I’ve been doing a little bit of work with the Electronic Reporting engine in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and I ran into a little trick that I wasn’t able to find listed on any forums, Yammer groups, LCS issues, or blog posts. What was I trying to do? I was creating a custom payment model to export a payment file.  Since this file was going to have multiple records and could have multiple different types of payments, I needed a nice clean identifier for each record.  I wanted to...

Price control to maintain sales price compliance – something that seems like it should be supported out of the box in Dynamics AX or Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.  Specifically, we’ve heard a number of companies say they want a way to review if a sales representative modifies a price that’s generated from a trade agreement when a sales order is created. While a simple report or list page reporting on order events might be useful for this, some people require a rigid workflow for review...

Background Let me first preface this post with giving a shout-out to the Critical Situation Management and Escalation team at Microsoft.  I was able to work with them throughout the night to get a recent issue with Management Reporter resolved even though I created my ticket around 5:30 Central Time.  They were incredibly responsive and helpful. The details of the issue are sort of bland.  During a recent upgrade from D365FO 7.2 to 8.1.3, a feature change in D365FO impacted the behavior of exchange...

There are lots of pros and cons to working remotely. Pro? Don’t have to head into the office every day. Con? Don’t have a great way to communicate or interact with a team on a consistent basis. There are tons of collaboration tools these days. Being a Microsoft Partner, we use Microsoft Teams and SharePoint within Office 365 to collaborate and keep in touch with each other throughout the day. One of the things we pride ourselves on, though, is providing access to management to all of our...

We’ve come a long way!  The reports that have looked the same since as far as I can remember have been updated to “Modern report designs”.  They’re not usable for every condition ( take a look here for instructions on how to install them and check out the caveats ), but they’re a good step up for people with basic form needs. Comparison of legacy forms vs. modern forms, courtesy of Microsoft They look great when they work, but there’s some pieces on them that I thought were kind of annoying...

Findings from #UserGroupSummit I’m sitting here after attending the MSFT14 – Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations: Microsoft Managed Continuous Updates and Support Experience session at AXUG 2018 in Phoenix.  I attended this session because I knew Shelly Bakke would be leading it and I knew she had the info I was looking for. My primary mission of attending the User Group Summit this year was to get some additional information on the upcoming deadlines with regards to the end of support for...

Look at all these KPIs! There’s all these wonderful out-of-the-box reports provided by Microsoft for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. When you spin up a new instance, the values just show up. Unfortunately, there’s not much of an explanation of how they’re calculated. Obviously, Microsoft is trying their best to provide reports that show valuable numbers but is trying to keep them generic enough so they apply to many different companies. In trying to explain how to tailor these to individual...

Upgrading from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 We’ve recently done a couple of upgrades from AX 2012 to D365. I thought it might be beneficial for a quick synopsis of the different types we’ve encountered. AX 2009 to D365 There really isn’t an “upgrade” from AX2009 to D365.  There is a data migration toolset provided by Microsoft that gets installed in AX2009, but it’s primarily a backport of DIXF to AX2009.  It helps get your data aligned with the new schemas, but it still requires some hand...

Adding custom fields As mentioned in the video I recently created ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxnOdPWMYw8 ), since platform update 13, authorized Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations users can create and manage custom fields without requiring development effort. Although this is documented really well in the Docs page at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/fin-and-ops/get-started/user-defined-fields I figured I’d put together some additional findings. What...

Master planning performance troubleshooting In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, planning departments typically run master planning regenerations in batch overnight.  When the planning department comes in in the morning, they expect that everything completed successfully.  This might not be the case.  I’ll show you how to use the Master planning history form to make sure things are running smoothly. Where to find this Each plan has its own history form.  If you’re using multiple plans...