SmartList | Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. Dynamics GP

Hello and welcome to this video series, “Dynamics 365 BC for GP Users”. We’ll explore what a GP user can expect to find if they’re moving to dynamics 365 bc.

In this video what will take the place of my SmartLists. My name is John Hoyt I’m the Solutions Architect of TMC. Let’s get started.

As the old saying goes “All roads lead to Rome” and it was true Rome was the center of the world and your path to success would lead you to Rome. Today the path that everyone wants to follow is to the cloud and that road leads to Business Central and the Microsoft Cloud.

Side note: Dynamics GP is not going away full stop. Check the link for more details in this video. We’ll look at how GP’s budgets, compare to Business Central. Off we go.

Now in the GP world of course everybody’s favorite tool is the SmartList. SmartList allows me to view information in one consolidated location I have the ability to filter I have the ability to sort. I can use it as a drill down field. I can go look for details about something, pick any one of my open quotes, open invoices whatever it might be and then I can do pick the document run through the go to uh you can export to excel I can work with the data as a source. I can as I said sort and filter and for a lot of users there’s some concern what happens when I move into the Business Central world – what’s that going to look like for me? Let’s take a look.

I’ll bring up business central and we’ll start with just a basic list view inside business central something like my sales invoice list. This will apply to all the lists inside the business central system not just sales invoices. What we’ve essentially done is take that consolidated view that smart list provides and have now distributed that throughout the system so there’s a list associated with sales invoices there’s a list associated with customers with vendors with general ledger accounts with bank reconciliation bank transactions. Everything inside the system gets governed by a list and we add many of the same features to other BC lists that we would include inside something like a SmartList.

Here again I’m looking at all the sales invoices open inside the system and I want to filter that list. Now I can filter by virtually any of the columns that are visible inside here so one of the things I wanted to filter by was a filter that was looking just at my customer number or my customer name or something I could do that and I want to enter in that value or a range of values whatever it might be and now I can filter that list down and have just the invoices open for one specific customer if i think that might be useful I can save that as give that a name and now I’ve added in that view just like we’d add a favorite into our SmartList views.

One of the other things we do with the SmartList of course is drill back for more information. I’ve found a transaction in smart list i want to go to the master record or an inquiry window see some other detail in business central. We accomplish the same thing but we never leave the list. We do that with what’s called a fact box or an information box. For any record that’s been highlighted over in the list view i can see details about that customer or that vendor or that transaction or that bank account whatever’s relevant to the list that I’m looking at and the details provide me a drill back to go see more information just like I would drill back into something like an inquiry window in the GP system.

If I need more screen real estate i can turn off my information box I can turn off my filter view and now i can see more columns of information. I could also go through and change that filter get rid of everybody again and say no what I really want to see are all my records.

Now the last thing that we do with SmartList that everybody really loves is I use it as a way to find data and then I can export that data out to excel and we can do the exact same thing here with business central. If I use my search function I can search within this page. I simply want to know where excel lives here and I’ve got two options i can open in excel which would be a read only version or I can choose to edit in excel. These are unposted transactions i can edit those if i need to i could also edit master records posted transactions anything completed and fully processed of course cannot be edited they could only be open inside of excel.

So just to recap with inside the SmartLists of business central as we look to see the functionality provided by something like SmartList i have the ability to see that related information that’s the fact boxes over on the right hand side. I have the ability to add in filters so that i can control the information that I’m seeing and finally i can either open or edit in excel depending on the list of information that i’m working with and if i’m editing it in excel then once i’ve made my edits of course i can publish those back into the business central system.

So just to recap here in this video we’ve seen how the lists in business central compared to GP smart lists we’ve looked at the ability to do drill downs or find more information the ability to create favorite views and return to them whenever we need and finally that export import function using our favorite office tool Microsoft excel.

We will have other videos in this series we’re going to talk about account formats budgeting ledgers and journals, please hit the like and subscribe buttons for our channel and i’ll see you on the next video.

If you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion of what we shouldcover comment down below I’ll do my best to answer your comments and if you need any immediate technical support i invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com . Thank you for watching and please follow our social media accounts they’re in the description down below.