11 Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Features that Improve Finance Team Productivity

ERP systems have evolved over the years, and as businesses have become more savvy in their ERP usage, they demand more features for improving the productivity of their teams.

The most important business team for maintaining an ERP system is the finance and accounting team, as they perform the crucial task of maintaining the integrity of the system. Their financial statements and reports require accuracy and precision, as the very health of the organization depends on their insight and assessment.

Let us take a closer look at which Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations features can aid in improving finance team productivity.

1. Global Entry Forms

With an increase in the shared services model, and thus a need to optimize human resource utilization, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has taken this to the next level. Users can now seamlessly create purchase invoices for purchase orders, or enter a journal entry in other entities, avoiding the hassle of needing to switch between multiple legal entities/companies.

2. Exchange Rate Integration

Exchange rate maintenance in a global organization is a tedious process where users need to create exchange rates every day/week/month. Consider the possibilities of trading in different currencies, which adds additional complexity to the maintenance. With Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, you can now seamlessly integrate with exchange rate providers such as OANDA, and thus reduce the burden on the finance/accounting teams for maintaining these rates manually.

3. Localization

In a global ERP rollout, it is inevitable that there would be statutory requirements in each country/region that need to be adhered to. With Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, rich out-of-the-box localization features for different countries’ finance teams can now take control and generate reports that are specific to each countries’ regulatory/statutory requirements.

4. Advanced Bank Reconciliation

With an increased need in having accurate reconciliation between bank account statements and the ERP system, the advanced bank reconciliation feature is one of the most important ones for improving the productivity of finance teams.

Back in the day, reconciliation used to be a painful and worrisome process where each transaction from the bank statement needed to be manually matched with each transaction in the system, or a custom process needed to be set-up for importing the statements.

With the advanced bank reconciliation feature in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, you can have industry-wide accepted bank statement formats (viz., MT940, ISOXMl2022, BAI etc.,) imported into Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations with rules defined to match by either amounts and/or dates. With little to no manual intervention, this feature is a huge productivity boost for finance teams.

5. In-built Audit Workbench

With organizations requiring tighter auditing controls around duplicate vendor invoices that are entered, organizations have been leaning on different systems to monitor high spenders, duplicate expenses, and to audit sample data. However, with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, you can use the in-built audit workbench to run sampling and provide additional controls and visibility to the finance team.

6. Budget Planning and Control

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations has in-built capabilities to plan your budgets with scenarios for monetary and quantity (for FTE counts, etc.), and have different levels of workflow stages for approvals. Besides these, you can set-up tighter control on the expenditure by using out-of-the-box budget controls for project cost control, purchasing cost control, etc., giving you more visibility into expenses, and allowing you to plan better for the future.

7. Management Reporter

Using Management Reporter – the financial reporting tool that is available out-of-the-box in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations – you can configure reports according to organizational requirements. With this tool, you do not need developers to develop a balance sheet, an income statement, etc. You can also choose to have these reports run by a schedule for a month or a week, where you can view them after execution; you can also have consolidated reports generated using financial reporting.

8. Aged Customer Balances Snapshot

Gone are the days where you would have to write custom queries to look-up customer aging data cross-company. With Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations’ aged balance snapshot, you can look at customer aging in a single view across legal entities. In addition, you can schedule a periodic job to update the aged balances, and the collections/AR team can look at this in a single view based on the aging definitions.

9. Cost Accounting

With Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, cost accounting features help analyze data for various cost objects, such as cost center, and allocate the costs and other overheads using different measures.

10. General Electronic Reporting

With the introduction of the General Electronic Reporting (GER) module, finance users can now modify the elements that they would require for vendor payments, customer collections, etc., where earlier these were dependent on developers.

11. Cost Allocations

With the flexible features of cost allocations in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, you can allocate costs based on fixed percentages or on a revenue basis, and you can even allocate costs across companies as intercompany transactions as well. This reduces the burden of preparing multiple journals and allocating the costs accordingly.

Using the features listed here are key for improving the productivity of financial teams. For further questions on how Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations can help your payment processes, please contact us today.