All posts by : Zach Karahalios

My name is Zach Karahalas and I'm the Director of Business Development here at Volt Technologies. Today I'll be walking you through a demonstration of Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Specifically, for this session, we'll be looking at the Power BI integration and all of the new Power BI reports that have been added into the out of the box capabilities of d three sixty five b c. Alright. So today, as I mentioned, I'm excited to run through a demonstration of Power BI reporting capabilities embedded directly into Business Central. So to start here, the one thing I always like to call out is obviously Power BI as a Microsoft product and Dynamics three sixty five Business Central as a Microsoft product. What this means is that these two tools, these two systems have that ability to integrate natively and pass data back and forth. So you actually have the ability to create Power BI reports utilizing data from Business Central, from SQL databases, from Excel spreadsheets, and then embed those reports directly into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. So here, we'll see that I've actually embedded three different reports. I have the ability to also see an out of the box Business Central report here, but these are custom reports that I have built utilizing data from Business Central and utilizing data from Excel spreadsheets and embedded directly in BC. I understand these can be small, but I think one thing that's great about this feature is the ability just to expand out those reports. From here, you actually have all the capabilities or the majority of the capabilities that you would have within Dynamics or within Power BI Desktop. So from here, I can see these reports. This is gonna be a report where we're looking at our historical utilization. I can actually filter, cut, slice that data any way I'd like directly with MVC. As this data changes from Excel spreadsheets or directly in Business Central. So this is a feature that has long been in Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, the ability to embed these reports directly into the system. But something that Microsoft has recently rolled out is actually out of the box Power BI reports. So they have actually gone in and added Power BI reports that are focused around purchasing sales, inventory, inventory evaluation, manufacturing, sustainability, finance, as well as manufacturing. So today, I'll be running you through some of those out of the box reports. You do have to have a Power BI report to actually access these, but let's go ahead and take a look. You can get to these reports several different ways from here. I'm just gonna go into my explore more roles. And for some of these specific modules, you're gonna see this Power BI reports. So these are those out of the box reports. We'll see some under finance, some under purchasing, sales and marketing. We also have some here under our manufacturing as well. So let's start by taking a look at some of our financials. I won't run through every report today, but I think it's just important to understand that these reports are actually directly tied to data within Business Central. So this is gonna be my financial dashboard or my financial overview Power BI report. From here, it's giving me some nice visuals on data that I'd like to see my top five customers buy a balance, my top five vendors buy a balance, my return on assets by month, net profit, asset turnover. And then on the top, I can just see some great data like my revenue, net profit, net profit margin, assets. I can even take a look at financial reports, things like my income statement or my balance sheet. I also have the ability to look at profitability. So I can get in, look at my profitability or my gross profit, net profit by month, my net margin, all of that fun stuff. We also have the ability to take a look at reports that are related directly to sales. So maybe we wanna go and take a look at my sales report. This is gonna be my sales dashboard. Same gist of the financials. It's gonna let me take a look at data, like my total sales amount, sales amount by salesperson, gross profit by items, so what are my most profitable items, my top five customers, my sales amount, count of documents. I can even drill in and look at daily sales, my moving average, moving annual total, period overgrowth, period growth. So these are just scratching the surface. Right? There are several of these reports. They're all embedded directly into Dynamics three six five Business Central. You get them with the purchase of a Business Central and a Power BI license. That's the demonstration for today. If you have any questions, please reach out to myself or anyone here at Volt Technologies, and and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you.

