New and updated capabilities in the July update of Dynamics 365 for Financials

Today we started rolling out an update that will be made available to you over the next few days with additional capabilities in the core application and with new extensions. 

Your business inbox in Outlook is getting even better

With this update, you can be even more productive if you have a need for invoicing your customers based on entries in your Outlook calendar. From a calendar appointment, you can open the Financials add-in and get an overview for the customer associated with the appointment. Then, you can create and send an invoice for the services provided in the meeting - all of this happening right there in the Outlook calendar. For more information, see Using Financials as your Business Inbox in Outlook.

We've also made it easy to update the add-in - you'll get notified that a new version is ready for you in Outlook.

And then we've added actions to the vendor dashboard in the Outlook add-in so you can work directly with attachments to the associated email. You use the actions to send the email attachments directly to the Incoming Documents list and send the documents, such as PDF files, to an Optical Characters Recognition (OCR) service. Here the documents are turned into a machine-readable format so that the invoice information can be added automatically to Financials - this reduces the risk of errors and as a result increases productivity. Just like that, you are sent an approval request for the incoming document. In Outlook, it's a seamless process where the Financials add-in pulls the attachment from the email, sends it to the Incoming Documents page, and links it to the purchase invoice record.

For more information, see Manage Incoming Documents.

Shipping agents and item attributes make your sales documents richer

With this update, you can add attributes to your inventory items that make it really easy to find the right product that your customer wants. You can define your own attribute types, such as color, country of manufacture, size, or product dimensions, and add them to your items as a supplement to the built-in item attribute types and values. Then, when you add items to sales and purchase documents, or just organize your items, you can view and filter on the attribute values to limit the list of items to choose from or take action on. For more information, see How to: Work with Item Attributes.

Similarly, we've added 3 fields to the sales documents that make a big difference: In order to track when an order is delivered to a customer, you can now fill the Shipping Agent Code and Shipping Agent Service Code fields as shown in the following screenshot:

If the shipping agent provides a tracking ID for a shipment, you can enter it in the Package Tracking No. field. All three fields are available on sales orders and invoices.

New extensions add even more powerful capabilities

Just like the first update of Financials, we've made new extensions available to you in this update. You can use the Extension Management page to get additional information and install the new extensions. The following new extensions are added in this update.

• LA Address Verification
  Verifies and corrects all addresses in Financials.
• Data Migration - Opera
  Extends the functionality of the Data Migration wizard. Easily migrate the Customers, Vendors, Items, and G/L Accounts entities from Pegasus Opera into Financials.
• Data Migration - Sage
  Extends the functionality of the Data Migration wizard. Easily migrate the Customers, Vendors, Items, and G/L Accounts entities from Sage into Financials.

For more information, see Finaicials Extensions by Other Providers.

Manage your customer relationships using Microsoft Dynamics CRM from inside Financials

Financials includes opportunity management and basic customer relationship management. But if you need more, you can easily set up a connection with Dynamics CRM so you can benefit from the strong capabilities that Dynamics CRM offers, such as marketing and customer service capabilities.

We've added a new assisted setup guide to the Business Manager home page that guides you through the setup process. Once that's done, you'll have a seamless coupling of Dynamics CRM records with Financials records. 

Note that you'll have to choose set the experience to Suite in the Company Information window to get access to integration to the CRM functionality. For more information, see Manage your customer relationships using Microsoft Dynamics CRM from inside Financials.