Community Summit 2024: Dynamics 365 Business Central at an inflection point

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central product team showed off the latest brand new capabilities to users and professionals at Community Summit 2024, including some new feature sets in areas like reporting and sustainability, along with touches of AI and injections of Power Platform that continue to expand throughout the product. 

“We are at an inflection point in ERP,” Microsoft VP Mike Morton told the audience at the Business Central keynote address. “We're just beginning this AI era. So it's a very exciting time to be part of this community and be part of a new generation of ERP and how it gets done,” he added 

The BC team offered up a series of demos showing of the latest product direction including cross-environment transactions, project (formerly “job”) multi-customer invoicing, the Sustainability module, subscription billing, and new Power BI reports that are shipping next month. 

The Sustainability module provides the basic reporting, data entry, and role centers that organizations can use to capture relevant data for their needs, said Microsoft principal program manager Brian Nielsen. The fundamentals of data input will be through journals, he explained, and they are organized depending on scope. The concept of reporting on sustainability data is similar to the journal templates and chart of accounts that BC already provides, he explained. An organization will need to define the scope they need to monitor and their own reporting needs.