If you're on Dynamics GP and you're looking for an honest, feature by feature analysis between GP and Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, this is the video for you. Today, I'll be walking you through what GP does and what Business Central can do that GP can't do. I'm not here to say that GP is a bad system, but I'm going to talk you through why Business is a better system. Additionally, we'll talk through what the cost staying on great plans looks like. My name is Zach Carahalis. I'm the Director of Business Development here at BOLT Technologies, and I'll be walking you through this today. So I would say that Business Central reporting is light years ahead of what you have within Great Plains. Right out of the box within Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, you get six hundred plus reports. These can be financial reports. These can be vendor facing documentation, customer facing documentation, out of the box Business Central reports, and lastly, Power BI reports. If you're not familiar with Power BI, Power BI is Microsoft's reporting and analytics tool that allows you to create reports utilizing data from Business Central, from SQL databases, from Excel spreadsheets, really anywhere, and create these reports. On top of that, you can actually embed these reports directly into Business Central. Not only can you build these custom reports, but Microsoft has actually started to roll out out of the box reporting capabilities with Power BI and Business Central. They've actually introduced several different dashboards, some for finance, sales, purchasing, service, manufacturing. These dashboards are all included within Business Central as long as you have a Power BI license. They're extremely powerful and something that we're seeing our customers starting to utilize on a daily basis. As many of you already know, Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, Dynamics Great Plains are both Microsoft products. One of the main differences though with GP and Business Central is that Dynamics three sixty five Business Central has built in integrations to the Microsoft three sixty five ecosystem. Not only is this a massive differentiator when it comes to competitors like NetSuite or Oracle, but it's something that introduces all sorts of automation and enhanced capabilities. You have built in integration to Excel, to Teams, to Outlook. You can export data from Business Central into Excel spreadsheets, manipulate, change the data, and publish it back seamlessly. You can send emails directly from the system. And lastly, and more importantly, you have the Copilot capabilities. I'm sure you're familiar with Copilot. If you're not, it's Microsoft's AI tool. It's something that is now embedded directly within Business Central on every screen. You have the ability to ask questions. It can help do automated bank reconciliations. It can help create reports. The capabilities are endless. So long story short, the Microsoft three sixty five ecosystem integrated into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central is extremely powerful and something that differentiates Business Central from all the other ERPs out there. As many people know, Great Plains and Dynamics three sixty five Business Central are both Microsoft products. What some people don't realize though, is the massive change in enhancements and capabilities and integrations you get with Microsoft products when you make the change from GP to Business Central. Right away, out of the box, since Business Central is that modern cloud based ERP, you have seamless integrations to the full Microsoft ecosystem. That includes Microsoft three sixty five, products like Excel, Teams, Outlook, Power Automate, or Power BI in the Power Platform family. And then additionally, lastly, but not least, you have Copilot. So let's start with Microsoft three sixty five. Right out of the box, you have full integrations into Excel. You can take data, you can export it from Business Central into an Excel spreadsheet, manipulate it, make changes, and seamlessly implement it back into Business Central through a quick import with all of the changes you needed. You have the ability to actually utilize Outlook directly within the system and even sends Teams messages. When it comes to the Power Platform, you have easy access to Power BI reports, as well as Power Automate. If you're not familiar with the products, Power BI is Microsoft's reporting analytics tool. It gives you the ability to create reports utilizing data from Business Central, from SQL databases, from Excel spreadsheets, and then actually embed those reports directly into Business Central. Additionally, on top of that, you actually have the ability to utilize out of the box Business Central Power BI reports. Power Automate is something that's also embedded directly into the product. Power Automate can be used to automate processes or build out integrations. The capabilities there are endless. Lastly, we have Copilot. I'm sure you're familiar with Copilot. It's Microsoft's AI tool. It's something that's embedded directly into all of these products, including Business Central. It's something you'll see on every screen. You have the ability to ask questions, to have it automate bank reconciliations, to have it create reports on your behalf. It's extremely powerful and the capabilities are just getting introduced. Every update there's new features that come out and it's something that we're extremely excited about here at