#dynamicsbusinesscentral

How can a CFO leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central capabilities?

The role of Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is not just financial management; everything in an organization impacts the CFO’s commitment to an organization. There is no doubt that the primary job responsibility is to optimize a company’s financial performance and financial sustainability. While these continue to be the CFO’s mission-critical responsibility, the CFO needs to manage risks, build innovative strategies, and incorporate the right technology and automation to transform the business, aside from their financial responsibilities. CFOs face many evolving challenges that include increased regulatory scrutiny, adapting to constant technology transformation, meeting ever-evolving customer expectations, and identifying business issues.

Why CFOs need a Digital Technology Tool?

With more responsibilities and challenges, the need for investing in the right digital technology becomes vital in managing the complexity involved. Digital technology helps CFOs better manage, analyze, and present data that yields the most significant business value. The right technology presents the finance leaders with an opportunity to accelerate decision-making. Many companies have implemented ERP to put their struggles away. Here is a list of benefits that prove why having an ERP makes the CFO work easy.

Top 5 ERP Benefits that Makes CFO’s Life easy

Unified View of Enterprise Data: An ERP system helps you get a single, unified view of the financial data, a real-time view of the enterprise’s core business processes. It helps to collect, process, and analyze data. With this, the CFO can read multiple data variables to make quicker, data-driven decisions.

Visibility and Tracking: Having an ERP system enables you to get complete visibility throughout your organization. It helps a CFO view whether the organization is performing based on the KPIs, looking at the results, identifying the issues, and immediately taking corrective measures.

Predictive Analytics: The right ERP powered with a robust analytics tool can enable the CFO to leverage data and predictive analytics to better read the organizational trends and plan.

Compliance Ready: ERP systems come with a high-level toolset that helps companies manage compliance and finance-related reporting. The CFO can use the reporting interface available within an ERP to investigate and remediate regulatory compliance deficiencies across the business processes promptly.

Cost optimization: One of the major concerns for a CFO is cost optimization. A cloud-based ERP system enables the CFO to cut down excessive investments of the legacy IT infrastructure and any additional investment required for hardware and software installation in the future.

Dynamics 365 Business central – the best ERP solution

Business Central is an intuitive and scalable ERP solution by Microsoft that connects operations across your small or medium-sized business. It is a part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, and it shares the same codebase as NAV. With Business Central, an organization will make more informed decisions as it connects data across accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, and operations while streamlining your processes and improving your customer interactions. Business Central is packed with rich capabilities that make it the best ERP solution that is available in the market. Some of the significant advantages that Business Central brings are –

Cloud: Adopt new business models faster with flexible deployment, reliability, and security.

Integration: Connect people, processes, and insights to make better decisions faster with embedded guidance and dashboards.

Visibility: Accelerate financial close, improve forecasting, and get real-time performance metrics.

Connected service: Manage the entire sales process from within Microsoft Outlook to deliver better outcomes with connected service operations.

Planning: Ensure successful project execution with planning, resourcing, tracking, costing, billing, accounting, and real-time intelligence.

Inventory: Adapt to changing business models with visibility across purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and warehouses.

How Can CFOs Leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Capabilities?

Business Central can enable a CFO to be equipped with connected data from reports, charts, and Microsoft Power BI dashboards across finance and accounting, sales, purchasing, and inventory to be proactive about the organization’s financial health. To put it clearly, we have come up with a list of ways Business Central can help CFOs.

Control Your Financial Data: By having Business Central in your organization, as a CFO, you can manage your cash flow, bank reconciliations, fixed assets, budgeting, and project costing while shortening cycle times with the late payment–prediction extension.

Automate Your Business Processes: All theDynamics 365 solutions are connected with the Power Platform. With that, you will be able to create workflows that hook together systems in a way that creates a seamless experience.

Monitor Entire Financial Performance: Business Central uses built-in reports, Excel, or Microsoft Power BI and unlimited data dimensions to give you real-time cash flow, help you identify financial patterns, analyze trends, and improve business planning. You can connect reports, charts, and Power BI data across teams to get accurate insights and make financial decisions.

Collaborate With Your Team: A finance team has to be more collaborative than any other team in an organization as they deal with numerous documents and reports across the organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, with Microsoft 365 and Teams integrations, a CFO can seamlessly collaborate within their team/ other team/ vendors in no time.

Power up Your Reporting with AI: Power BIiss one of Microsoft’s reporting tools that can be used across all different systems. With Power BI in your Business Central system, you will be able to quickly get access to live reporting, real-time insights and act upon those promptly. Several powerful AI pieces built into Business Central can help you increase productivity by speeding up repetitive tasks and improving cash flow by helping with inventory.

Business Central Dimensions: ‘Dimensions’ is a powerful Business Central tool that enables CFO to get their hands on detailed reporting with great depth and speed. Unlike other methods, instead of having hundreds of G/L codes, you can use ”Cost Centre” and ”Department”/ any other as Dimensions in Business Central.

Quickly Expand into Global Markets: You will have the ability to support multiple currencies easily, exchange rates, consolidations, intercompany transactions, and localized tax regulations with Business central capabilities.

