Dynamics 365 Finance: What’s New? 2021 Release Wave 2

From October 2021 to March 2022, Dynamics 365 Finance will continue to lead in providing intelligence and automation to users in a way that they can trust. In the 2021 release wave 2, there will be focus on data-driven insights as part of the general availability of Finance Insights, enhanced usability and expanding global coverage.

Updates for Dynamics 365 Finance

• Enhanced Usability

This release for Dynamics 365 Finance is focused on bringing additional enhancements to core financial capabilities which will ensure increased productivity for users to help them close financial activities on time. With automation and modernised services, Dynamics 365 Finance will be bringing enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close and financial dimensions as well as extended focus on quality, performance, and customer-requested enhancements.

• Finance insights

The general availability of finance insights will allow organisations to become more empowered with out-of-the-box machine learning for their financial operations. Common pain points for finance employees include spending hours on repetitive, time-consuming, low-value daily activities and struggling with rapid decision making which as a result leads to slow financial processes and less time spent towards strategic initiatives. With Finance Insights, your organisation will be digitally transformed by bringing the power of AI and automation into your financial processes. By taking advantage of AI and automation, you will be able to understand and act on your company’s cash position and also have the ability to take proactive action to improve it. By having tedious tasks automated or removed, you will save time and be able to move your business forward with the insights provided. Other benefits of finance insights include being able to view when customers are predicted to pay, having the ability to forecast what the budget should be and being able to view forecasted cash positions based on accounts payable, accounts receivable, project transactions and predicted outcomes.

• Globalisation

To continue enhancing the Dynamics 365 Finance globalisation offerings, two main areas will become the primary focus for the 2021 release wave 2. The main areas of focus will be further out-of-the-box global expansion, and simplifying compliance and globalisation extensibility through no code/low-code globalisation services.

Global Expansion

Firstly, shipping will become more available to more countries and regions out of the box in order to help simplify global Dynamics 365 Finance usage. In addition to the six new countries that will come on board, Dynamics 365 Finance will be shipping Commerce localisation for Russia and will also deliver the highly requested e-commerce localization for India. They will also deliver localisation for Indonesia whilst expanding their global coverage to a total of 44 countries.

No-code/low-code globalisation services

There will be continued enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Finance configurable, no code/low-code globalisation capabilities. These globalisation capabilities will be transformed into microservices that can enable enterprise-scale functionality and performance and can simplify globalisation extensibility. The Tax Calculation service will also be released for general availability to support complex tax compliance scenarios. In addition, there will be enhanced functionality and country coverage of the Electronic Invoicing service which will integrate any first-party or third party application via Microsoft Dataverse. The integration will allow these applications to use the Dynamics 365 Finance service that supports global trends of real-time tax reporting and business-to-business e-invoicing.  Microsoft will also ship several frequently requested features based on the most popular customer ideas for configurable business documents and electronic reporting.

The delivery timelines for these updates may change and projected functionality may not be released. If you would like to learn more about these updates or Dynamics 365 Finance, please get in touch with us and let us know how we can help you get started today.