Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations 2022 release wave 1

May 1, 2022

Review the release plans for the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O), comprised of Finance and Supply Chain Management, is a powerful cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Microsoft recently released the 2022 release wave 1 plans with important updates and enhancements that Dynamics 365 F&O users can expect to be rolled out from April 2022 to September 2022.

In this post we will highlight the key updates and features for the following applications:

Dynamics 365 Finance

Advanced bank reconciliation

In the 2022 release wave 1, Dynamics 365 Finance will receive several improvements to advanced bank reconciliations:

  • Reverse reconciled advanced bank reconciliation – When bank reconciliations are reconciled without new transactions or correction amounts, this feature enables the reverse reconciliation button on the Bank reconciliation and Bank reconciliation worksheet pages to reverse reconciliations.
  • Bank to ledger reconciliation report improvement – The Bank to ledger reconciliation report has been improved. Currently, if a bank transaction has a correction during bank reconciliation, there’s a discrepancy in the Bank to ledger reconciliation report. Now, an additional correction record is added to help the reconciliation process.
  • Reverse correction amount in advanced bank reconciliation – This feature allows reverse correction amounts in advanced bank reconciliation. With this feature you can reverse the correction amount in advanced bank reconciliation or cancel reconciliation in bank statement line with correction amount.
  • Allow recovery of bank reconciliation worksheets stuck in workflow – This function will reset the status of bank reconciliation worksheets that are stuck in workflow. Users can check workflow history in the Bank reconciliation journal to locate the lines that are in an Unrecoverable status. After selecting the line, the bank reconciliation workflow status will be set to Not yet started, which allows the user to submit it again
Advanced bank reconciliation

Vendor bank account validation

In earlier versions of Dynamics 365 Finance, you could submit a vendor payment journal to the workflow process even if the information for the vendor’s bank account was incorrect. In the 2022 release wave 1, Dynamics 365 Finance lets you identify issues with the vendor’s bank account before submitting the payment journal to workflow, thereby letting you correct the issue before it surfaces as an error during the workflow process.

When there’s an issue with a bank account that’s used in a payment journal that has been submitted to workflow, the issue will stop the workflow process when the issue is encountered. When that happens, a member of your accounts payable staff must correct the issue and then resubmit the payment journal to workflow. Finding and fixing potential errors in advance can save time and help prevent the frustration that can arise.

Vendor bank account validation

Improvements to subscription billing

Subscription Billing in Dynamics 365 Finance’s 2022 release wave 1 comes with several new features that offer greater flexibility and control to organizations over their subscription billing. With these updates, users can easily automate and manage evergreen renewals, set up flexible pricing models, and gain better insights into recurring billing. Here are the new features:

  • Recurring Contract Billing – This feature allows organizations to manage pricing and billing parameters at the line-item level, automate evergreen renewals, and improve forecast accuracy with monthly recurring revenue reports. Flexible pricing and subscription billing can be based on usage, consumption, or meter readings. Users can also consolidate invoices if multiple billing schedules exist.
  • Revenue Allocation – Users can allocate revenue to items within contracts that have multiple performance obligations and assign default and standalone selling prices and methods to items to calculate standalone selling prices as a percentage of related items. This feature enables compliance with accounting standards.
  • Revenue and Expense Deferrals – Advanced revenue recognition enables organizations to manage revenue in one system, eliminating manual processes or external systems. This feature offers greater control over revenue recognition by allowing users to manage deferrals at the line-item level. Users can define different types of deferral schedules, such as monthly, quarterly, or based on specified dates, using predefined templates.

Ledger settlement enhancements

Microsoft has added several enhancements to the ledger settlement process to make it easier for businesses to reconcile the balance of the ledger account with the detailed transactions that make up that balance. In this release, Microsoft has implemented the following enhancements:

  • Year-end close and ledger settlement process enhancements – The year-end close and ledger settlement processes will be tightly integrated to ensure that only unsettled transactions are considered during the year-end close, providing correct beginning balances per transaction currency. This ensures that settled foreign currency transactions aren’t included in the foreign currency revaluation process in the next fiscal year.
  • Reporting and inquiries improvements – Reports and inquiries will use the settlement date, which provides an accurate picture of what is unsettled as of the reporting date.
  • New button added to view settlement voucher – A new button, named Settlement voucher, has been added to the Vendor settlement history and Customer settlement history pages. You can use the button to view all transactions in a settlement voucher in one step. This feature is available by default and can save time when performing reconciliations when you try to view all the transactions in one settlement voucher.
Ledger settlement enhancements

Enhancements to the globalization studio

Globalization Studio is a low-code tax compliance and globalization platform that enhances Microsoft’s compliance and globalization capabilities with out-of-the-box multi-country content. The Globalization Studio will be enhanced as part of the 2022 release wave 1 and will include the following capabilities:

