All posts by : Mason Whitaker

Working with lists and views within Business Central is one of the best ways to get access to your data. In order to be a pro, you've gotta keep your data organized. So let's take a look at how we could do that within the system. From here, I'm on the role center page within the system, the home page as sometimes referred to as within Business Central. And I can navigate to a list page here by selecting one of my favorites. So I'm gonna go to items, but the easiest to look at in terms of our, views and different filters that we have available. So this is gonna pop open all of the lists of items that I have that are available automatically filtered on the primary key, which is my item number here. If I want to filter back and forth, or or sort back and forth rather on a individual column, I can click on that column and it's gonna sort it ascending to descending for me here. So an easy way for me to be able to flip back and forth within any of these, these given columns here. So you can see I'm flipping now on the description to see a, alphabetical order based on my description, and I can flip it to go descending alphabetical order here as well. So just an easy way for you to quickly get access to, certain information. If I wanna be able to filter on, these these items, I can right click here on the top and I can hit filter, which will then pop open all of my filtering, that's available for me on the left hand side. I can filter for certain, characteristics within the description like blue. If I do a wild card and then type in the, the description I'm looking for, hit enter. Now it's gonna look for anything that has blue within that given description. And then if I want to add in an additional filter here, I can hit the plus filter icon and then search for additional fields that I'd like to have. So maybe we can do quantity on hand as our filter, And then I can say, I want anything that is greater than zero here. So just showing you how you can do greater than, less than, or equal to. I can click, and then now you're gonna see it's filtered for anything that has blue in the description and has more than a quantity of zero on hand. So this is actually inventory that we have available for us. So now if I'd like to save this view, I can click on save as and I can create a copy. So greater than zero, blue. And then now when I select off, it's gonna have created a saved view for me that I can go to at any given moment. So then I can switch easily back to the view of all, and then I can go through and look at all items. But whenever I wanna go back to that saved view, I can just click right on here. And then now I'm right back to my to my view here. Just showing you some easy ways to filter your data, and create a save views of the system. You can imagine all the different things that this can apply to, like looking at sales orders that have been shipped but not invoiced, or looking at sales lines with specific items on them, or that have higher than certain amounts. The options are really endless in terms of the capabilities here when it comes to the filtering and the view creation. So that's it for creating views and filters in the system. Hopefully, you've gotten some value out of understanding how to use these features, to be able to maximize your organization within the system. Can't wait to see you in the next video.

One of the main benefits of running Dynamics three sixty five Business Central as your ERP is gonna be getting this nice detail, report and analysis out of the system. But there's so many different ways for you to do this. There's Power BI reports. There's embedded reports. There's transactional reports, document reports, financial reports, and so much more. Over six hundred reports, getting close to seven hundred reports available out of the box of the system. I'm gonna take you through an overview of some of the different ways you can get access to the data and see your insights from running transactions in Business Central. So let's take a look. Starting here on the role center page within Business Central, we can scroll down within our given role to see some of the, reporting that's available for us. So these three graphs here from the sales pipeline, opportunities, and top five opportunities are some of the out of the box visual reports that exist within the system, and this is underneath the sales and relationship manager role. So we can change some of these reports by saying, you know, clicking on the drop down and then selecting next sales cycle, and it's gonna change the different sales cycle for me here, thus changing the data. If I want to, I can click on that and actually interact with the data inside of the report. So now I can see what are those opportunities that are actually showing there. What's the value, what's the stage they're at, etcetera, and even drill down into that exact opportunity card. And then here under our opportunities, you could do the same thing, but now splitting out by the date. So I can say, I wanna look at this in a period of a year. I can look at this in a period of a quarter and really whatever date that you'd like to see. And then down here below, you have the opportunities. So showing top five opportunities. These are all configurable based on the role that you have. This is just the ones that come by default with the sales and relationship manager. These are the out of the box visual reports that Business Central provides, but you also have Power BI visual reports that can be embedded inside of Business Central. So down here, you'll see this power Power BI, action where I can select the given report that shows on my homepage. So if I want to expand this out to look at this from a full screen perspective, I can hit expand. And now it's gonna show me the report in a much bigger, part of the screen. And then if it's a dashboard and not just a single report, you can navigate between the different reports that are available in that dashboard. So giving you the full functionality of Power BI directly inside of Business Central. So if I wanna change any filtering or anything that's available, I could do that, directly inside of Business Central. So just like using Power BI as in Power BI service, but now it's fully embedded within Business Central. If you wanna flip between different Power BI reports that are, uploaded to your workspace, you could just hit that drop down and hit select report here. This is now gonna pop up all of the ones that are available within your workspace. Selecting a different report will then require it to reload and then it will now be available for you to use. While this Power BI option here is added on the role center, this can also be added throughout the system so you can get Power BI reports wherever you really need it. Those are the main visual reports in the system, but then there's also lots of detail regarding transactional reports and also our, financial reports and then just our document reports. So if I come up here and look at a document report, can go to my sales order, and we're we're just gonna take an order confirmation here as one of our reports. So from the sales order screen, I have a, an option here. This is gonna be available throughout lots of, different pages within the system. But let's take just the confirmation on the sales order as an example document report. When I hit print confirmation, it's gonna bring up my report layout, screen here where I can select lots of different options to see what I'm gonna actually be printing out or what I'm gonna be displaying in PDF or or in preview. First, you could select a printer if you'd like. So if you want a hard copy of this report, you can print it out. This will all be handled through your browser print settings. Or if you have a print agent installed and a print server, you can handle it that way as well. And then also the layout. So there's different types of layouts that can be used for this order confirmation report, and you can select which one you'd like to use. So these would all be different document formats. Say if you have different customers that require