Introduction: Businesses in the digital age depend on cloud platforms and ERP systems integrating seamlessly. Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) and azure integration is one such potent combination. Numerous advantages, such as improved scalability, agility, and data-driven decision-making capabilities, are made possible by this integration. The step-by-step instructions for connecting Azure with Dynamics 365 F&O will be provided in this blog. Steps to achieve the goal: Step 1: Setting up Azure Services a. Create an Azure account: Sign up for an Azure account if you don’t have one already. b. Provision Azure resources: Set up the required Azure resources such as virtual machines, databases, storage accounts, and other services according to your needs. Below are few links to create azure account. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/433827/how-to-get-an-azure-account-without-credit-card https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/students Step 2: Configure Azure Active Directory (AAD) a. Click on New on the App Registration page. Set the name and set the type like below screenshots. b. Once you click on Ok button you would get notification like below. c. Now go to API Permission and click on Add permission d. Select Dynamics ERP e. Select Delegated Permission f. Select all permission and then click on Add Permission g. After selecting this permission again add permission on the screen this time selected Application Permission. h. Now we have to generate client secret value. Just select Certificates and secret. i. You will see the below screen where you can generate a new client secret j. Once you click on new you will see below screen where you can set the date to which this secret key would be valid. Max validity is 2 years. k. This is how the secret value would look like just copy Value. l. Now copy the Directory ID and Application ID Step 3: Connect Azure Services to F&O a. Go to Finance and Operations and serach globally Azure Active Directory/Microsoft Entra ID b. And then click on New and add your client id over here and set User ID as Admin. Please Note you should have the admin access right if not this won’t work. Conclusion: Azure integration with Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations empowers businesses to streamline processes, unlock data insights, and achieve operational excellence. Next blog would be how to connect standard API on postman and perform get and post function. Stay tuned! We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Introduction: The 2024 Wave 1 release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces a new feature called Page Scripting. This tool is designed to enhance User Acceptance Testing (UAT) by allowing users to record and replay their actions within the Business Central. This capability streamlines the UAT process by automating repetitive tasks and ensuring consistency across tests. Capabilities and Usage: The Page Scripting tool, records user interactions such as opening pages, entering data, and navigating through the system. These interactions can be saved and replayed, making it easier to validate the system’s behavior under various conditions. The tool records actions in a YAML file format, which can be shared and reused, promoting collaboration and efficiency. Let’s get started with how page scripting works: – Setup: To use the Page Scripting tool, users must have specific permission sets assigned. – Once these permissions are in place, users can access the tool by navigating to Settings and selecting the Page Scripting (Preview) action. The tool pane appears on the right side of the screen, allowing users to start a new recording or open an existing one. – When the user clicks on Page Scripting action, following screen opens up: – In that, user have an option to start a new recording or open existing recording. – User can start a recording by clicking on “New recording” or “Start new” button. – When user clicks on ” Start New/New recording” following page displays: – When new recording is started it captures every user action and input, including interactions with custom or third-party extensions. Users can track their steps, such as opening the Customer List page, selecting a customer record, and entering new sales prices. During the recording, users can delete the last recorded step if needed and can stop and resume recording as necessary. For Example: – Once all the steps are completed, user can stop the recording and save the file in YML format. – If the user wants to replay the recording, then simply user can click on open recordings, select the saved file and all the recorded script will appear on the right screen. – A recording can then be played, and all the recorded actions are executed in the web client. User will see an indicator if an action is succeeded or not as shown below: – User can Click on “Play” action, the system will automatically run the whole script and indicate (a green tick) if successful as shown in above image. Conclusion: In brief, the Page Scripting tool in D365 Business Central enables advanced customization, allowing users to optimize workflows, enhance user experience, and drive efficiency within the system. This tool offers valuable flexibility for businesses to tailor their operations to their unique needs and goals. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Client Requirement: Financial Reporting Year Change from Jan-Dec to Apr-March The last financial year is January2021 to December2022. Client has the requirement to change the year to April to March. The transition year needs to be from January 2023 to March 2024. In Microsoft D365 F&O, fiscal calendar can be of 15months, however, ledger calendar cannot be more than 12 months. Solution: 1.  Ledger calendar can be shorter than 12 months. 2. We need to do two-year end close process: a. For January 2023 to December2023 – 12 months b. For January 2024 to March 2024 – 3 months 3. Client can have regular financial year from April 2024 to March 2025 onwards. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Introduction  Dynamics 365 Project Operations (PO) is a project management application within the Dynamics 365 suite. It is designed to manage project-related tasks, schedules, resources, and budgets. While they may include some financial functionalities, they often lack the comprehensive financial management capabilities that dedicated financial platforms offer.  In this article, we will explore several functions that Project Operations (PO) cannot perform as effectively as financial platforms like QuickBooks (QB) or Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC).  We will also discuss how to bridge this gap and create a seamless integration between Project Operations and these financial platforms.  Let’s first look at what Project Operations falls short of and what financial platforms like QuickBooks or Dynamics 365 Business Central can offer.  Accounting Functionalities  General Ledger Management: Financial platforms provide robust general ledger management, allowing for detailed tracking and reporting of all financial transactions across the entire organization.  Accounts Payable and Receivable: They manage accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) efficiently, including invoicing, bill payments, and collections.  Tax Compliance: Financial platforms are equipped with tools to manage tax calculations, filings, and compliance with local and international tax regulations.  Financial Reporting: Financial platforms offer extensive reporting capabilities, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and customizable financial reports.  Audit Trails: Financial platforms maintain detailed audit trails of all financial transactions, which are crucial for internal audits and external regulatory audits. To leverage the Project Management features of Project Operations and the above-discussed features of financial platforms, businesses often choose to integrate both systems.  Integration Approach  Custom integration offers the utmost flexibility when connecting Project Operations with QuickBooks or Business Central. Several key considerations and entities are important to ensure a seamless integration: Data Mapping:  Tables: Identifying the key entities (Tables) such as projects, expenses, invoices, customers, vendors, contacts, and accounts that need to be synchronized between project operations and financial platforms.  Mapping: Map the fields and attributes of these entities between the two systems to ensure accurate data transfer and synchronization.  Tip: The best practice is to create mapping Excel for maintaining the table and column mappings between the systems.   Chart of Accounts (COA):  Chart of Accounts: Proper alignment between the chart of accounts in Project Operations and the financial platforms is necessary to facilitate accurate financial reporting and reconciliation.  Tip: Creating custom tables for your Chart of Accounts (COAs) and designating the financial systems as the source of truth for COAs is recommended. This approach offers flexibility to associate COAs with expenses, materials, roles, etc.  API Integration:  API Access: Check if the financial platforms offer APIs for integration.  Integration Points: Determine the integration points where data will be exchanged between the two systems, such as project creation, expense tracking, invoice generation, and payment reconciliation.  Data Flow:  Data Direction: Define the direction of data flow between Project Operations and financial platforms, ensuring consistency and integrity of data. The source and the target systems should be defined.  Real-Time Sync: Decide whether data synchronization will occur in real-time or through scheduled batch processes to meet business requirements. Currency:  Currency Conversion: Consider currency conversion requirements when dealing with contracts or transactions in multiple currencies.  Error Handling and Logging:  Error Handling: Implement mechanisms to handle data validation errors, inconsistencies, and exceptions during data transfer between systems.  Logging: Maintain logs of integration activities and errors for troubleshooting, audit trails, and compliance purposes.  Security:  Authentication: Implement secure authentication mechanisms to ensure data privacy and integrity during data exchange between systems.  Access Control: Define roles and permissions to restrict access to sensitive data and functionalities based on user roles and responsibilities.  Testing:  Testing: Set up a dedicated testing session to validate the integration setup, data mappings, and synchronization processes before deploying to production.  Integration process flow diagrams:  Create a process flow diagram for all the entities, for example below, is an integration process flow diagram for integrating Accounts, Contacts, Vendors from Project Operations to Quick Books.  In conclusion, while Project Operations is essential for managing the operational aspects of projects, it lacks the depth and breadth of functionalities offered by dedicated financial platforms.   Financial platforms provide accounting, regulatory compliance, advanced financial reporting, cash flow management, and more, which are crucial for the overall financial health and strategic planning of an organization.   Integrating these platforms with Project Operations tools leverages the strengths of both, ensuring efficient project management and robust financial oversight.  Here is our featured Customer Success Story:  Armexa, a leading US-based Industrial Cybersecurity Company, partnered with CloudFronts for Services Automation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Business Central.   We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Each time I attempt to export a solution from the source environment to another environment, I receive the following notification “isGlobal information provided True doesn’t match the value stored in DB False.” As a result, importing the solution into the destination environment becomes challenging for the individual. Whenever this kind of error appears, it has to do something with the fields on the form. This happens when you mistakenly make changes in the Production environment instead of making changes in the Developer environment or Vica Versa. Normally, the procedure is to make changes (e.g., Adding fields or any other customizations) in the Developer Environment and then export those changes to the Production Environment. Once those changes are imported into the Production environment, after cross-checking you realize many more fields are to be added. So we started to create and add fields in the Production environment instead of the Dev environment and that is how a mismatch of errors occurs with Fields and thus it gets difficult to export/import a solution in other environments.   