Vault. The longer you stay on Great Plains, the more expensive the upgrade and implementation of Dynamics three sixty five Business Central is going to be. Every day that goes by, you're adding data into the system. You're creating new vendors, new items, new customers. You may be even be extending the system or creating new reports. Every extension, every item, every report that you create is going to be an additional waterfall task or data that needs to be migrated over or extension that needs to be created in Business Central. This adds scope to the project, which adds resource structures, which ultimately adds budget. So the longer that you stay on Great Plains, the more expensive your implementation upgrade can be. Lastly, when making the upgrade from Great Plains Business Central, you're introducing all sorts of new process automation and capabilities. What this does is this can create and make your employees more efficient. Now they no longer have to spend time on these manual processes like going through and reconciling bank accounts when Copilot can do that automatically for you. It gives your employees more time to focus on more important tasks, makes them more efficient, and increases your ROI. I'm not here to say that Great Plains is a bad product. It's something that's been extremely successful for Microsoft, something that thousands of companies are running their business on. But I'm here to tell you that by continuing to stay on great planes, you're missing out on all sorts of new features, new capabilities, new automations within Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Think of great planes like a flip phone. You're missing out now on the new iPhone, right? You're ten generations behind. There's so many new added features, so many new added capabilities. It's something that I believe our customers, you know, we're doing a disservice by not making the recommendation for them to upgrade from Great Plains into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. If you want to go deeper into any of the new Dynamics three sixty five Business Central capabilities, whether it's the Microsoft three sixty five ecosystem integrations, Copilot, Power Platform, added automations around bank reconciliation, please just reach out to us here at Volt Technologies and we'll do anything we can to help. Additionally, if you like this content, go ahead and subscribe. Thank you.

If you're on Dynamics GP and you know the migration is coming to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, but you don't know what the process will look like, this video is for you. My name is Zach Kerhalis. I'm the Director of Business Development here at Volt Technologies, and I've had this conversation with so many customers in the past. Today, I'm going to walk you through what that process will look like, why projects stall, what we do to make sure they're so successful, and how to ultimately get you from Great Plains to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. The first thing that I always recommend is to utilize the GP migration assessment tool. This is going to give you a good understanding of where you're at with the data and it give you a good starting place. From there, you really need to be working with your partner to identify what the functional and technical scope for the implementation is going to look like. So on the functional side you're going to identify your process flows whether it's purchasing, sales, financial, getting an understanding for what that will look like. From there you're going to move into your technical or what we like to call our waterfall task. We're going to make sure that our data migration is set up for success. If we have any integrations into our current Great Plains environment, how we're going to replicate those within Business Central, our critical reports, so what types of reports do we run on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And then finally, we're going to have our extensions or our ISPs. So a lot of the times what we have found in these Great Plains migrations is that customers have one extended their environment or they're utilizing independent software vendor extensions on top of their current environment as well. What we do is we identify those processes, we understand what they look like today, and then we see if we can replace those with out of the box Business Central If not, then what we do is we go and look at what types of extensions or what ISVs would be necessary within the system. So to set the set project up for success, we need to make sure that we're all in line with what the functional and the technical scope is going to look like and the workload that's ahead of us. So the data migration for any project within ERP is going to be one of the most important starting places for the actual implementation. So what we'll do is as a first step is we're going to identify what data is going to come over, right? So customers, vendors, items, our chart of accounts, any open transactions. From there we need to identify our historical data. Generally speaking, our recommendation is on the financial side to bring three years of summary level financial data over. That being said, every customer's requirements are different, so we'll work with you to figure out what works best. Additionally, on top of that, something to understand is that this is a great opportunity to cleanse your data. So let's not just bring over every vendor, every customer, every item that you've