From the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central blogs: NumberSequence; Prepayment amounts: Create a dashboard; Word invoice formats;

In this week’s Dynamics 365 Business Central blog roundup:

• The power of NumberSequence
• How to adjust prepayment amounts after invoice posting
• How to create your first Business Central dashboard in Power BI
• How to customize Word invoice formats

Dynamics 365 Business Central: The power of NumberSequence

Writing on his blog, Stefano Demiliani stated that although assigning number series to documents seems pretty simple, it can be complicated to set up in an ERP system (where concurrency is always present).

Demiliani wrote that number series in D365BC are a source of locking when you have lots of concurrency. He stated that number series are specially designed for scenarios where you have to use a continuous numbering system on transactional records, for example on invoices.

The disadvantage of using continuous numbers is that when a number is requested by a transaction, the number series line table in the database is locked until the transaction is completed, he explained:

The number series management in Dynamics 365 Business Central is now moved to the new Business Foundation layer, a new horizontal layer created to modularize the application that provides a standard set of capabilities that serve as a foundation for developing business apps.

Demiliani stated that D365BC also supports number sequences. He noted that in AL, you can create and manage number sequences that generate numeric identifiers for data and records. He explained that to create and manage number sequences in AL, you can use the NumberSequence data type.

Demiliani wrote that the power of a numbersequence is its speed, especially when you need to reserve a range of numbers.

How to adjust prepayment amounts after invoice posting in Business Central

Writing on the Dynamics 365 community blog, Jun Wang stated that when you're managing finances in Business Central, you sometimes might have to adjust prepayment amounts on sales or purchase orders after an invoice has been posted.