Accelerate Financial Closing: Financial close and reporting is quite a nightmare with the volume of data in an organization. Business Central helps you reduce month- and year-end closing times with connected general ledger, accounts receivable, payables, and fixed assets data. You can also streamline approval workflows using Power Automate in Business Central.

Find the Right Way to Leverage Business Central Capabilities for Your Organization

What we have seen in this blog is just a glimpse of what Business Central can benefit a CFO in an organization. But, there are a lot more features and capabilities of Business Central that can help transform your business.

In the wake of this information conundrum, the big question that organizations are asking is “why?” If both Microsoft solutions serve the same purpose as an ERP, why upgrade to Business Central from Dynamics 365 GP? What does Business Central offer that would convince someone to make the switch? In this blog, we are attempting to unravel the puzzle, put all the pieces in the right place, and find the answer for all these questions.

Defining Microsoft Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business central

Microsoft Dynamics GP is an on-premise Business Management solution, which enables you get better and efficient control over your financials, inventory, and operations. It is a flexible, configurable, and quick business management solution that can handle the management of your financial, accounting, inventory, operations, sales, service, HR, payroll, BI, and reporting.

On the other hand, while Dynamics 365 Business Central is also a business management solution, here are the differentiators. It has a rich and modern user experience, more flexibility to be deployed either in cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid combination. So, the major difference is that Business Central is more of a cloud-based solution while GP is an on-premise solution.

Why upgrade to Business Central?

Ease of Access: Since your business management solution is cloud-based, you and your team can access the solution from anywhere at any time using any device. This will ensure better collaboration between your team and improve the overall productivity of your business.

Security and Disaster recovery: Moving to the cloud-based management solution can ensure security as it can enable better disaster recovery plans. Also, it can expand the tools you use, reduce limitations, and adapt to the growth of your business.

Automatic updates: The Business central subscription service comes with automatic updates without incurring any additional cost. The updates are not only automatic, but it is quicker compared to the Dynamics GP updates.

Cost-effective solution: Dynamics GP being an on-premise solution can cost you more in terms of time and money, that is spent on servicing, maintaining, upgrading it whenever necessary, and so on. Business Central comes as a subscription-based service to make sure that it can help you reduce the exceeding cost without compromising on the solution.

Integrated CRM: Unlike the Dynamics GP that requires you to integrate Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to have CRM capabilities, Dynamics 365 Business Central comes with an integrated CRM.

Machine Learning and Business intelligence: Dynamics 365 Business Central provides you access to new technologies and integrations, including Machine Learning and Business intelligence, which is one step ahead compared to Dynamics GP.

DemandDynamics’ Business Central Implementation Services:

We have seen what Dynamics 365 Business Central is, how it can benefit you and its significant advantages as a cloud-based management solution. But, if you still need help in deciding which could be the best solution for your business, you can reach out to us. 

You have to juggle with a multitude of challenges including deadlines, tracking performances, and pivoting on your heels to fight off pandemics. This is where a reliable management tool comes in handy. Microsoft's Business Central provides a unified dashboard and an eagle’s eye view of your operations and processes. As a highly comprehensive business management tool, it streamlines the process and helps you make decisions faster.

Dynamics 365 Business Central Best Practices To Maximize your ROI

D365 Business Central is an all-rounder management tool that takes care of your invoices, purchases, approvals, and etc. With both on-premise and cloud support, it fits your business model like a glove. With effective Business Central practices and a little change in old habits, you can have the Business Central engine humming nicely in rhythm.

Avoiding the Lock

D365 Business Central often locks the program when it requires exclusive access to a data table or sheet. This makes accessing the tool for some other resource, a prolonging and time-consuming task.

Running Tasks in Background

Scheduling jobs and long-running reports is a great way to do multitasking. You can always enable background posting instead of reservations and item tracking using serial numbers.

Number Series with gaps

Number series without gaps can cause locking issues in Business Central. And, not all the records created are financial transactions, requiring sequential serialization. So, it's best not to use gapless number series where it's not needed.

Copy company operation

Perform Copy company operation after your work hours to maximize productivity as it's not required to be running along while Business transactions are being applied.

Enhance your Performance

It is recommended to use links instead of document attachments to access files, and to use Keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys for faster data entries. These practices dramatically improve your productivity in the workplace.

Block inactive entities

Blocking inactive entities like inactive customers, vendors, and items from Sales improves your filter and makes searching objects faster and easier.

Short and Simple DON'Ts you should follow:

Don't adjust cost items with high data entry frequency.

Don't run job queues frequently on Business Central.

Don't run Copy company operations in business hours.

Don't create a 'change' log for everything you edit.

Don't update item costs on automatic settings in case you have a high number of entries.

Implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central to get productive results

D365 Business Central is a fully equipped business management tool that is the perfect productivity booster for all your problems. Adopting these practices will undoubtedly help you boost your team's productivity, so your brand enjoys the fruits of all effort you put in with ease.

Image Source: Microsoft Dynamics