  • Configurable business documents – You can use named electronic reporting destinations for all types of business documents that can be generated in Finance by using the Electronic Reporting framework. Additionally, users can download new business document templates or new versions of existing business document templates from one workspace.
  • Order by function in queries – This feature significantly improves the performance of many electronic reporting configurations that are executed on large volumes of data that require some specific order sorting. Electronic reporting users can choose querymode to execute the electronic reporting OrderBy function.
  • Tax calculation service – This feature provides users with the option to inherit tax information, such as tax codes, rates, and amounts from the original transaction, or recalculate tax based on the latest tax setup. Additionally, this release enables multiple document tax calculations in one API call to increase the performance of the tax calculation processing for customers with a high volume of invoices in certain industries.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Global Inventory Accounting add-in

This add-in was in public preview in the 2021 release wave 2 and will be generally available as a part of the 2022 release wave 1. The Global Inventory Accounting Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides the ability to account inventory in multiple representations by applying the appropriate valuation method and the selected accounting currency per instance. With this new functionality, organizations can define as many costing ledgers as required. Inventory accounting in dual currencies and in dual valuations are both supported. Additionally, this solution provides a detailed audit trail, which ensures that you can track inventory accounting events and measurements all the way back to the original document posted in Supply Chain Management.

Inventory Visibility add-in

In the 2022 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft has implemented several enhancements to the Inventory Visibility add-in to help organizations unlock visibility, resiliency, and efficiency in their supply chain.

  • Inventory allocation – Inventory allocation lets you pre-allocate available inventory to make sure you can fulfill orders for key channels or accounts. It helps you meet service level agreements (SLAs) and fulfill commitments to important customers.
  • Availabletopromise – Available-to-promise (ATP) functionality for the Inventory Visibility Add-in can greatly increase your order fulfillment capability. It provides visibility into future stock levels and can query the next available date for orders. This reduces the risks of losing sales opportunities and overstocking inventory.
  • Onhand query support for WMSenabled items – Businesses using warehouse management processes (WMS) are now able to leverage the Inventory Visibility service to make near real-time inventory on-hand queries of all warehouse items. With this enhancement, the Inventory Visibility service calculates WMS-enabled items correctly, regardless of which hierarchical level the items are stored in.

Manufacturing improvements

The 2022 release wave 1 focuses on building resilience into key manufacturing processes. In this release, Microsoft enhances the production floor execution interface to make it easier for manufacturers to complete the following processes:

  • Material consumption and reservations – In this release, manufacturers can leverage the new, modern user experience to register material consumption, batch numbers, and serial numbers.
  • Catch weight items – Workers can now use the production floor execution interface to instantly register material consumption for catch weight items. They can also explicitly register the weight of each piece of consumed material, formula items, co-products, and by-products that are enabled for catch weight.
  • Job search – This feature makes it possible to add a search field to the production floor execution interface. Workers can search by entering text or scanning a bar code.
  • View full serial, batch, and license plat numbers – This feature provides an improved experience for viewing lists of serial, batch, and license plate numbers in the production floor execution interface. The display changes from a card view with a limited number of characters to a list view that provides enough space to show the full values.
Material consumption and reservations

Planning optimization

Microsoft has implemented many updates and new features to Planning Optimization processes. Planning optimization enables businesses to increase their agility so they can respond to volatile business environments. In this release wave, Planning Optimization has been significantly expanded to reduce replenishment time, reduce inventory levels, and increase resilience in response to disruptive changes in supply and demand.

  • Support for shelf life – Companies that have items with limited shelf life can now take advantage of Planning Optimization to automatically replenish expired goods. 
  • Resource scheduling – Planning Optimization now supports production scheduling that respects finite resource capacity. Finite scheduling enables manufacturers to detect expected future delays caused by limited resource capacity. 
  • Capable-to-promise (CTP) – Capable-to-promise (CTP) support in Planning Optimization enables manufacturers to provide their customers with reliable order-promising dates directly from the sales order.
  • Planned orders simplified – This feature makes it faster and easier to view, approve, and firm planned orders. It adds a page called Planned Orders Simplified,which is a simplified version of the standard Planned Orders page. 
  • Planning optimization suggestions – Action messages with suggestions to optimize existing supply are created when the system detects existing supply orders that can be optimized due to recent requirement changes.
  • Support for subcontracting – Enables manufacturers to use Planning Optimization to automatically create the purchase orders needed to control and track subcontracted components for production orders.
Capable-to-promise (CTP)

Want to learn more?

The new features and enhancements listed above are only a few highlights included in the Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations 2022 release wave 1. For all enhancements included in this wave, you can review Microsoft’s documentation for new and planned features for Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Users can start exploring these new features and capabilities. Additionally, many Dynamics 365 F&O users rely on a Microsoft partner for assistance reviewing the most impactful updates. The right Dynamics 365 partner helps users identify the features most beneficial to their organization and provides training for users to maintain peak performance.