Video Transcript:
What is Dynamics 365 Finance?
Well, first it is a web‑based application.
This means that as long as you have a web browser and an internet connection, you can access the system anywhere in the world.
It is an ERP to track financial performance.
That means that it can do all the financial reporting that your organization needs and allows you to do base sub‑ledger financial work as well.
It is multi‑company, multi‑currency, and multi‑language.
That means if you are an organization that just does business in one country and has one legal entity, it can handle that.
Or if you are a multinational with subsidiaries in a number of different countries and doing work in all the different currencies with users who speak different languages, it can handle that as well.
You'll often hear the term finance and supply chain management.
Dynamics 365 Finance is fully integrated with Dynamics Supply Chain Management, which is the operational side of the ERP.
Any of the transactions done within that—purchase orders, sales orders, production—the financial impacts and the general ledger integration will all happen automatically and be available to report against in real time.
However, it is not a requirement that you implement supply chain management.
You can also integrate Dynamics Finance with other operational systems as well.
Dynamics 365 Finance has your standard traditional modules.
That is your general ledger, where you specify your chart of accounts, make journal entries, close balances, and perform year‑end close activities.
All of those various pieces can be done in the general ledger module.
Then you have accounts receivable, or AR.
You can issue invoices, create customers, perform cash application against those invoices, and perform credit and collection activities such as tracking overdue balances, making phone calls and emails, and eventually writing balances off.
Within accounts payable, you can receive invoices from your vendors, register them, get approval to pay, and then make payment with checks, ACH, or other electronic payment methods.
Finance also has a native positive pay format.
You have fixed assets, which allow you to do full lifecycle acquisition, depreciation, and disposal.
Finally, you have the budgeting module, which allows you to load budgets, run comparisons between budget and actuals, and produce financial statements.
Dynamics 365 Finance also supports chart of accounts and reporting.
It allows you to have multiple charts of accounts.
If you have organizations that need to use a different chart—whether for company or statutory reasons—you can have multiple charts and consolidate them together with rules that you define.
It has a built‑in financial report designer, which allows you to build report structures directly in the system and continue running them each month or quarter.
You can build as many reports as you'd like, whether for parent companies, auditors, banks, or other stakeholders.
You have the ability to run a trial balance, drill down into transactions, and export anything directly into Excel, since Dynamics 365 Finance is a Microsoft product.
You can also upload data from Excel into Dynamics, and there are various out‑of‑the‑box reports such as aging reports, margin reports, and top customer reports.
Dimensions are an extremely powerful tool.
A dimension is a way to segment your chart of accounts without creating numerous main accounts.
For example, if you want to analyze revenue and cost of goods sold by product line, older systems required separate accounts for each product line or region.
In Dynamics, you can instead create a dimension such as product line or department and assign it to a single revenue or COGS account.
Whenever a transaction is posted, it is segmented automatically.
This makes maintenance much easier—if you open a new product line, you simply add it in one place.
There are also several newer modules added in recent years.
The first is Landed Cost.
This module allows organizations to take ownership of goods and pay for them before they arrive at the warehouse.
For companies buying overseas, you can post the material invoice and bring goods into a goods‑in‑transit warehouse.
You can also book costs such as freight and duties to the journey and allocate those costs across the products purchased using methods such as value, volume, or weight.
The rebate management module expands traditional rebate functionality.
It supports stepped or cumulative rebates, invoice or early‑pay discounts, and the inclusion of ancillary charges such as freight or handling.
You can aggregate rebates across multiple customers and remit payment to a head office.
There is also royalty functionality to track commissions or royalties on product sales, as well as vendor rebate tracking.
The unified pricing module extends traditional sales pricing.
It supports attribute pricing, buy‑one‑get‑one offers, free coupons, and other advanced pricing capabilities.
Expense management includes configurable fields, OCR capabilities for receipt capture, and a fully integrated mobile app.
Users can take a picture of a receipt, and the system identifies the merchant, amount, and taxes.
Finally, there is the subscription billing module for organizations with repeat orders.
You can create a billing schedule and have the system automatically generate orders and invoices.
This supports both services and physical products and includes revenue and expense deferrals, such as spreading revenue for prepaid warranties over the life of a contract.