Operating on legacy finance systems can slow down your organization. When users are forced to consistently use manual processes, your organization becomes susceptible to data-entry errors, inefficient workflows and user frustration.
The change from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 Finance can be transformative for your business. With centralized data and workflows, and AI and machine learning to drive valuable insights, Dynamics 365 Finance can help you make sense of disorganized data and bring order to previously disorganized processes.
Here are five areas where finance professionals can increase efficiencies with Dynamics 365 Finance.
- Credit Management
- Navigation
- General Ledger
- Vendor Payment Proposal Automation
- Electronic Reporting
Understanding the benefits of how Microsoft Dynamics 365 will improve your business is the foundation for garnering buy-in from all parties involved to make the move easier.
Credit Management
Credit management for many companies is still largely held back by manual processes – keeping track of customers, payment terms, ratings and more in a mix of Excel spreadsheets and siloed applications. Automating these processes can significantly increase efficiencies and reduce the risks associated with extending credit.
Financial leaders need flexibility when setting client-specific limits and rules for credit. Dynamics 365 Finance provides that.
The system then ranks a client and tracks purchases, alerting you when payments are overdue, or credit limits have been reached. The ranking system helps identify which clients are consistently meeting or missing payments and using extended amounts of credit.
Inversely, the system also presents the ability to extend greater credit to your largest clients. With low-, medium- and high-risk rankings, the system automates the decision on whether to block purchases or hold purchases based on the customer’s risk score.
Navigation
Time is money – and spending endless amounts of time searching your system for customer information is costing your business money. With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, financial managers must remember the location of the specific information to easily access it. Without that, they have to search the system, going page by page to find the feature they’re looking for.
Dynamics 365 Finance’s enhanced search makes it easier to find the functionality you need.
Dynamics 365 Finance also offers customizable tiles for your workspace. A finance employee working with vendor invoices can personalize their dashboard to see only the tiles they access regularly on the screen: invoice entry, invoice payments and vendor payments. And rather than navigating through multiple screens to get to the information, they see right upon opening the application the 51 (for example) pending vendor invoices they need to work on.
General Ledger
CFOs and financial managers who must approve journal entries across multiple legal entities can get bogged down switching back and forth, leading to wasted time or lags in approval and, ultimately, more work than is necessary.
Dynamics 365 Finance offers finance professionals the ability to see and access all journal entries from one main screen. If your entities span multiple countries and currencies, Dynamics 365 Finance is designed with all the tools and capabilities you need to master the situation; read about how Columbus tackled a multi-country, multi-currency implementation.
It also allows for easier access to reverse journal entries. Instead of having to track down the journal entry and enter the necessary information, users can access the reverse journal entry button from the top of any journal entry.
An Excel Add-on allows you to copy and paste large journal entries, publish them and go right back into the system without having to use a third-party system to integrate the data.
These benefits may seem small, but collectively save time and allow your finance team to focus elsewhere to grow and develop the organization.
Payment Proposal Automation
Another large time-saving benefit of Dynamics 365 Finance is its ability to automate vendor payment proposals. This feature allows financial personnel to set the system to scan a given time frame for due payments and automate the creation of the proposal. This saves valuable time for your organization. This feature does not process or issue payment, it creates the proposal to be reviewed and accepted.
Users can now access the automatically created payment journal and review the data rather than executing the proposal immediately prior, and the user can edit the journal if necessary.
Electronic Reporting
With Dynamics 365 Finance, you can do electronic reporting through configuration rather than manual coding. It lets users define electronic format structures and control how they are filled and used. It is simple enough for everyday users to understand and learn, eliminating the need for SSRS reporting software programmers.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance combined with templates from Microsoft enables users to make easy changes to electronic reports on their own, as well. Users no longer have to wait for an SSRS programmer to build out the changes. This provides cost savings by eliminating expenditures on programmers and providing a time-efficient process for users.
This is just the start. If you want to explore all the other ways that Dynamics 365 Finance can help you increase efficiencies compared with AX, reach out to Columbus US today.