different look and feel for their order confirmation, you can set that up here and you can also set it up to auto default based on a lot of different criteria. With every given report, you're gonna have different options that you like to perform when you're printing it out. For now, we're gonna skip that. As well as you can filter down to the specific, transactions or the specific views that you'd like to actually print out within this document. Under our advanced settings, you can control things like how much you want to print out the maxes. This way you're able to get specifics on on all your reports and not, you know, go too long on running a report and then it it crashed out at the at the very end or something. You can set maximums, so that way you can control a lot more of the document generation. Down on the bottom, I can send this report to a variety of different options, PDF, XML, a Word document, or an Excel document. All of these have different formats that can be set up. So that way you're able to control the exact look and feel and and get really what you need from a document report. When I go to, print, this is actually gonna kick off the printer. So it will say, you know, based on my my browser, I, have some tax enabled here. There's other settings that are that are required there. Let's take a a pick instruction and try to preview this. Perfect. Doing the preview, it's gonna pop open a report for me so I could see actually what it's gonna look like when I do print this out. I could print this out from here or I can download this, to a file and control it this way. And, of course, this is the out of the box version, which just normally looks like defaulted information. This is all controlled by the document settings within the report layouts. In order to navigate to those report layouts, you just go up to the top right, hit the search icon, search for reports, and then you can see the report layouts page. Within this, you're gonna see all of the different reports that the report layouts that are here. You can export them and take a look at what they look like. You can run them. You can set them as default if you have lots of different report options, or you can create your own. This is just an overview video. We can go in-depth on exactly how to manage that across Word documents, Excel documents, XML documents, and so much more. So that's a brief overview of some of the reporting options that you have within Business Central. From visual reports, Power BI reports, document reports, transactional reports, there is so much to unlock in the system in regards to reporting because that's one of the best benefits that you're gonna get from running all your transactions within a holistic system like Business Central. Hopefully, you learned something in this video, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

One of the great things about Dynamics three sixty five Business Central is that you can have a lot of different apps which bolt onto it and look like they are Business Central underneath, where you're just using Business Central like regular, and it looks and feels like Business Central, but it's actually an extended capability coming from a third party. This is all managed inside what's called the AppSource marketplace. Inside of AppSource, you can select different apps and have them automatically install into your Business Central environment and then manage them using the extension management workspace. So let's take a look at how that's managed in the system. Starting here from the role center page in Business Central, I can go up to the top right and search for marketplace. Selecting marketplace is gonna pop open the AppSource library for me. Let me search for apps that I'd like to bolt on to Business Central, even test out free trials or just inquire for more information if you're if you need to go to an outside company to acquire this. There's lots of different apps that are in in here. They have a full rating system included as well. Business Central has the most amount of apps built for it as for third parties of any Microsoft product that's out there. So I could search for different apps in here and check out specific platform apps. But for now, I'm just gonna show you how we can install this used Dynamics app that's written by a back end. This shows you video guides on Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five, but embedded inside of the product. I can select the get it now option. And what this will do is install the extension into my environment in the given language that I choose. It may take some time to be able to install. I know that this used Dynamics product is is relatively nimble, so it should only take just a few seconds for it to install into the environment. And then we're gonna see it actually embedded on the role center that's available there, for you to be able to use and inquire about, you know, specific videos on the page that you're looking at. Alright. So my app has now been installed, and it's refreshing my page and lets me know that my app is installed and ready to use. Took about a minute to get through, but now the code is available within the environment, and I'm gonna be able to see things that are applicable now using that use dynamics solution. Should be actually on the business manager role center here. So I'm gonna flip over into this role so I could take a look at now what's been added into the environment. So it doesn't look like a third party. It actually looks just like Business Central. So here up top, I can see this use Dynamics menu item that's been added. I can select something like basic training. It's not gonna show me all of the different videos that are available, for me to see, Business Central training there. So this way, I don't have to navigate outside to go and look at additional videos here, but rather I could view that inside of Business Central. If I want to maintain that extension, I can search for extension management. It's now going to pop up all of the different modules that are available here, And then it will show me this one that's by installed by the publisher, Abakyan, and that is the use dynamic solution. And let's search through here as well and see there's also another use dynamics, package in here as well. So you'll see on this list page all of the different extensions that have been installed in addition to the base application that's available. So Microsoft being the main publisher here as well as some other third parties that you'll see. And if you'd like to manage the solution, say, if we would like to install another application from outside that we've developed custom, you could go to upload extension and install the app file directly here. If you'd like to deprovision, a, a given, app, you can come here under manage and then hit the uninstall. The uninstall is gonna ask you if you'd like to delete all of the data that's associated with this extension. I'm just gonna hit yes. It's saying warning because everything is on this cannot be undone. That data will actually be gone and will not persist in the environment. And I'm just gonna select uninstall. It lets me know that there's a dependency on the other app that we saw down below, use dynamics. And it asks if I'd like to uninstall all of the dependencies with this app as well. I'm gonna say yes. I wanna uninstall both at the same time, and then it lets me know again that the data is gonna be deleted. Microsoft likes to ensure that you're aware of what you're doing here. I'm gonna hit yes, and then now it's gonna go through and perform the uninstall for me. Great. The application was successfully uninstalled, and now you have to sign in and sign out in order to see that take effect. And that's how you can quickly and easily access the AppSource marketplace from inside Business Central, install applications, and uninstall applications so you can take advantage of all of the different third parties that have built applications to increase Business Central's features and capabilities. Hopefully, you got some value out of this video, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one.

