DynamicsCon Live 2024: Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM roadmap: Features, deprecations, and update rules

Microsoft continues to move forward with its twice-yearly release wave plans for its business applications lineup, and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management customers must follow those plans carefully as they roll out during the four planned service updates per year. Microsoft representatives shared updates with DynamicsCon Live 2024 attendees on some of the key changes coming in the latest release wave and the upcoming service update periods that will bring both new features and deprecations that some customers will need to plan for.

Dynamics 365 Finance: Business Performance, invoice, and more

Microsoft showed off 50 new and improved features of D365 Finance, coming in 2024 release wave 1 at the event. The area of Business Performance Planning, or BPP, refers to features of financial planning and analytics in the product that aim to improve data management and visualization. Those reports and dashboards can be published via Power BI for reporting with granular controls for who gets access to what information. 

BPP now comes with reports and templates out of the box that users can use or modify when they want to upload data from a range of sources including accounting and other enterprise systems or even spreadsheets. 

“Individual users … can do what-if analysis in those reports,” explained Microsoft principal program manager Rachel Profitt in a roadmap session at the event. “The out of the box reports that we have provided so far with business performance analytics include a balance sheet, a budgets versus actual financial performance, GL dimension details, GL transaction details and profit and loss statements.”

Security remains a key element of deploying reports, and the BPP capabilities include steps that allow administrators to secure reports and data so they can be shared with the right users and groups.

Among the dozens of feature enhancements coming Finance in this release wave, Profitt discussed the new vendor invoice automation workspace, which provides a new way of finding and managing the processing of all types of invoices. Within the workspace, AP teams can see approval status, track any failed items, and understand the formats coming in. Other invoice automation improvements include the ability to use custom models for invoice recognition, the ability to add a PO’s requester and orderer as the invoice’s approver, and improved document type settings for transferred invoice documents from invoice capture.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: Features, deprecations, and service update changes

Within Microsoft’s broader cadence of two release waves per year, the D365 Supply Chain Management team has recently changed their update model to include four updates per year for their cloud customers, and they can only pause one update, meaning they must take the subsequent one.