What is new for Dynamics 365 Business Central in Release Wave 1 – 2021

by | Apr 19, 2021 | Business Central, ERP, Microsoft

April marks the release of Microsoft’s first round of its bi-annual updates to Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Release Wave 1 2021 brings an array of new capabilities and improvements to the whole suite of Business applications. This blog post will outline what upcoming features are planned for release from April to September 2021 for Dynamics 365 Business Central (you can explore the updates to the rest of the Dynamics 365 platform in our blog post here)

 

Administration

Schedule the installation of per-tenant extensions using the Automation API

With version 2.0 of the Automation API, you can schedule the installation of per-tenant extensions using the API, just like it is possible in the browser client.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

System requirement for the database relaxed to compatibility mode

Installations of Business Central (not including SaaS), can run the database on any version of SQL Server and any operating system, as long as the database has the required compatibility level.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Improve the reliability of the database export operations for larger databases with more companies

With this release, we are shipping a more reliable solution for database export, which allows exporting much larger databases.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Improvements for the delegated administrators

Delegated administrators are able to perform more actions in the Business Central environment, enabling partners to provide better support for their customers.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Reassign an environment from one Azure Active Directory organisation to another

Protect business continuity and allow customers keep their Business Central environments running in situations where their Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) organization layout changes.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Application

Signal about document posting added to Application Insights telemetry for partners

The Business Central server will emit telemetry about posting for:

  • Purchase documents
  • Sales documents
  • Sales invoices

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Assisted setup helps move the task of adjusting item costs to the background

To optimize the experience, most features in Business Central are turned on by default. However, as data accumulates over time, that might impact performance. To reduce the load on the application, it’s often helpful to use job queue entries to move tasks to run in the background.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Automatic creation of lot and serial number information cards

Business Central offers Lot No. Information and SN Information pages, where you can add notes, such as information about the quality of a lot, and block the use of numbers if needed

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Bank reconciliation improvements

The features for bank reconciliation have been improved to make it easier to see how the automatic application rules have been applied. A report for the posted bank reconciliations (bank acc. statements) is now also available.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Bin codes in jobs

To speed up order handling, extended support has been released for bins in the jobs capabilities so that warehouse workers can find items more easily.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Changes in synchronisation between contact and customer of vendor

Business Central continues to keep in sync any customer or vendor record and contact record that are linked through the Business Relations action. New in this release wave is that the contact selected in Contact Code and Contact Name on the customer card and vendor card will no longer be used for sync. 

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Define lot sizes for various stages of production

Companies have more flexibility when they define lot sizes, and can use the sizes when calculating duration times for production orders.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Dimension corrections (for G/L Entries)

You can now correct dimensions for general ledger (G/L) entries to ensure your financial reporting gives you accurate insights without having to make notes of temporary data entry mistakes. For one or more G/L entries, you can change the dimension values, add dimensions, or remove them.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Easy contact insights and access to history of interactions with contacts

Business Central provides you with quick and easy access to information and insights for contacts.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Inventory documents – new capability to adjust your inventory

You can use the Inventory Receipt and Inventory Shipment documents to adjust your inventory.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Monitor inventory and transaction flow with Availability by Lot window

In this release item tracking capabilities have been improved by introducing Availability by Lot. You now have a list of lots with on-hand quantities, plus expected incoming and outgoing transactions, such as sales, purchase, transfer, assembly, or production orders.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

More control over settings for Default Dimensions

With this feature, your controllers and finance and accounting users have greater control over prerequisites for recording any transaction that must include dimension value attributes that will later be used in business analysis and reporting.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Payment reconciliation journal improvements

Users become more efficient in the payment reconciliation journal that now supports application against employee ledger entries.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Simplified ban statement file import

With the new capability, users can configure the import of flat file and comma- or semicolon-separated transaction formats, so that they can more easily import files they have produced or manipulated to fit with the mapping that they have configured.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Variant code added to production order header, plus limited support for production BOMs and routes on stockkeeping units

In this release, you can define production BOMs and routes for different variants, and the locations you store them in, rather than setting hp each variant as a separate item.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Advanced localisation pack for Czech

This extension adds features to Business Central that help companies meet the requirements of Czech accounting and tax legislation and best practices.

