All posts by : Mason Whitaker

So you're thinking about moving to a modern cloud ERP solution, and you're wondering what the differences are in how your on premise licensing works today versus what it will look like in the cloud? Well, I'm here to help answer that question for you. In the future, with Cloud ERP, you'll be based on a seat license, meaning that per user, you'll be able to have access to the system and pay per user. So a user will be assigned a license, and then they'll get associated features that they can leverage based on that license. On the on premise model, you're used to where there's limits to concurrent usage. In the cloud, that's no longer a factor. So one user can have as many tabs open sessions as they like to no hindrance. With Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, licensing is based on, two different full user licenses. You have Essentials and you have Premium. With Essentials, you get full customer relationship management, financials management, sales management, purchasing management, inventory management, and warehousing management, as well as project management too. So a lot included in the Essentials package at just seventy dollars per user per month. With Premium, you get all of that's included within Essentials and then also manufacturing and service management. So two additional modules that have a lot of of included in there that are great for field service organizations or production inventory organizations. So those are just some of the ways that the cloud ERP licensing model can work and how it will work specifically for Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. If you have any questions on how licensing works in the future, reach out to one of the members of our team. We're happy to work with you to create that plan for you.

Are you evaluating Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central and you're wondering if it supports multi entity and multi currency? Well, I've got the answer for you today. Business Central does support intercompany and multi entity management as well as multi currency. So you can have up to two hundred companies within a single environment in Business Central that you can have intercompany transactions flowing between those, as well as those transactions operating in multiple currencies. So the ability for one to have an exchange rate with another, you can have that full fledged currency management inside of the application. Now, where Business Central has some limitations is when you have multi region. So if someone, has a company that is in the US and you also have a company that is somewhere in South Africa, let's say, then you have different localized environments. And so that requires two separate environments, which will need to be connected through an API connection to perform that intercompany consolidation. But if you have companies that are within the same region, let's say within the US or all within the UK, then performing intercompany is as simple as just hooking up an intercompany partner and posting transactions against them. So that's just a little bit of insight into how that multi entity and multicurrency setup and capability works within Business Central. If you have any questions on how that could work potentially for your business, then feel free to reach out to one of the members of our team today. We're happy to work with you on it.

I get asked all the time, does Business Central have a CRM or customer relationship management tool embedded inside of it? Well, I'm here to answer that question today. And yes, it does have a CRM tool built into the ERP itself, meaning that you can track all of your contacts or leads and their associated interactions, such as emails or phone calls or events with those, those contacts. And you could also track the opportunities that exist out there with those leads and turn those opportunities into quotes. And then, of course, the associated orders and customers, moving your way all the way down to collecting the cash from that given customer. So it starts as that, that entry point for any sort of customer, whether it's a lead, an opportunity, a quote, what have you, and all of that is able to be tracked inside of the application. Though there are some limitations with Business Central CRM, such as you don't have that capability to send out SMS text messages or have nurture email sequences, some of those capabilities would exist within Dynamics three sixty five Sales, which is the tier one CRM application that's available. That is available as a bolt on or an add on license to Business Central for just an additional twenty dollars per user. So if you have more questions on the CRM capabilities that exist within Business Central, then feel free to reach out to one of our team members today. We're happy to connect with you and work with you on evaluating if it's gonna suit your needs or not.

Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains is at end of life. And if you're still running the product, then you're already behind. Microsoft has announced that there's no longer gonna be support for the Great Plains products, and your competition is already moving forward with a modern scalable cloud ERP. These legacy systems like Dynamic Scrape Planes open you up to not just security vulnerabilities, but also the risk of implementing workarounds to get solutions that are just native in the cloud. Your competition is gaining an edge with new flexible capabilities capabilities while you're stuck in the past trying to make things work in the as is state. Cloud ERP offers flexible update schedules, scalable architecture where you're no longer limited by on premise infrastructure, and so much more. Plus, with remote access built into the product, your team can operate from anywhere in the world on any device, unlike Great Plains having to operate on the infrastructure that you have on your on premise solution. Let's be honest on how a month on Great Plains actually looks. With week one, your approvals crawl. Managers are traveling, emails are stacking up, POs wait, and you get your sales team asking, do we have it? Followed by three different answers. Now week two, you're dealing with spreadsheets everywhere. Smart lists to Excel, copy paste, a PO gets rekeyed, and the numbers just don't match. Friday becomes a change freeze, so IT can babysit servers. By Saturday, they patch SQL and hope the VPN holds. With week three, you're getting a cleanup. Bank reconciliation is done by hand, journals to fix timing, tickets for stuck integrations and inventory drifts, you chase receipts. By week four, your closing week turns into a closed weekend. Late approvals land, you rerun reports, and stay late tying subledgers to the GL. Monday morning, the first question is still, is the close done? Now that's the month on Delay, rework, and risk repeated every cycle. With Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, approvals route in Outlook and Teams, bank feeds reconcile without exports, and you see cash, margin, and inventory live. Updates and security are handled in the cloud. No VPN drama, no Saturday patch window. You get one set of numbers and a close that finishes on Friday, not Sunday. The future is here with Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Don't let GP hold you back.

But if you're happy with the soft allocation plan, then what you can do is you can run what's called your automated order release. Before you run automated order release, there's all sorts of different parameters that go into setting that up just like the soft allocation. We can set up this automated order release on our sales and receivable setup. So if we were to navigate over here, we can see that we've added in some features at the bottom where we can actually put in thresholds. So maybe we want price thresholds. Maybe we have quantity thresholds, order dates that need to be actually applied on the threshold. The release group method. So are we releasing per order line, per item number, per item plus color on our variant? And then what's that threshold percentage going to be as well? So we can take this down to the sales and receivable setup. We can do this on the customer card. We can do this on locations. We can do this on inventory setup, or we can even go as granular as doing this on particular orders. So I'll showcase just what it looks like on the customer card as well. I won't go through every one of those screens here today. But if we were to navigate over to our customers and we look at Trey Research here, we'll see that we can put threshold methods. Right? So whether it's price, whether it's quantity. So maybe we actually have a quantity threshold, or we have a release group method on an order line, the item number, the item and color, and then we can put those percentages on these associated with it as well. So, basically, what this does is it gives us the ability to say, for example, maybe Trey Research doesn't want us to send partial orders unless it's over fifty percent or whether it's over seventy five percent, or maybe they don't care. We can do partial shipments. Right? So it gives you that granularity to set these thresholds, and automated order release will take that into effect as well. Once you're ready, everything's set up properly. You have the ability to manually or have automated order release run on schedule. What we'll do is I'll click automated order release. I can select the demand sequence that we'd like to utilize. We can even set if we'd like to create Don WMS pick list, we can run it in simulation, and we can even put in days prior to shipment that we'd like it to look at. Right? So in this example, I've run it in simulation mode already, and now I want to see the specific results that have been created here. So I can search for my automated order release summary. I can click, and I can see the two times that has been run. I can see the days prior to ship date that we've associated with that. We can see the orders that were released, the actual lines on that order that released, and then the total quantity that's been released as well. But maybe we wanna get a little more granular with that, and we'd like to see the log. So now we can see every order that is looked at, and then we can see the log lines here as well. So if I expand this out, we can see that for this one here, the order header validation pass, the ship date pass, the line threshold validation equals none, the order release date pass threshold zero percent. And so in this example, no lines were released since they haven't been allocated out. But if we were to look here specifically at that sales order that we looked at earlier, now what we can see is in this particular scenario, the order header validation passed, the ship date validation passed, our line threshold validation was skipped because we had a method of none, the order date threshold, we had a zero percent. It looks like seventy six point nine two percent of that order is ready to release. We saw that one line that did not have the actual on hand to fully allocate, and then the simulation would have released those four lines. So if we just navigate back to that sales order here, what it's saying is based off of the parameters we have set up for soft allocation and for automated order release, those parameters, we would actually release these four lines, so the two or the three that are fully allocated and the one that's partially allocated. Since we do not have on hand here, we can't fulfill this order. And for that reason, we will not get through with this particular line here. So that is just one very simple scenario of running automated order release in tandem with our soft allocation engine. I think it's something that, you know, is extremely helpful, will be tremendous for a lot of our customers out there today.