Dynamics 365 Business Central – Connect and Automate Processes within your Business Operations
By Proximo 3
What is Dynamics 365 Business Central?
Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft’s cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system aimed at the Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) market. With Business Central, Microsoft has developed and brought to market a solution that will help you manage your sales, service, operations, and finance processes in one single solution.
Until now, the functionality and benefits of ERP systems were the preserve of the l-scale corporates. However, over the last decade and particularly during the pandemic, the way we work, where we work & how we collaborate has changed. Business Central is a fully cloud-built solution with desktop, tablet, or mobile capabilities and therefore enables your team to work seamlessly across different sites, locations, and across different business functions in one single solution. It will help your people to be more efficient & effective in how they deliver for your customers, no matter their work location.
As Business Central sits in the Microsoft Cloud it can be effortlessly integrated with Microsoft’s portfolio of products including Power BI, Power Automate, Office365 & Teams, in addition to incorporating industry-specific apps from Microsoft AppSource, it’s the ERP of choice for high-growth businesses who need to scale at speed, and in an automated way.
Why is Dynamics 365 Business Central the solution for your business?
Business Central covers the core functions of any global business, including specific modules providing functionality for:
- Financial Management
- Sales Management
- Supply Chain & Warehouse Management (Manufacturing)
- Project Management
- Service Management
Operating a business across multiple regions is complex with a myriad of global and localised regulations. Business Central is developed with this in mind as it’s supported in 25 languages and compliant with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR. Additionally, user interface changes are included where required for local regulatory compliance.
Many SME and high-growth businesses we have worked with have solutions built around evolving their legacy system landscape which is based on acquiring a software solution for a specific functional requirement. And often this ‘best of breed’ approach works adequately. However, it’s regularly characterised by having multiple different unconnected systems and data structures which can give rise to the following:
- Their people spend time manually transferring or keying data between systems or managing key processes in spreadsheets.
- Time intensive month end reporting routines with disproportionate time spent on ‘production’ of reporting focussed on historical events and insufficient time to generate insights that influence decisions.
- Limits the possibilities to automate and scale processes in a cost-effective manner.
- Lack the functionality to meet regulatory requirements across the different markets in which they operate.
Dynamics 365 Business Central stands out as the market-leading ERP solution for SMEs because it enables organisations to overcome these barriers. It has a wealth of functionality and features to ensure your business processes are well-defined and scalable, but flexible enough to evolve with your business as you grow.
Two Business Central Features That Improve Finance Processes
Connect & Share Your Data with Microsoft 365
Most if not all users across the businesses we have worked with rely heavily on Microsoft Office applications to do their roles. Indeed, at times it feels like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are the user interface through which roles are performed, and often means users can be skeptical about moving to a new system with an unfamiliar user experience.
Dynamics 365 Business Central helps ease that transition journey for the user as it enables users to download, view, and even edit data directly in Business Central via Microsoft 365 applications. Therefore, not only do users avoid having to manually key data into systems and spreadsheets, the quality and accuracy of your reporting and analysis are significantly improved as it’s based on data direct from the system.
Additionally, in modern organisations, employees often have to collaborate across different business functions and different locations. Whether someone is office based, working remotely, or on-site at an important client meeting, Business Central users are able to share system reports and data effortlessly via the MS Teams integration.
Management Reporting & Data Visualisation
If there’s one certainty in most organisations, it is that both finance and business colleagues spend time contributing to the month-end reporting cycle. And it makes sense, as the most common metric of assessing business performance is via the financial statements, the basis of many of the financial and non-financial KPIs used to measure performance.
However, that monthly reporting cycle often burns a high number of employee hours as the ‘production process’ involved means business users need to manually source and shape the data that underpins the reporting produced.
This is where Dynamics 365 Business Central excels. Its rich and diverse reporting capability can be used to provide real-time reporting connecting the data across sales, purchasing, finance, projects, and manufacturing modules. Business Central offers a rich array of built-in reports including Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and Working Capital schedules which can be edited, and data structures adapted to ensure you report on the things that matter to your organisation.
Moreover, through the integration with Microsoft365 & Power BI, Business Central data can be used to report and analyse business performance in real-time. By combining the benefits of real-time, structured transactional and master data, and Power BI’s ability to visualise data, Dynamics 365 Business Central transforms the reporting capability of organisations. The rich functionality ensures that businesses can determine what metrics are important to them, and build custom dashboards to track trends and performance, updated and refreshed in real-time.
Business Central reporting transforms monthly reporting cycles from being labour-intensive & producing reporting focussed on historical events, to a monthly reporting experience built around real-time reporting which enables users to generate insights that positively impact future outcomes.
Learn more about how Business Central can enhance the operations & processes in your organisation
This blog covers the positive impact Business Central can have on your finance processes and reporting. If you’d like to find out more about the financial capability of Business Central, or if you think Dynamics 365 Business Central could help your business, visit our service offering page or book a free call with one of the experts at Proximo 3.