 

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Edit active prices in price lists and price overview pages

Business Central now provides flexibility in defining and updating price lists to suit the unique approaches to pricing its products or services, even if the price list they belong to is active.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts

General Availability: May 2021

Better with Microsoft 365

Support cloud printing using Microsoft Universal Print

With Business Central supporting cloud printing via Universal Print, you can now send documents and reports to any of the printers defined in your Universal Print management page.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Enablement of Word merge in Business Central

You can use the mail merge functionality in Word to use data from Business Central to add a personal touch to bulk communications.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Search for customers, vendors, and other contacts from Microsoft Teams

The Business Central app for Teams has been updated to include a messaging extension to look up contact records sourced in the Business Central database.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Editing in Excel more reliably

The reliability of the Excel add-in has been improved so that business users can work more effectively in a broader range of scenarios.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Editing in Excel more reliably

The reliability of the Excel add-in has been improved so that business users can work more effectively in a broader range of scenarios.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Country and Regional

The 2021 release wave 1 brings Business Central to more countries with release in India, Greece, Romania and Turkey.

Microsoft Power Platform

Virtual tables for Microsoft Dataverse

With this update to the preview of the Virtual Tables for Microsoft Dataverse solution, it is possible to create relations between virtual and native tables.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability:

Synchronise item availability from Business Central to Dynamics 365 Sales

With this update, when inventory changes in Business Central, the change is automatically reflected in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Enable Power BI connectors to work with Business Central APIs, instead of with web services only

With this feature, instead of having to enable pages as web services, you can now create Power BI reports and dashboards using the modern Business Central APIs, including both the built-in APIs v2.0 provided with Business Central and custom APIs created by partners or developers.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: May 2021

Client performance improvements

Optimisation has been applied to Role Centre home pages, reducing the loading time  and allowing you to start interacting with content quicker

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Usability enhancements for the Business Central web client

The web client has been improved in a variety of ways to enhance productivity for users.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Enable cloud printing on mobile app and from Microsoft Teams app

When cloud-enabled printers are defined in Business Central on the Printer Management page, it’s now possible to use them to print via the cloud from mobile & tablet devices when working with Business Central

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Users can change the assigned printer before printing a report

After defining report destinations using the Printer Selection page, users can now change the assigned printer before printing a given report. 

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Modern Development Tools

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Use one-dimensional barcodes in reports

This release wave adds fonts to generate one-dimensional barcodes in Business Central production and sandbox environments. This means that any custom layouts using the fonts will work.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Interface – handling removed enum extension value

Add resilience in interface implementations when extensible enum values are removed due to uninstalling extension declaring value.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Interface – Obsolete support

To support the process of obsoleting interfaces, they now have the same obsolete properties as other AL object types.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Return record link instead of name when using lookups

When the user selects entries in lookup triggers, it will be possible in AL to retrieve the record link of the chosen entry, instead of just the name.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Returning complex types

You can now simplify your AL code and return complex types, instead of passing these in the method parameters.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Additional dimensions in Item Tracking as foundation for vertical solutions

With 2021 release wave 1, we introduce Package No., support for a third dimension for item tracking that you can use as is to keep track of simple WMS packages or pallets, or which you can use as a foundation for advanced vertical solutions.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Report extensibility

This update brings the ability to extend an existing report by making additive changes to the report dataset and request page. Report layouts will not have an extensibility model.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Extension validation upgrade

A new per-tenant extension (PTE) validation service will be created that validates applications on different aspects.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Modern Development Tools

Getting started checklists for guided and faster initial setup

A new concept of Getting started checklists allows partners to bring checklists to the customer that enable the customer to complete the last-mile setup by themselves, not depending on a consultant or partner to assist.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Improved company setup experience

This release simplifies the initial company setup wizard.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

In-app contextual help improvements

New visual aids help call out features and key business process fields and actions in Dynamics 365 Business Central, allowing the customer to self-learn and get educated on how to start using the product.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Improve the experience of getting started with Power BI

The Getting started with Power BI feature now runs as a wizard that guides the user through all the necessary steps.

Enabled for: Users

General Availability: April 2021

Install and uninstall AppSource apps using the Business Central admin centre API

This release wave adds the option to install AppSource apps programmatically, using the Business Central admin centre API.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: May 2021

Support for migrating data from earlier on-premises versions of Business Central to 2021 Release Wave 1

Support has been added for customers who are running Business Central on-premises versions 14, 15, 16, or 17 to migrate their data to version 18 of Business Central online.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: May 2021

Seamless Service

Background sessions now have a timeout

Provides a protection mechanism for not overloading the Business Central server.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Exclude FlowFields and fields outside repeater from ETag (OData)

Business Central 2021 release wave 1 implements a new strategy for ETag calculations with OData. You can now choose to exclude non-editable FlowFields and fields not included in a repeater control.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Extension publishers can get page view telemetry in Application Insights

You can now add an instrumentation key for Application Insights in the app.json file for an extension.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

Limit recursion level in AL session creation

The Business Central server now includes a setting that sets a limit on the recursion level in AL session creation.

Enabled for: Admins, makers, marketers or analysts

General Availability: April 2021

(Source: Microsoft)

 

Leave a comment and let us know what you think the best feature of Release Wave 1 2021!

 

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