How a CFO Uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

I want to show you how CFOs find Dynamics 365 Business Central a good fit for their organizations. Let’s take a look at it. We’re going to look at localizations and language options available from Microsoft, look at foreign exchange and how you can keep that up to date on a daily basis. Look at a common deployment method hub and spoke. We’ll take a quick look at consolidations and also financial reports.

Localizations and Language Options

Microsoft supports localizations in dozens of countries around the world. A localization helps ensure that you meet tax and legal compliance in the countries in which you do business. These are currently just some of the localizations that are available at the URL listed below. You’ve got a complete up-to-date list of localizations and also language options. This page shows all the localizations available for Dynamics 365 Business Central. It shows Microsoft-supported localizations as well as partner-supported localizations. If we scroll down, we can also see the supported languages for Business Central.

Foreign Currency Management

Setting Up Foreign Currencies

Let’s go into Business Central now and take a look at foreign currency. These are the currencies I have set up in my system. You can add as many currencies as you want to. You can add the ones that you need for your business, and it’s easy to do. There’s very little additional information you need to add for each currency. You can see the information right here in this table.

Managing Exchange Rates

Let’s take a look at the exchange rates. So for the Canadian dollar, I’ll go to exchange rates and I can see a complete history of the exchange rates in my system. And in my system, I have these exchange rates automatically updated on a daily basis with a free exchange feed. Let’s take a look at that. I can go to Exchange Rate Service to see the simple setup. That is all I need to set up the exchange rate feed in Business Central and this is a free rate service from floatrates.com. You can use this one or any one of your choosing. It’s easy to set up and it can be updated as often as you want. This helps ensure that current foreign exchange rates are used in all the transactions that are processed in your system. And this is a simple report that comes with Business Central. It shows your current foreign exchange exposure. It’s easy to see, it’s updated on a regular basis, and you can see right now where you are with foreign exchange. You can see any gains and losses that are recorded in the system.

Common Deployment Methods

Hub and Spoke System

Next, let’s take a look at a common deployment method for ERP systems and large organizations. This is called a hub and spoke and this is used by larger organizations that may have an enterprise ERP system for their main business, but they may have a number of subsidiary organizations that each have their own ERP system. And I see this commonly with Business Central. A lot of subsidiaries are smaller mid-sized companies. They’re using Business Central. A hub and spoke system allows a main ERP system to draw information from the subsidiary companies and their ERP systems. So this is a common deployment. We see Business Central in the smaller to mid-sized companies. All that information is coming to the ERP system. The main ERP system is enterprise level. It might be Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management or it could be SAP or Oracle. But this works well and it works well with Business Central because it allows the individual subsidiaries to use their own systems for the industries in which they do business.

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Consolidations and Financial Reports

Next, we’re going to take a quick look at a clip that covers consolidations and financial reports in Dynamics 365 Business Central. In the 2023 Wave 2 release of Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft introduced new functionality to allow you to create consolidated financial statements across multiple environments. Now you may want to use this if you have other companies in your organization that are out of the country or just happen to be in different environments. This can happen when you acquire a company and they’re already using Business Central but in a different environment. This functionality allows you to create consolidated financial statements in different environments and then different Azure regions.

Setting Up Consolidation

So let’s take a look at it. We’re going to look at business units, the chart of accounts that I’m using, the consolidation process, and then some simple reporting. This is the organizational structure I’m using in my demo today. I’ve got a consolidating company and I’m consolidating 3 subsidiary organizations up to the consolidating company. Those organizations are in two separate environments. We’ll be taking a look at Cronus and also AM Distribution in one environment and we’ll look at Cronus Unlimited in a second. This is my company in the second environment. If we look at the chart of accounts, I have accounts that are different than my original environment. This particular company has more of a European chart of accounts, but it’s easy to accommodate. All I need to do is look at this particular account. I’ll open that up. You can see at the bottom here in this Fasttab for consolidation, I’m specifying the account number in the consolidation company that this information goes to for this particular account.

Running the Consolidation

Once I have everything set up, all I need to do is run the consolidation routine. So let’s run that and you can see a couple steps that I take in the consolidation process and I’m done. I’ve run the consolidation that I want and now I can go back and do some basic reporting. We can do that right from this page here. Let’s run the trial balance. Here’s a trial balance report. It shows information from three different companies that I have in my organization. These first two are in one environment. The third one is in the second environment. This is a standard report with Business Central. It’s easy to run. It gives you a worksheet to analyze and plan your consolidated financial statements.

Financial Reports

Let’s look at the financial reports. I’ve got one here where I consolidate information from these three different entities. You can see the results here. This allows me to drill down and see the account information for these three different organizations. This one’s in a different environment. If I click on that, I can see the consolidation entries that were recorded for this entity. This is the column definition I’m using for this report. You can see the business units right here. Now let’s go run the report and here’s the report. Here I’ve got my three different organizations. I’ve got a total off to the right. I’ve got year-to-date totals as well.

Conclusion

So today we looked at why CFOs might want to use Dynamics 365 Business Central in their organizations. We talked a little bit about localizations and language options. We looked at foreign exchange. We also looked at a common deployment method for ERP systems with the hub and spoke, and we looked quickly at consolidations and financial reports.