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In this webcast, I will show you how you can automatically put your ledger periods on-hold with the help of MS-Flow.
Automatically close your ledger periods in D365FO with the help of MS-Flow
01 Sunday Apr 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
Storage and transfer of electronic documents by Email
14 Wednesday Mar 2018
Posted in Accounts Payable
This post illustrates how electronic documents such as payment covering letters can automatically be send to external parties by email.
The standard D365FO functionalities do not only allow this transfer but also provide tools that automatically store those documents.
You can thus resend those documents if your vendor requests – something that was not possible prior Dynamics AX versions. Just take a look yourself
Intercompany transfer of Fixed Assets with the help of MS-Flow
01 Thursday Mar 2018
Posted in Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets
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In this post I will show you how you can sell fixed assets in one company and automatically create and acquire a fixed asset in another company. With the help of MS-Flow I could solve a long-term mystery with out of the box functionalities.
Intercompany free-text invoicing in D365FO with MS-Flow
21 Wednesday Feb 2018
Posted in Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable
In this post I demonstrate how MS-Flow can automatically create intercompany vendor invoices based on free-text invoices that have been created in another D365FO company.
MS Outlook synchronization (Part 2)
08 Thursday Feb 2018
Posted in General Ledger, Miscellaneous
In this post, I will show you how you can make use of the MS Outlook – D365FO synchronization for your month end closing process.
MS Outlook synchronization (Part 1)
01 Thursday Feb 2018
Posted in Miscellaneous
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In this post, I demonstrate how you can setup and synchronize contacts, appointments and tasks between MS Outlook and D365FO.
Get informed about the setup of new ledger accounts with MS Flow
14 Sunday Jan 2018
Posted in General Ledger
In this post I will show you how you can inform people about newly setup ledger accounts in D365FO. Even though Alerts and MS Flow triggers are currently not available for D365FO, you can make use of the standard D365FO functionalities and MS Flow to send notifications to those who are for example responsible for setting up reports to ensure that they don’t miss newly setup ledger accounts.
Electronic Transfer Of Documents
01 Monday Jan 2018
Posted in Accounts Receivable
This video post shows you how you can attach documents such as a dunning letters to Emails that you send out to customers. If no Email is provided a document is automatically printed and can be send by letter post. In case an invalid Email address was setup, the bouncing Emails are tracked through MS Flow and other products of the MS stack. All the things shown in the video can be achieved in the D365FO standard application in combination with products from the MS stack without making any system modification. Hope you enjoy and see you next time.
Go Live Setup Checklist
17 Sunday Dec 2017
Posted in Miscellaneous
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Inspired by a previous post of my follow MVP colleague Fredrik (see: https://dyntips.com/2017/08/02/data-validation-checklist/) I decided to take a closer look at the data validation checklist functionality
(a) for checking that all necessary system setups are made and
(b) for establishing a data migration or cutover plan, which helps ensuring that nothing important is forgotten before going live with D365FO.
Once the project was created, I started with the setup of the task areas, which can be realized by opening the configuration menu shown next.
While setting up those task areas, I noticed that this setup can easily become a lengthy and time-consuming process. Luckily, D365FO ships with a handy Excel add-in that alleviates the setup of those task areas. For details, please see the following screenprint.
The task areas can be setup in numerous ways. I decided to use the different D365FO modules as my task areas. If you want to follow the same approach, you can download the attached SampleGoLiveChecklistTaskAreas Excel File and use it for importing the task areas in your environment.
After the task areas are setup, the legal entities need to be specified …
… before the tasks can be setup. Setting up the data validation checklist tasks is the core of the data validation functionality. When setting up those tasks, you need to take the elements highlighted in the next screenprint into consideration. In the following, the highlighted elements will be explained in more detail.
No 1: Task
Here you have to provide a task description that you can freely define.
No 2: Area
This field allows linking the tasks to the task areas that have been setup before.
No 3: Menu item name
The menu item name allows you establishing a link to the setup form. Once this link is established, users can directly jump to the form where they have to make their setup.
The menu item linkage functionality is probably the most important functionality of the data validation checklist because it allows users opening the respective setup form without a lengthy search in the D365FO menu structure. There is, however, a catch with this menu item linkage. The catch is that unless you know all of the different menu items by heart and can enter them directly through the Excel add-in, you have to select them manually, which is a very time consuming process. To help you with this setup, I attached you the different tasks and menu item in this file (SampleGoLiveChecklist) that can be downloaded and used as a starting point for your own data validation project. Please note that this file includes tasks for all except the retail and warehouse management modules.
No 4: Display order
The display order code allows defining how the tasks are sorted and displayed in the task list.
No 5 & 6: Status & assigned to
The status and assigned to fields allow tracking the progress and the person responsible for a specific task.
No 7: Attachments
The attachment functionality is another great feature that is incorporated into the data validation checklist. It allows attaching comments through notes, links – for example to VSTS backlog items – and files that can be used to document the setups that have been made.