had in your system for over twenty years. Let's go through the process of bringing over the active vendors, active items, right? So maybe things that we have transacted within the last three to four years or additionally on top of that we can go through processes of changing the numbering sequences on items, customers, vendors, the chart of accounts. That's a great place as well to clean up. Maybe there's accounts that we've been wanting to get rid of, consolidate or eliminate, or even change our numbering sequence. So the data migration is going to be a key aspect of the project and something that we're going to spend a lot of time on since it sets us up ultimately for success. So for this, it really comes down to the planning, just like everything we've talked about. As long as we go into the project with a clear plan, clear milestones, clear dates, deadlines, resource structure, and a budget, we should be able to get to that successful go live. That being said, I've gone through hundreds of these implementations and where I see the most issues arise is the velocity of decision making. When we get into an actual process and we say, okay, how are we going to handle this? How do we want to change the number in sequence for the chart of accounts? How do we actually want to go through purchase orders or sales orders? Where I see hang ups in these implementations is where the customer or our team doesn't have that velocity on the decision making. Something gets held up for a week, two weeks, that starts to delay the project. So our team and your team ultimately need to collaborate together on daily, weekly basis, sure we're on the same page. And that's something that's a really important piece of our methodology. We make sure to meet on a weekly basis, our project manager and your project manager. Additionally, we have our steering committee meetings on monthly between your oversight and our oversight team. This is where we're fully transparent and honest with each other. We discuss key risks, key issues, key decisions. We see where we're at on the milestones as well as our budgets. So as long as we're working together, collaborating, marching towards that successful go live, we shouldn't run into any of these hang ups. So as I mentioned earlier, the data migration is one the most crucial pieces of the implementation. The data is going be the main starting point for our ERP, so we need to make sure that we're validating this data from day one. So an important piece of our methodology is at the beginning of the project we will begin actually migrating your data from Great Plains into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. What we want to do is identify a repeatable process of exporting the data, transforming and cleansing it, and importing it back into Business Central. Additionally, on top of that, we're going to have our conference room pilots or what I like to refer to as our mock go lives. During each mock go live, we will do a full cutover of all of your data from Great Plains into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central and go through validation processes. We'll look at customers, vendors, items, our chart of accounts. Obviously, we don't look at every record or every field, but we validate key accounts. We make sure that fields are mapped correctly. We do this sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes three or four times. It just depends on the complexity of the project. But making sure that we're aligned, all of the data is validated is a crucial piece of the implementation. So in my experience with these implementations, something that I've seen that our customers come unprepared or unplanned for coming into the project is really the work that comes on their side. We all know that the partner is responsible for the actual implementation, the data migration, the design, the testing, the validation, the actual go live, But this is a collaborative effort. We work with your team on daily basis to understand how they currently do their processes, what they like about those processes, what they don't like, actual things that they would like to see work in the future, whether it's automation or new capabilities. This is very much a collaborative effort where we need to understand what the process looks like today and what you would like for it to look in future state. Obviously, we can come in and we can just design the system, build it, you know, how we would like for it to be, but ultimately we want to make sure that your team feels comfortable with it as well. So we will be meeting with your team on daily basis, getting understanding for those processes. We'll be assigning out homework. We'll be creating standard operating procedures for your team to review. This is a crucial piece of the implementation. We have to work together. We have to be aligned on expectations to get to that successful go live. I hope you found this video helpful. Just to recap what we've gone through today, we've got an understanding for how you can handle a Great Plains Dynamics three sixty five Business Central implementation. It's crucial that you scope out the project correctly on the functional and technical side, that you collaborate with your partner, and that you're transparent and honest with each other as you go through these projects. If there's anything that we can ever do to help in the future, please go ahead and reach out to us at Volt Technologies and go ahead and subscribe if you like this content.