To avoid this error, below is the blog you can refer to. Step 1: Log in to Power Apps using your credentials. Try to check both your source environment as well as Destination Environment. Step 2: In order to check the same, Go to Solutions and click on Default Solutions. Step 3: Go onto the table/Entity in which you are currently working. In my case, My table/Entity is Students. Step 4: Try to check the latest field which you have added. In my case, the name of the field is Courses Offered. Step 5: Click on Edit table column. Step 6: As you can see, my Destination environment (Production Environment) consists of the below field (Courses Offered), which is a Global option set Field. Step 7: Whereas my Source Environment (Developer Environment) has the same field name called “Courses Offered” which is an ‘Option Set field’. So, Delete the old option set field from this environment and try again to import this solution to the other environment. Step 8: The Difference between a Global option Set and a normal Option Set is that a global option set can be used globally for all entities/tables. But an option set field can only be used for that specific table. For eg If my entity/table name is “Students”. I can only use my option set for that specific entity. Step 9: In order to avoid the error, download that error log and try to open it via Excel and try to rectify all the fields from that Excel sheet via both environments. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Introduction By default, Business Central comes with 80GB of storage capacity across three sandbox environments and 1 Production Environment with an additional 3GB/Premium License, 2GB/Essential License, 1GB/Device license. These storage limits depending on your Business volume may run out if the data is not managed properly. Business Central now comes with a one stop view where you can manage (compress or delete) the entries to reduce storage usage – “Data Administration.” Pre-requisites Business Central Cloud/On Prem References Manage Storage by Deleting Documents or Compressing Data – Business Central | Microsoft Learn Configuration In Business Central, we’ve had the option to view the capacity usage from the Admin Center for a while now. Recently, they’ve also added a one stop view to check and manage the capacity usage – Data Administration from within Business Central itself. It can be found directly from the global search. The first time we open this we are greeted with an empty view, the data is loaded after we click on refresh to load the latest data. You can also configure it so that the data is loaded automatically in the background every so often. Here, we get the options for Data Clean up where we can delete data that isn’t required anymore. All of the below options, open a similar processing report where you can set filters which are used to delete the records as needed. The “Delete Detached Media” opens another page which I’ve discussed in depth in another blog. The second action groups hold actions which are meant to compress the ledger entries which can drastically reduce the storage space used. It is important to note that you can only compress entries which are older than 5 years by yourself which belong to Fiscal years that are closed and the entries themselves are closed (Open is set to false). You can configure the compression such that there is one entry per day, one entry per week, one entry per month, one entry per quarter, one entry per year or one entry for the period that is defined for compression. You also have the functionality to delete empty registers from here. If these individual actions seem to be overwhelming, Microsoft also provides for a Data Administration wizard which simplifies this process and allows you to manage the capacity via a wizard. Conclusion Thus, we saw how we can use the standard data administration tools to manage capacity of Business Central environment which can help the system run much more efficiently in terms of both performance and costs. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Microsoft Azure provides a cloud-based storage service called Azure Blob Storage. It is made up of Blobs, which are files kept as individual units and arranged like folders inside of Containers. Uses of Azure Blob Storage include: Steps to Create Azure Blob Storage STEP 1: Access the Azure Portal. Before proceeding, please confirm that you have a subscription. You will already have a FREE TRIAL membership for one month if you made a free account for the first time. Note: To learn more about how to obtain a free Azure account, click on Azure free account to create Free Trial Account. STEP 2: Setting up the “Storage Account” is the first and most important step in generating Blob Storage. Go into the Azure interface and select “Storage Accounts” to start the creation process. STEP 3: After clicking on Storge Account, the following screen will appear and then click on ‘+ New‘ to proceed further. STEP 4: After selecting New, you’ll be prompted to provide the following information on the following page: After you have entered all the information, click “Create.” Step 5: As seen in the sample below, an Azure Storage Account offers four different kinds of redundancy storage. For the demo, Geo-redundant Storage (GRS) will be used. Step 6: The next screen displays the deployment status when you click the “Create” button. Once deployment is finished, select “Go to resource.” Steps to Create Container STEP 1: Now, we have to create a new Container for that click on ‘+ Container ‘. Step 2: After selecting Add Container, a form requesting the container’s name (which must be unique) and access level will appear. We have chosen Blob Public Level access for the demo. Select “Create” to continue. Step 3: As a result, the blob storage has been effectively constructed, the container named as demo. Steps to Create Blob Step 1: Click on the container demo. Step 2: Under overview blob can be uploaded. The connection string can then be found by selecting the Storage Account and clicking on “Access keys.” These Connection Strings are used to communicate with the Storage Account. Conclusion Azure Blob Storage features integration with other Azure services, built-in security safeguards, and accessibility through a variety of tools and APIs. Azure Blob Storage is a solid and affordable solution for companies looking to store and manage unstructured data in the cloud thanks to these benefits, Azure Blob Storage is a powerful and flexible cloud storage option that offers several benefits. With many storage layers, it provides an enduring and scalable storage solution to satisfy the demands of diverse applications in terms of both cost and performance. