Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Business Owner Highlights Demo in Business Central

Managing Cash

Business owners have a number of concerns that they deal with every day. Here are three of the top ones that they deal with. They have to manage cash, they identify sales trends, sales opportunities, and they have to track profitability. Business Central is really good at helping business owners run and manage their business. I’m logged in to Business Central and this is the Role Center. On the Role Center, I’ve got a number of items that address cash. I’ve got the immediate cash balances right here on the left-hand side. You can see those accounts listed and these are kept up to date by processing within Business Central. So at any time, I can look at this list, I’ll know exactly how much cash I have. Thank you. Any questions I can drill down on these numbers and get additional information. Let me scroll down the Role Center just a little bit more.

Down here I’ve got cash flow information. I’ve got a very simplified cash flow statement on the left-hand side. It’s showing me where I stand on my actual cash. You can see that here. This is the actual cash flow. I’ve got receivables, payables. I’m getting a snapshot of my cash flow. flow in my business at this point. Then over to the right, I have a cash flow forecast. What’s interesting about this is that it uses information within Business Central to prepare a forecast of cash for the next periods, and I can change the periods that I’m looking at. Right now I’m looking at monthly periods, but I can change it to a week or day or quarter or year. So, I’ve got the bill. to not only seed the cash flow immediately, but also to forecast out. And what Business Central does, is it looks at receivables, sales orders, purchase orders, and it also uses artificial intelligence to look at the data in Business Central and add another level to make the forecast more realistic.

Tracking Sales Opportunities

So here you can see that here, I’ve got the different components, I can drill down on those and get more information of where those are coming from. For example, if I click on this item here, these show me the underlying data that’s supporting the forecast. This is important to make sure that the forecast is accurate. Business Central also has the ability to track sales opportunities. I can have multiple cycles. A cycle can have multiple steps within it, so I can track sales as they’re being developed, processed, worked on, and finally as they’re closed or lost. So, I can track that all here. I’ve got one sales cycle for existing clients, and I’ve got another one for new clients. You can make up your own. You don’t have to use these. You can have as many as you want to. You can have different steps. If I click into a step, I can see opportunities that make up that step. I can look at more information. Let’s take a look at this opportunity card. It shows me who the salesperson is, the steps that have been gone through and the steps yet to be completed. I can also take this information, I can turn it into a sales quote and the sales order when the time comes or I can show it as a lost opportunity and Business Central will track all that activity.

Also in the sales area, it’ll track opportunities by salesperson. I can drill down on the salesperson and get information about what they are working on, what stage their opportunities are in, so this gives me a full view of what’s happening in the sales organization in my company.

Financial Reporting and Profitability

Before we continue, if you like this type of content, the best way to support us and help others find this content is to subscribe to our channel, activate the notifications, and share your thoughts in the comments below section below. Thank you for helping us grow this channel. Let’s get back to the demonstration. Business Central keeps track of all the business activity in an organization. Here I’ve got the invoices. These are all the invoices that I’ve sent out to my customers. And what I can do is I can download this to Excel. I can then use Excel to do further analysis on it.

So let’s go ahead and do that. I can just go up here. I can open in a So open up an Excel spreadsheet. It’ll put the data in there and allow me to work further with that data. So let’s take a look at it. Here’s the data in Excel. I downloaded it directly from Business Central. From here I can use any of the functionality within Excel to manage this data, to report on the data, to sort through it. But I also have access to Co-Pilot. Co-Pilot is a generative generative AI function from Microsoft that I can use within Excel.

So here I can use co-pilot to ask questions about the data, sort the data, get information out of the data without knowing a lot about Excel. So let’s try it. Here’s my prompt right here in the lower right-hand side. What I want to do is I’m going to use co-pilot say look at this data and one of the total sales by customer group. You can see customer group is one of the fields right here. So I’m just going to run co-pilot and we’ll see the results. Co-pilot has gone through the data and it’s created a small chart. We can see that right here. I can add this chart to the worksheet. It also gives me text about the results. So you can see that right here. Let’s add this to the new sheet. sheet. It adds the graph to the sheet and a list of the results. Let’s do a further query here. I can see from this graph that my small customer group is a main contributor to my sales. Let’s go back and create another query for co-pilot. Go back to the data here. We’re going to use this query here. We want to find the top two customers in this small customer group code. Let’s go ahead and do that. Copilot’s going to analyze the data again and give me the results. Here are the results right here. So Copilot is handy for a large amount of data like we have here in this Excel spreadsheet. Now these results that Copilot got, you could probably figure that out in Excel using the functionality in Excel. But using Copilot’s going to make it a lot easier, a lot quicker. quicker. So co-pilot is good for looking at a large amount of data and using natural language inquiry to get the results that you’re looking for.

Business Center also comes with a mobile app that you can download to your iPhone or your Android device and start using it immediately. It includes most of the functionality that’s in the main product. For example, here’s a role center. We’re looking at a role center here that can scroll down. down and see more information about this particular roll. I can also look at the graphs that we saw earlier too. Let’s do that. Here are the sales opportunities. Opportunities broken down by salesperson. And another graph for top five opportunities. So the mobile app allows you to connect directly to Business Central. You can use it on the go, get up-to-date information. also stay involved with what’s going on in your business.

And finally, a top concern for business owners is to maintain profitability and keep up-to

date on what’s happening in their business from a profit perspective.

Financial Reporting and Profitability

Business Central has a financial reporting function that comes with the system. You can set up a number of different types of reports. You can use it for different segments of your business. If you have multiple companies, you can use it across multiple companies. You can also use it on a consolidated financial basis as well. Here’s an example of one. Let’s open this up here Here’s an income statement has a budget on it online. We can view the different rows in the financial statement We can also drill down on that information if you scroll down to the bottom You can see our net income here comparing actuals to budget got a current period and we also have the year today Hey Let’s go ahead and print this out. I can export it to Excel if I want to, or I can just print it out. Let’s print it out and take a look at it. And this is a good example of a financial report in Business Central. I’ve got a budget, current period, actuals. I can change those columns any way I want to, so if I want to report by quarters, I can do that. It’s easy to do. It’s all within Business Central, and I can run it anytime I want to. This information is going to be based on the actual posted balances in the general ledger and also current budgets.

From a business owner perspective, we looked at three major concerns they might have, managing cash, identifying sales trends and opportunities, and also tracking profitability. Business Central can be a main tool that you use to manage your business. It’s easy to use and your staff and members will love it. It will handle all sorts of different types of businesses and will keep you up to date with what’s going on in yours.