If you're on Dynamics Navision today, it's time to make that natural upgrade into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. What a lot of customers don't realize is that Microsoft actually stopped supporting Navision in January of twenty twenty three. That means you're vulnerable when it comes to security. Today, I'm going to walk you through what that process looks like upgrading from Navision into D365 Business Central and how we can help. My name is Zach Kerhalitz. I'm the Director of Business Development here at Voalte Technologies, and I'm going to walk you through what that upgrade process looks like. If you're still running on Navision today, that means you're living in the past. You need to go ahead and look at that process from upgrading from the Vision into Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft no longer supports the Vision. That happened in January of twenty twenty three. Additionally, you're going to be very vulnerable when it comes to security. On top of that, you're missing out on all sorts of capabilities within Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, whether it's AI, advanced planning capabilities, warehousing, all sorts of other additional tools. Lastly, you're definitely going to want to make that move from this clunky on prem hardware into the modern cloud based ERP. So today, we're going to walk you through that process. When making the move from the vision to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, there's several different ways you can handle these implementations. Obviously, you have the lift and shift model where you just take the processes, the data that you have within the vision, and move it into Business Central. That's not what I would recommend, though. These implementations are hard, they're complex, and they take a generally long period of time to go through. It's important that you actually get the rewards out of this. So let's look at actually improving those processes, introducing new capabilities, as well as cleansing your data. So what we're going to do is that first phase of the project is go through and diagnose you. This is like a doctor's appointment, where we get an understanding for the functional and technical scope of the implementation. What type of processes are you running in Navision today? Are you just doing finance? Are you doing purchasing? Sales? Maybe you're doing manufacturing. We need to understand what that looks like. Then we move into our technical scope or our four waterfall tests. Our integrations so is your Navision environment integrated into any other peripheral systems? Your reports I'm sure you have critical reports that you run on daily, weekly, maybe even monthly basis. We need to make sure that those reports are replicated in Business Central. You additionally then have your extensions or ISVs, so as part of these implementations, we always run into individual environments where you have extended or customized it, or you're utilizing an independent software vendor. We need to understand those processes, see if it can be replaced by out of the box Business Central, and if not, then identify how we're going to handle that, whether that's by changing the process to meet out of the box capabilities, extending the system, or introducing an independent software Finally, you have the data migration. Data migration is really one of the first key steps of this process. We need to identify what data is coming over and how it's coming over. So which customers? Which vendors? Which items? Our chart of accounts. For financial, we always want to bring over any open transactions, but we also want to understand how we're going to handle this historical. Our general recommendation is three years financial historical summary level data. That being said, every customer has different requirements. We'll work with you to identify that. Once we've gone through, we've fully identified our functional and technical scope for the project, we then move into the actual design phase, and this is where we actually get into building the processes that you have within Navision in Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Generally, we look to improve those processes, introduce new tools, capabilities as well. We have done several of these implementations of these upgrades from Navisions to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. We've worked with customers who have extremely customized and extended Navision environments. We've worked with customers who have very standard basic Navision environments. When you have the basic processes, generally that makes the implementation easier. That being said, if you have a customized Navision environment, that's not a red flag by any means. What we'll do is we'll go through and we'll identify every extension in the tables and fields within your NoVision environment. We'll go through these extensions and say, okay, some of these can be replaced by out of the box Dynamics three sixty five Business Central capabilities. Maybe some of the customizations or extensions that you have in the environment you're no longer using. Additionally, we'll look and see if there are any independent software vendors out there that we can build into Business Central to replace those extensions. Finally, one of the first things we will do on top of all that is to make sure that if a process is extended within the vision, is there any way to change that process to actually make it out of the box? That being said, a lot of our customers have some sort of process that they run that's so specific to their business that they have to continue utilizing. In that instance we will look to utilize an extension or an ISV. It's like renovating a house when you're still living in it. The structure is sound but the wiring, the plumbing, it's all set to an older standard. What you need is someone to come in and upgrade that to the future to the current standards that are out there and this is something that we'll do while you're running the business the entire time as well. Obviously the more up to date version you're on, the easier the upgrade from Navision