purchase transactions so that you can report the amounts to the tax authorities. | Work with VAT on Sales and Purchases |
| Prepare a report that lists VAT from sales and submit the report to tax authorities in the EU. | Report VAT to Tax Authorities |
| Manually convert service contracts to change their VAT rate. | Convert Service Contracts that Include VAT Amounts |
| Monitor the flow of cash in and out of your business. | Analysing Cash Flows in Your Company |
| Follow and end-to-end procedure on using use account schedules to make cash flow forecasts. | Walkthrough: Making Cash Flow Forecasts by Using Account Schedules |
| Work with financial statements and overviews in Excel. | Analysing Financial Statements in Excel |
| Learn how to use the Accountant Role Centre, invite an external accountant, and use the Company Hub to manage accounts for multiple clients. | Accountant Experiences in Business Central |
2. SALES
You create a sales invoice or sales order to record your agreement with a customer to sell certain products on certain delivery and payment terms. You must use sales orders if your sales process requires that you can ship parts of an order quantity, for example, because the full quantity is not available at once. If you sell items by delivering directly from your vendor to your customer, as a drop shipment, then you must also use sales orders. In all other aspects, sales orders work the same way as sales invoices. With sales orders, you can also use the Order Promising functionality to communicate certain delivery dates to your customers.
You can negotiate with the customer by first creating a sales quote, which you can convert to a sales invoice or sales order when you agree on the sale. After the customer has confirmed the agreement, you can send an order confirmation to record your obligation to deliver the products as agreed. You can easily correct or cancel a posted sales invoice before it is paid. This is useful if you want to correct a typing mistake or if the customer requests a change early in the order process. If the posted sales invoice is paid, then you must create a sales credit memo or a sales return order to reverse the sale.
Good sales and marketing practices are all about how to make the best decisions at the right time. Marketing functionality in Business Central provides precise and timely overview of your contact information so that you can serve your prospective customers more efficiently and increase customer satisfaction.
In business environments where the customer must pay before products are delivered, such as in retail, you must wait for the receipt of payment before you deliver the products. In most cases, you process incoming payments some weeks after delivery by applying the payments to their related posted, unpaid sales invoices.
Sales documents can be sent as PDF files attached to email. The email body will contain an extract of the sales document, such as products, total amount, and a link to the PayPal site.
For all sales processes, you can incorporate an approval workflow, for example, to require that large sales to certain customers are approved by the accounting manager.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
To: |
See: |
| Create a customer card for each customer that you sell to. | Register New Customers |
| Create a sales quote where you offer products on negotiable terms before converting the quote to a sales invoice. | Make Sales Quotes |
| Create a sales invoice to record your agreement with a customer to sell products on certain delivery and payment terms. | Invoice Sales |
| Process a sales order that involves partial shipping or drop shipment. | Sell Products |
| Understand what happens when you post sales documents. | Posting Sales |
| Prepare to pick items for shipment. | Print the Picking List |
| Set up standard sales or purchase lines that you can quickly insert on documents, for example, for recurring replenishment orders. | Create Recurring Sales and Purchase Lines |
| Link a sales order to a purchase order to sell a drop-shipment item that will be delivered directly from your vendor to your customer. | Make Drop Shipments |
| Have a catalogue item shipped from a vendor to your warehouse so that you can ship the item on to your customer. | Create Special Orders |
| Perform an action on an unpaid posted sales invoice to automatically create a credit memo and either cancel the sales invoice or recreate it so you can make corrections. | Correct or Cancel Unpaid Sales Invoices |
| Create a sales credit memo to revert a specific posted sales invoice to reflect which products the customer returns and which payment amount you will refund. | Process Sales Returns or Cancellations |
| Manage your customer’s commitment to purchase large quantities delivered in several shipments over time. | Work with Blanket Sales Orders |
| Sell assembly items that are not currently available by creating a linked assembly order to supply the full or partial sales order quantity. | Sell Items Assembled to Order |
| Invoice a customer once for multiple shipments by combining the shipments on one invoice. | Combine Shipments on a Single Invoice |
| Inform your customers of order delivery dates by calculating either the capable-to-promise date or the available-to-promise date. | Calculate Order Promising Dates |
| Register your estimates for future sales, specified by item and by period, to function mainly as input to production planning. | Create a Forecast |
| Resolve confusion when two or more records exist for the same customer. | Merge Duplicate Records |