Want to be notified more, or less, often?

Most businesses these days have a lot of moving parts, and when you’re focused on one activity, like making a sale, it can be easy to overlook other details, like how much of the item will be left in stock. To help you stay on top of things, Dynamics 365 for Financials offers the concept of notifications. In case you haven’t already seen it, here’s a link to the official announcement.

Notifications offer advice and hints, but unlike pop-up messages that require you to act, even if it’s just to click OK or Cancel, notifications don’t interrupt what you’re doing.

If you’re using Financials, you may have noticed a blue bar at the top of the workspace, as shown in the following image.

That’s a notification. They just hang out, and let you act when you’re ready. But the advantages of notifications are more than just their subtlety. Notifications are also fully managed. You can turn them on or off, and specify the conditions that trigger them. For example:

• If you don’t care that a customer’s balance is overdue, or you aren’t interested in overdue balances when the payment method is cash, why be notified?
• You’re familiar with Financials and understand the concept of posting, and don’t want to be notified every time you close a document without posting it, so you decide to turn off the notification.
• You want to be notified when inventory levels drop below a certain threshold, but only for items you source from a particular vendor.

Manage your notifications in My Notifications. There are a couple of ways to get there:

• In the upper-right corner of the window, choose Search for Page or Report, enter My Notifications, and then choose the related link.
• Go to the My Settings page, and choose the Change when I receive notifications link.

For a little more information about what each notification does, choose the name.

You can also personalize the conditions that trigger notifications, so that you’re notified only about things that are important to you. Note that your settings are personal, and apply only to you. Other people can personalize their own notifications. This includes turning notifications on or off.

For example, if you aren’t interested in being notified about overdue balances if the payment method is Cash, you can set conditions that will exclude those, as shown in the following image.

If you aren’t familiar with filters, there’s a helpful article on MSDN titled Enter Criteria in Filters. You can also read about notifications in the documentation for Financials.