to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central is going to be. That being said, if you're running a product like Navision two thousand and nine, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is going to make it more complex than a customer who's running something like Navision twenty fifteen. There are steps that we can take to make that upgrade path easier for each process. So long story short, yes and no. It really just depends on the capabilities and the processes you're running in the system. We'll make sure to identify what that would look like and ultimately get you to a successful go live. The longer you wait, the further you're getting to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Microsoft rolls out updates to BC every six weeks with two major updates a year. As they make these updates, Nuvision and Dynamics three sixty five Business Central are getting different. There's new processes, new capabilities. It makes the migration process more difficult. We need to make sure that we're setting you up for success so the sooner you run these implementations, these upgrades, the easier the project will be. Additionally, on top of that, we mentioned that Microsoft stopped supporting the product in twenty twenty three. Every day, every week, every month that goes by, your security and vulnerability is getting more at risk. Lastly, the technical debt. As you're supporting the vision, every dollar you spend is something that you're going to have to spend on the Dynamics three sixty five implementation as well. So maybe you create a new report within Navision, or you go and you add an extension, or you're adding new records, new files, new items, customers. This makes the implementation upgrade more complex, so you're actually double dipping when you're making that investment. It adds scope to the project. So go ahead, rip the bandit off, let's talk, let's help you navigate through that upgrade and make the change into Business Central. If you've been thinking about making the move from the vision to Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, stop waiting. Go ahead, reach out to us here at Volt Technologies, and we'll help guide you through that process. We're more than happy to take you through a free consultation of what that process would look like, going through a discovery, understanding what your division environment looks like, and ultimately coming back to you with what that timeline, resource structure, and budget would look like. If you enjoy this content, please subscribe, and if there's anything we can ever do to help in the future, just reach out.

Alright. Everyone should now be able to see Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. And one caveat I will say, you know, I'm not gonna go through an overview of the system. I'm really just gonna be highlighting the enhancements that we have built on as part of our apparel IP. You know, if you have never worked with Business Central before in the past, that's totally fine. Just reach out. We'll set up a quick overview demo to get you started. But I will be going under the assumption that, you know, if you're here today, you have familiarity with the base functionality, and I'm gonna be showing those enhancements. Alright. So right off the bat, as you log in, you are gonna see here that we have enhanced the loading screen right away with some great reporting metrics that we've seen as very popular within the apparel space. I will say that these are purely customizable. These are just kind of the out of the box reports and metrics that we utilize. That being said, if these reports if these metrics don't really correlate to your specific businesses, we can always tailor these to different types of metrics. So we start with our year to date performance. We can see things like our net sales year to date. We can see our new customers. We can see our gross margin percentage, active SKUs. Additionally, on top of that, we can showcase and see capabilities, for example, like, compared to last year. So our net sales year to date is eight point seven five million. That's a twenty one percent increase over last year. Additionally, we have our last thirty days. So looking at net sales, new customers, our average order value. So it looks like we have an average order value of around two hundred and eighty eight dollars. That's up eight point four percent from our previous month. Lastly, we have our returns value. So what does that look like last month? So it looks like we had around forty two thousand dollars worth of sales or returns. I'm sorry. We have reports around our net sales trends, so we can see we had a nice steady increase in sales month over month until August where we had a little dip, but then we increased back in September. We have our sales by channels, so online, retail, marketplace, wholesale. I understand that some of our customers, you know, they're really just in the b to c space or they're just in the online space. That's totally fine. We can create other reports metrics that would correlate better to your business. We have reports around performance. So our top SKUs, you know, over the last thirty days, what are the top SKUs? How many units have we sold? How many dollars? Who are our top customers? So on the b to b side, we have Urban Outfitters, Norbert's from retail. We can see the dollar amount associated with that as well. If you utilize retail locations, we can see our top performing stores. These could also be online stores. So if you're utilizing Shopify or Joar, you have multiple online shops, we could set those up to see which one of the online stores are performing better than the others. We have fulfillment capabilities. So how many orders are due this week? How many have been fulfilled in the last seven days? What's that dollar amount? How many orders are past due? And then how many purchase orders should we be arriving this week? We have some advanced analytics around inventory aging in our customer segmentation as well. So we have repeat customers around twelve hundred and forty three and then three hundred and eighty four new customers in the last ninety days. We can even see our inventory aging.