If you downloaded and imported the sample task areas and sample tasks that I provided for download, you will get a task list similar to the one shown in the next screenprint.
MS PowerApps ships with a default connection to D365FO and allows establishing a connection to the tables that hold the data validation checklist tasks.
After doing some tests with PowerApps, I feel that this and the other previously mentioned functionalities (work items, alerts, MS Flow) do not add much value but might rather complicate working on the different setup and configuration tasks. As a result, working directly on the data validation checklist seems – from the author’s perspective – the easiest and most efficient way.
Hope you enjoyed reading this post and that you find the provided downloadable task areas and task Excel documents useful. Till next time.
Dynamics 365 General Journal Excel Imports
07 Thursday Dec 2017
Posted in General Ledger
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Within this post I would like to share some of the experiences that I made with the import of transactions from Excel to D365 general ledger journals. The story began in the general journals form, which allows users opening, editing and re-importing accounting transactions in Excel.
The standard general journal line entry template that ships with D365 opens an Excel document similar to the one shown in the next screenprint that has (1) a link to the general ledger journal batch number and (2) a link to the main account(s) used.
Those linkages and functionalities are nice. However, I wanted to (a) enter main accounts and financial dimensions and (b) create new journals and not open already existing ones. Within the following, we will see how (a) and (b) can be achieved.
(a) Enter main accounts and financial dimensions
Fixing the first issue is easy and can be achieved by adding the account display value field via the workbook designer. The next screenprint exemplifies this.
A disadvantage of using the account display value field for recording main accounts and financial dimension combinations is that you cannot easily identify the sequence of the different financial dimensions used and thus do not know how to enter your transactions. That is because this sequence is defined in the following integration form in the general ledger module.
A second disadvantage of entering the main account-financial dimension combinations in a single field is that no tooltip or lookup is available that would help users entering their transactions. Luckily this disadvantage can easily be overcome by implementing a minor system modification that is described on the following website: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/dev-itpro/financial/dimensions-overview. The next screenprint that was taken for a different D365 environment that has this modification implemented illustrates that the system modification allows entering main accounts and financial dimensions in separate columns of the Excel template.
Even though the workbook designer and the optional system modification help to overcome my first issue, you will quickly notice that all Excel design changes that are made via the Office add-in designer are gone the next time you open the Excel template. To fix also this problem, one has to design its own template.
Creating and designing an own template might sound complicated. However, you do not have to design everything from scratch but can rather make use of the things that are already available. In other words, you can make use of the existing standard templates and easily modify them yourself as required. The only thing you need to do to realize that is opening the document templates form…
…identify the existing template and download it.
When downloading and saving the template, take care of the name that you give to this file because this name will be important later on when making the file available for usage.
In my example, I simply changed the template name by replacing the ending numbers with L1.
Once the template is downloaded and saved, you can open it in Excel and start creating your own design.
After all design change are made, the new template can be made available by creating a new document template and importing the Excel document as illustrated in the next screenprint.
Please note that the template name defaults to the file name that has been uploaded. In my example, it ends with _L1. If you do not delete this suffix and make use of the original template name (‘LedgerJournalLineEntryTemplate’), the upload will succeed but you won’t be able to make use of the document template.
Provided that you managed creating your new template, it finally becomes available for selection in the general journals form…
… and can be used for recording accounting transactions.
(b) Create new journals
Using the general journal Excel add-in is nice. Yet, you might have noticed that all my Excel documents shown before had a link to an already existing general ledger journal. What I wanted to do though was creating new journals directly from Excel and not creating a journal in D365 that can be opened in Excel.
In the following, I will show you how creating new journals can be realized by making use of the Excel document template functionality. To make this exercise a bit more challenging, I decided to demonstrate the creation and posting of a new journal by ‘copying’ the lines from an already posted journal. For that reason, I selected one of the already posted journals and transferred all lines into my newly created template.
Once that export was done, I put my cursor into the header section and selected ‘New’ in the Office add-in data connector, which allowed me entering a new description and name that I could publish.
As a result a new batch number became visible (00459)…
… and a new journal was created in the D365 web client.
There is no lookup available for the journal name. You thus have to know and enter the name before you can create a new journal through the Excel add-in.
Happy about what I have achieved so far, I continued my exercise by changing the existing lines that I could still identify in the template. Trying to publish those modified lines to my newly generated general ledger journal went, however, terribly wrong and I got many error messages. After a while, I noticed that something might be wrong with the journal line association. To check this, I added the journal batch number field into my template and noticed that the existing lines still had a relationship to the old and posted journal no. 00001.
When I tried to overwrite those lines, I basically tried to tell D365 to delete already posted vouchers and replace them with some new ones. D365 did of course not allow me doing this and consequently generated the error messages. After becoming aware of this issue, I simply copied the existing lines from journal 00001 to the end of my template, entered the new journal batch number created (00459) and modified the posting date.
Those changes finally allowed me uploading and posting my journal.
I hope that this information and the experiences that I made are helpful for you and allow you circumventing those problems when using the document template in D365. Till next time.
