What's New in Budgeting in the New Microsoft Dynamics AX

Attending the Dynamics Technical Conference is all worth the investment. You not only see the new capabilities but also the ability to interact closely with the experts from Microsoft who built the product.

I am personally interested in budgeting planning and control as it forms a strong analytics base for any organization in the world. And budget planning is not limited to only users who use Microsoft Dynamics AX; it can be used as an independent workload along with any ERP or customers on other versions of Dynamics AX.

Microsoft Dynamics AX introduces several key improvements to budgeting functionality. Let's explore those in more detail.

Excel Integration

For any budgeting system to be successful in user adoption, integration with Excel is crucial. Enhancements in Excel integration provide a huge improvements in user experience and productivity of people involved in the budgeting process. Here are some specific benefits of the updated approach: 

• Layouts make Excel templates useful year after year. In other words, you do not have to build all the templates every year and it reduces the need for testing prior to every budget cycle.
• Templates eliminate chances of user error, and improvements in the process of designing the template also means less chances for the errors. 
• Calculated columns instead of matrix fields. This will make Excel templates much faster as aggregated data is pulled into Excel than all the individual rows.
• Option to choose from alternate templates in Excel. Users have option to define multiple excel templates for given budget planning process and stage. 

Productivity Improvements for Budgeting in AX

Budgeting is now a more integral element of financial management in Dynamics AX. ...