Business Central 2024 release wave 2 is almost here and here’s a pick of my favorite features coming in this release.
All of the new features can be found from here.
I think this is feature is great for companies that have some kind of recurring revenue and contracts with customers. It has lots of cool features such as:
- Contracts for which you do recurring billing for items and services.
- Billing schedules with flexible parameters that cater to typical use cases for recurring billing.
- Usage-based billing.
- Automated billing.
- Deferral integration.
- Revenue recognition based on billing schedules.
- Contract updates (parameters and prices).
- Standard reports for contracts, customers, billing schedules, recognized revenue, future billing dates and amounts, and so on. Most reports are available as Power BI reports.
2. Capture documents with Azure AI
This feature is not yet available but promised to come to public preview in January 2025. But it seems to offer PDF and other document digitalization natively in Business Central!
3. Create Purchase Orders for Projects straight from Projects
Small feature but still very useful. I really like that Microsoft is improving the Project module which is one of my favorite in Business Central!
4. Automate tests with Copilot
Not yet available (public preview in dec 2024) but looks very promising and useful. Features include:
- Author tests for your prompt dialogs using a familiar framework in AL and Visual Studio Code.
- Organize your test datasets based on purpose and prompt variations.
- Implement automated verification depending on your feature use case.
- Run tests as fully automated or semiautomated.
5. New features for word layouts
This new update for Word layouts will add conditional visibility for texts, tables etc in word layout which means that now Word is much better replacement for RDLC reports!
6. Optional minor updates and five month period for major updates
Now you can postpone major updates for 5 months and skip the monthly minor updates. Very useful for some large customers with large extensions that need time to fix issues before updates.