Dan's Corner on Power Platform and D365

Microsoft has recently released two Copilot applications to work with Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain. These solutions are still in preview, so it should only be uses in sandbox environments to evaluate and learn how they will work with your organization. Prior to installing it is important to make sure your environment meets the requirements. Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain requires the latest hotfix on Dynamics 365 Finance version 10.0.34 (10.0.1591.107) and version 10.0.35 (10.0.1627.70) and later. In addition, the solutions rely on the Power Platform and Dataverse, so it is important to have the environments connected and user security set appropriately. For more details on the prerequisites and the installation instructions you can follow the Microsoft installation documents. Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Let's look at what these two copilots provide to users Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance C...

We have been hearing a lot about Artificial Intelligence recently, and Microsoft is investing very heavily in brining AI to many of the solutions we use on a regular basis.  In many solutions the AI solution is known at Copilot.   Copilot in Power BI Desktop is currently available in preview for you to start testing.  After playing with it a little, I would have to say it is a nice tool, but I will caution you that you need to be careful.  It is simply going to give you some suggestions on creating new measures, but if you do not understand DAX, you may not select the correct version. So how do you get started?   1. First you need to be on a current release of Power BI Desktop (at least after May 2923) 2. The feature is still in Preview, so it is necessary to enable the preview feature.  File - Options and Settings - Options and enable Quick measure suggestions 3.  To use Copilot, you select to add a Quick Measure (this can be selected on the...

Microsoft recently released a new reporting / analytic solution to public preview.  The solution is Business Performance Analytics.  They have been talking about this solution for some time, so it is great to finally be able to get our hands on the solution. To get the directions to install the preview simply go to Microsoft docs . One thing to note is the solution requires a Tier-2 environment and Dynamics 365 Finance version 10.0.35 and PU 59 or later.  As with many of the recent solutions from Microsoft, this solution is built on the Power Platform as a model driven application.   The solution also includes embedded Power BI.  Since there is some good documentation on the installation steps, I will not go through it in my article.  I will take a look at what the solution provides at this point. As you can see from the screen shot, this solution is very similar to the embedded Power BI that is currently inside of D365.  One of the differences is...

Have you ever wanted to put a website or a model-driven Power App in one of your existing Dynamics 365 Finance workspaces or forms?  You might already know you can create a new workspace with a website, but did you know you can add the website to an existing workspace? Here is an example of the Vendor invoice entry workspace with the Invoice Capture Power App embedded. Prior to using this feature, you need to turn on "Saved views support for workspaces" in feature management. Once this feature is enabled you can follow the following steps to add the Invoice Capture app or any model-driven Power App or website to an existing workspace. Open the vendor invoice entry workspace From Options - choose Personalize this page From personalize menu - select the 3 dots - and then Add an app Once that is selected (the screen goes gray) - click on the section header where you want to add the app (in my example I put it in Links) On the Add an app menu - choose Website Give it a name (my e...

I was recently working with a couple customers that have very large orders and they need to invoice when the order is booked and maybe issue a couple progress invoices while the order is processed.  There are a few ways this can be handled in D365.  Unfortunately, Microsoft disabled the prepayment tab on the sales order tab in version 10.0.14 .  There is currently an idea posted inside the Microsoft ideas portal to add a function to handle prepayments.   Hopefully Microsoft will address this issue in the near future.  However, I needed to find a solution for today, and using Project Accounting seems to give an acceptable solution for managing the progress payments.   The key to this approach is using the Customer Advance on the Project screen.  It is also important to make sure you have setup the proper liability account for the prepayment invoice.  This is done in Project - Setup - Posting - Ledger Posting Setup. To see how this works in act...

As a solution architect, prospects and clients often ask me for ways to improve their Accounts Payable process.  They receive hundreds of invoices every month, and it can take considerable amount of time to enter all of the detail as well as attaching the invoice for reference during the approval process.  This is an area where we have often needed to bring in an ISV solution, but that could cause other issues.  Microsoft has been doing considerable work around automation for AP and they recently released a public preview of their Invoice Capture solution. I have had the opportunity to set this up in one of my test environments so I could get an idea of what they have to offer.  As we would expect, the Invoice Capture solution is built on the Power Platform.  It uses a model driven Power App along with Power Automate Flows to integrate with Dynamics 365 Finance.  However, since it is a solution, they have done much of the work for you, including creating th...