We were hearing about Dynamics NAV 2017 since long time that it will be releasing by the end of 2016 which will be coming up with further integration of office 365 and few many more interesting features (called project Madeira).

Yes, now Microsoft has released the beta version of NAV 2017. 

Here is the brief description about the road Map of NAV 2017 release

                          Fig 1. Shows roadmap of Microsoft Dynamics NAV

So, what’s new in Dynamics NAV 2017 Beta Version?

1.Richer Incoming Documents

A new field called “processed” have been introduced to reduce the huge amount of entries in incoming document list page.

Filter will show only unprocessed incoming documents.

2.Inventory Items

To find the right product that our customer wants we can define our own attribute types such as color, country of manufacture, size, or product dimensions and add them to our inventory items.

                                               Fig 2. Inventory items with attributes.

So, when you add items to sales and purchase documents you can view and filter on attribute values to limit the list of items to choose from or take action on.

3.Smarter sales and purchase documents

Earlier we were able to cancel posted sales and purchase invoices but now we’re also able to cancel posted sales and purchase credit memos.

Dynamics NAV has the capabilities to unapplies the credit memo from the invoice and creates a new invoice that is applied to the credit memo. This will bring back to where we started before creating the credit memos.

4.Account Categories in Chart of Accounts

Now we can group general ledger accounts to fit our need for financial reporting in order to do so Microsoft have added account categories and subcategories.

Ex. For each G/L Account, you can specify the account category so that ledger entries posted to this accounts are categorized as assets or liabilities (income or expense).

5.Payment reconciliation

The Payment reconciliation journal now shows totals for outstanding transactions and outstanding payments. From there, we can look up the list of documents that have not been applied or used in the reconciliation process.

6.Jobs

·         Project Manager Role Centre

A new “Project Manager” filed has been added in Job Card so now users can have a clear sense of job ownership.

·         My Jobs List on the Project Manager Role Centre will now display jobs with the status of order by default based on the new project manager.

So, now if John is assigned as a project manager to 4 jobs and those jobs have the On Order status, those 4jobs will default on the My Jobs list on the project manager role centre.

7.Fixed Assets

A standard setup is provided to setup fixed assets easily. We can also modify if anytime we want. We can register fixed assets as cards with complete information, accounting details and report classification.

The right accounting entries are created automatically.

8.Simplified setup for using Dynamics CRM from inside Dynamics NAV

There’s a new assisted setup guide to the Business manager home page that guides through the setup process. Once that’s done, we will have a smooth coupling of Dynamics CRM records with Dynamics NAV records.

9.Simplified opportunity management and CRM functionality

Dynamics NAV CRM module has been simplified in no. of ways:

·         Existing CRM wizard have been replaced with card pages so that they can also run in web client.

·         Worksheet pages have been replaced by list pages so we can use pages in browsers.

·         The .NET components for mail merge have been replaced with word reporting.

·         A new Sales & Relationship Manager Role Center (9026) has been created to show the relationship management in a better way.

·         For users to setup Email logging a new wizard has been created. (public folders, rules, and job queue setup). 

10.Smart notifications give you advice and recommendations

Suppose, we create a sales invoice for a customer that has an overdue balance then a context notification will show up in different areas of Dynamics NAV. But, it is up to us whether to react to the notification or ignore it.

11.  Extensions

·         Paypal payment standard service is installed as an extension in Dynamics NAV 2017 and ready to be enabled.

·         To enable customer payments through paypal you must to following things.

a.       Setup Paypal payments as a payment service in the payment services window.

b.      Select paypal payments standard in the payment service field on the sales document if questioned.

·         Quickbooks Data migration:

If your buiiness uses quickbooks then you can export the necessary information and then open an assisted setup guide to upload the data to Dynamics NAV.

·         Sales and inventory forecase:

The Sales and Inventory forecast extension gives you insights about potential sales and a clear overview of expected stockouts.

We’ve used Extensions to upgrade add-ons in NAV 2016. But that was limited to some of the object types in NAV 2016.

Fig. 3 Extensions in Dynamics NAV

But here in NAV 2017, it supports for additional object types.

·         Apart from table, pages we can also include reports, XML Ports, queries

·         Support for .NET framework add-ins.

·         Support for web services.

·         We can also restore and backup data using the concept of extensions.

·         Windows PowerShell cmdlet have been updated for publishing extensions.

12. Office 365

                                Fig. 4 Office 365 integration extended in Dynamics NAV

·         Suppose if our organization uses office 365, then Dynamics NAV 2017 includes an add-in so you can invoice your customers based on entries in the outlook calendar.

·         There’s a calendar appointment, so from that calendar appointment you can open the Dynamics NAV add-in and get an overview for the customer associated with the appointment.

·         You can create and send an invoice for the services provided in the meeting. All this will happen in outlook calendar.

·         Updating add-in is also made easy. We’ll get notified that a new version is ready for us in outlook.

·         From the contacts list we can manually synchronize your Dynamics NAV contacts to office 365 people. The contacts from office365 will sync back to Dynamics NAV as well.

13.  US financial reports

In US Version of Dynamics 2017, there’re four financial reports added to the Business Manager and Accountant Role Centre:

·         Balance Sheet

·         Income Statement

·         Cash Flow Statement, and

·         Retained Earnings Statement

The reports uses G/L Account categories and sub-categories to group your financial data.

There are lot more many which we shall update you in our next blog.

For any question please write an email to us at Subhash.sharma@ecanarys.com