Yeah. Traditional Copilot is built to be able to work with your Microsoft applications and really work kind of in line with you on your productivity tools or your business applications. Copilot Studio enables you to broaden that into other applications and other datasets, for you to build really copilots that are specific for a certain purpose. So if you need an accountant copilot or if you need a, like, a lawyer copilot or a mathematician copilot, you're really able to build those specifically for what your requirements are. So you have this ability now with Copilot Studio to take certain datasets and then give it certain, features and customize the specific Copilot that you're looking for. And this is all now really available, at your fingertips with the Copilot Studio tool. I would recommend trying to build out your first Copilot. So going to, the Copilot Studio application itself, and trying to create actually, the the first virtual agent. So this will get you used to how to add in the certain topics that you're gonna be working with, how to understand context of questions, how to understand the datasets that are required, and then go ahead and try to use it within your team. You know, give them access to the tool, have them start asking questions, and you're gonna see firsthand really the types of interactions that, your team is looking for. And then you can tweak and change the behavior of the Copilot depending on what your team is ultimately looking for. So I'd say the best way to get started is honestly just to get started. Yeah. So, actually, within Copilot, this is a a huge factor that there is this enterprise grade data protection that is ongoing with all of your data that's secured within the Microsoft Graph and any sort of interaction that you have with Microsoft Copilot. So you know that any sort of answer that you're providing or additional context is not going and becoming publicly accessible by the, you know, residents of the Internet. And so you're able to ensure that that's kept secure, under guard. It's really all backed by Microsoft's compliance and security. Yeah. You see Copilot Studio formerly was, Microsoft Virtual Agent, being used in a number of use cases. The first one that you see the most is online on the website. You're gonna actually have a a chatbot interface that your customers or potential customers are are able to interact with to understand, you know, general information about your organization or maybe the availability of products if you're working in kind of a b to c or b to b capacity. So that's a huge use case is having an online chatbot, that can really facilitate this sort of customer service interaction. But that's really just step one. There's so many other use cases, with Copilot Studio of building these Copilots that achieve certain tasks, whether that's, you know, achieving your, your legal request and asking it, you know, how should I interact on this certain contract, Or, you know, from an accounting perspective, understanding what are the gap rules that we need to be following and, giving getting insight from that. So, really, the use cases are honestly endless in this way that you can build a Copilot for specific functions across every single role in your organization. Definitely. There are tons of ways that you can train, the the interface, and that's all really used, or or done through providing a different context. So adding in different datasets from different environments. Like, if you wanted to have a sales agent Copilot, for example, built through Copilot Studio, you could, perform, or provide all of your CRM data into the tool, and then it will have the context to understand exactly where you're at with your opportunities, your leads, at what point a certain lead is in a marketing campaign. It'll give you all of that insight. It's really just all dependent on what data you provide to it and how you train, the the decision making for the chatbot. Yeah. I'd say, one of the best ways to do something like this is actually ask Copilot itself, to say, you know, how can I improve, you know, our our attendance, or how can I decrease the amount of tickets that we have within our customer support portal? It'll give you some sort of insights like that. And you can even ask how to work with, you know, how to add Copilot to decrease those or to create more attendance. So using it actually as a resource, for questions and getting general answers just like you would with Google, but just with additional context. So one of the best use cases that I see for Copilot in the future is being able to take any role within an organization and see where we can parse out some of the automated, tasks or the the tasks that should be automated and then building a Copilot specific for that role.