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Introduction:  Many Businesses supports buying and selling items with different unit of measures. How to configure this in Business Central without showcasing your inventory in decimals. Let’s take an example: We will be buying the goods always in dozen whereas we can sell the items in PCS or CARTONS. Steps to achieve the goal: 2. Once the base unit of measure is set to PCS. Go to the Item Unit of Measure page by click on Related-> Unit of Measure. 3. By default PCS line would be set to 1. Add new line enter DOZEN and next right 6 which means 1 dozen has 6 PCS. 4. Next line add CARTONS and enter the qty per unit of measure as 72. which means 1 Cartons has 72 PCS in it. 5. Once the above lines have been set. Let’s pass Item journal where will be increase the inventory by dozen and sell the items in PCS and CARTONS. Ideally the inventory would be shown without any decimal value. 6. Below is the explanation how system would calculate into PCS as when you buy and sell in different items. 7. Purchase 100 dozen which is 600 PCS. This would be converted by Business Central itself. As we have defined 1 dozen as 6 PCS. 8. Sales 7 Cartons which is 702 PCS. This would be calculated by Business Central itself as per the Item Unit of Measure configuration where 1 cartons is 72 PCS. 9.Once the above transaction is posted the inventory would be whole value without any decimal. Conclusion:    Thus, we saw how we can use alternative Unit of measure in Business Central. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

Hello everyone, in this series of Blog, we are going to learn about the Advance warehouse management in D365.  In this blog we will learn about the basic setups required for the Advanced Warehouse Management process. These setups may vary depending on the business scenarios. As a continuing blog from https://www.cloudfronts.com/blog/advance-warehouse-management-item-creation-part-1/ and https://www.cloudfronts.com/blog/advance-warehouse-management-warehouses-and-locations-in-microsoft-d365-fo-part-2/, this is will be a part 3 of the series. The following are the setups that we need to configure:  Load:  The loads are useful when we group multiple shipments. So, you can consider load as an object that will be used to transport the material.  Path:   Warehouse Managementà SetupàLoadà Load Templates  I have created two containers here as a load. One is a 20 ft container, and the other is a 40 ft container.  Location Directives:  The Location Directive plays a significant role in inventory movement in advanced warehouses. Location Directives are the set of rules which define the pick and put, Counting, License Plate building, Status change and Quality check etc. for individual warehouse or group of warehouses.  For my current scenario, I will create location Directive for a Purchase Order transaction. In further blogs I will write about other transactions as well.  Select the Work Order type as Purchase Order.  Select the work type as “Put.” For the receipt location, I have mentioned the default receipt location in the warehouse master.  For default receipt location, Go to Warehouse managementà Setupà Warehouse à Warehouses.  Select the default receipt location from the Drop down.  Select the Warehouse for which this “Put” rule going to work. You can group the warehouse and select the warehouses to work similar to the rule.  In the lines I have mentioned the from Quantities and to quantities.  For location directive action, I am using “Only fixed locations for the product.” By this, the system will ask for the location while Putaway operation in the Purchase Order.  Now, the Loads and location directives are ready to use in Advance Warehouse process.  That’s it for this blog!!  How to use these Loads and location directives in actual transaction will be discussed going forward in the blog series.  Keep learning!!!!!  Next in the Blog series:  How to create Work Classes and Work Templates in Advance warehouse management in D365.  How to set up Worker in Advance warehouse management in D365. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com

While going through some sales documents, I noticed that the page that appears when I click on “Show Details” in the notification for low inventory has been updated! When we click on “Show Details” now, we’re taken to the page named “Item Availability Check”. Furthermore, it includes options to directly create a Purchase Order or a Purchase Invoice from this page.  If a Vendor is specified in the “Vendor No.” field of the Item Card, the Purchase Order/Invoice is automatically generated with that Vendor. In the scenario where multiple vendors are selected in the Item Vendor Catalog instead of the Vendor No., all the vendors are displayed, and the one selected by the user is utilized to create the Purchase Order/Invoice. In both cases, the Purchase Line will reflect the shortfall as the Quantity. If the Item has any substitutes available then the “Substitute Exists” indicates the same and clicking on it opens the Item Substitutions page. Further, if you click on the “All Locations” then the “Item Availability by Location” page is opened. That’s all! Just wanted to share something new I learned recently. We hope you found this article useful, and if you would like to discuss anything, you can reach out to us at transform@cloudfronts.com