What’s New in Dynamics 365 (Part 1): Intelligent Budget Proposals

Microsoft D365 is constantly evolving to meet its customers’ needs and periodically will update or release new features in waves throughout the year. Tune in to our three-part blog series that will give you a quick overview of some of the exciting things Microsoft has pushed out last year.

Time to Explore: Feature Management Workspace

Before diving into Intelligent budget proposals, let’s take a moment to explore the Feature management workspace. The Feature management workspace shows you a complete list of features, when they were released, and any documentation related to the release. 

From here, you can enable/disable features, reschedule features, and check for updates to features. Additionally, you can even utilize the Feature management Data entity to export feature settings. For more information about the Feature management workspace, check here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/fin-ops/get-started/feature-management/feature-management-overview.

Intelligent Budget Proposals Meets AI

There is so much value in automating those often repetitive and boring tasks. Intelligent budget proposals uses AI to greatly reduce the amount of time spent gathering historical data and creating the nitty-gritty budget detail. D365 will use historical data (the more, the better!) to automate the budgeting process by:

• Automatically creating budget plans for multiple scenarios using years of posted historical planned vs. actuals for multiple scenarios
• Using a workflow to automatically route budget plans and worksheets to each department manager
• Consolidating multiple budget plans into one master budget plan

Using Intelligent budget proposals with advanced budgeting not only gives you the opportunity to automate processes, but also gives you the visibility to monitor budget performance in real time. Create Budget codes to easily identify the type of budget transaction, all with an audit trail. Configure Budget control to give you the insight into available budget funds and for planned and actual expenditures.

Lastly, Microsoft has supplied us with a couple workspaces to give you additional tracking resources. Use the Ledger budgets and forecasts workspace to look at a quick view of budgets that either are over budget or approaching the limit.

The Budget planning workspace can be used during budget planning to review Budget plans that are assigned to you/others, view the budget forecast, and view the organizational hierarchy for the budget plan.

Stay tuned for parts two and three of our Feature Overview! If you found this blog helpful, be sure to check out Finance insights has arrived for Dynamics 365 Finance.