Overview I’m sure you’ve already read a lot of good reasons on why moving to Dynamics 365 Business Central Online is the greatest idea ever. I will 110% agree with that statement. But this article, I’m going to list out some of the reasons that comes to my mind when working with clients on Dynamics 365 Business Central from the point of view of a service provider like ourselves. Not Locked into Any Hardware/IT Vendors (Other than Microsoft) Can’t tell you how much this is an issue whether Business Central (or Dynamics NAV) is in the “cloud” or on premise. Every company that touches your ERP sy ..read more

Overview Relax folks, Microsoft didn’t remove the Export to Excel function in Dynamics 365 Business Central starting from v19. It’s just been moved. The Difference Old Version (or versions prior to Business Central v19): Starting from Business Central v19: Why The Change? The direction from Microsoft is to integrate more and more Microsoft 365 application into Business Central. Having a organized place where you can export the data into other Microsoft 365 application is one small step in that direction. Conclusion Yes, we’re getting a ton of “The export to Excel function is gone. PLEASE HELP ..read more

Overview Permission setting in Dynamics 365 Business Central is a serious, but not serious topic. When a company coming from a legacy system or no system, they will always want to restrict everything. The older systems are easier to restrict because there’s not a lot of functions you need to worry about. A considerable amount of business processes had to be complimented with manual processes. In another words, they couldn’t do anything in the legacy system anyway. This is one of the reasons why they’re migrating to Dynamics 365 Business Central. In my experience, after the company goes live, p ..read more

Overview On Dynamics 365 Business Central release 18, Microsoft made significant changes to the bank reconciliation features. Most of the articles and videos on entering beginning bank balances are still based on the older versions Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics NAV. Just thought I would share with the community on setting up your beginning bank balances if you’re moving to Business Central from your legacy accounting /ERP software The goal is to have your bank balance match your G/L account. Just posting whatever is in your G/L to your bank is not the way to go and you’ll run into ..read more

Just a short post this month. Wanted to share an interview I did with MSDynamicsWorld about Business Central and its customers. It’s 45 minutes in length. Hope it doesn’t put you to sleep! https://msdynamicsworld.com/story/msdw-podcast-alex-chow-serving-dynamics-365-business-central-customers ..read more

Overview I’ll admit that I’m a bit of an old school person when it comes to implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly called Dynamics NAV). I believe when you make a decision to implement Dynamics 365 Business Central for your business, the transition should be smooth with minimal disruption. In fact, these transition often make your process better as it sorts out (and eliminates) processes that are convoluted. It forces everyone within the company to at least take a hard look at what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. I believe the transition process should be fully planned ou ..read more

Overview In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV), when doing costing and profitability analysis, you need to differentiate between a transaction’s True Cost and Accounting Cost. These terms will not appear on any official documentation or manuals, I made them up for a lack of better terms. To better explain the difference between True Cost and Accounting Cost, we will use this example: Aug 15, 2021 – Item A was received at 10 pieces for $2.00 each. Aug 30, 2021 – 6 pieces of item A was sold for $5.00 per piece Sept 1, 2021 – The vendor invoice for Item A is posted a ..read more

Overview Sometimes, how a computer system does accounting will be different than how traditional accountants does accounting. One of the subjects that always come up for debate is how COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) is calculated. The Postings In Dynamics 365 Business Central, when a purchase of inventory is made, 4 General Ledger accounts are hit: Inventory A/P Purchases Direct Cost Applied When the items are sold, 4 General Ledger accounts are hit: Inventory A/R Sales COGS In this case, the COGS is automatically calculated and posted to your COGS account. How Dynamics 365 Business Central calc ..read more

It’s that time of the year again. Close out the year! Most companies align their fiscal year to the calendar year so right around this time, we usually get a ton of support calls from people that forgot how to close the year end and need a quick refresher. So I made a quick 2 minute video on how to do year end processing. Why? Because you can’t go through a 10 minute video in 2 minutes and I know you have a ton of other things to do. I’m using the older version of NAV, but the menu tree is the same as in prior versions. To access the accounting period, in the video, the NAV 2013 has the icon ..read more

Overview I mentioned In my previous article that there are multiple ways of setting up warehouse management. In reality, however, there really are two ways: there’s the option of setting up your warehouse with Directed Pick and Put-away…and the wrong way. In almost all companies where bin location management (or warehouse management using wireless scanners) is desired, setting up your warehouse with Directed Pick and Put-away will be the correct decision. The Setup Assuming you’ve done the necessary prep work in your warehouse for a warehouse management system, you will then need to configure ..read more