Spring ’18 summary of what’s new in Finance and Operations

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

For a list of the regions where Dynamics 365 business applications are available, see the International availability guide.

April ’18 – General Availability

Business productivity

• Alerts - Client-based alert functionality enables a user to define alert rules based on business events, such as when an invoice is paid or a customer changes an address.
• Optimization advisor - Uses telemetry to analyze customers’ business processes, finds optimization opportunities, uses application data to quantify the opportunities, and then recommends solutions.
• Project timesheet mobile - Employees can create and submit project timesheets. The use of saved favorites and the ability to copy from a previous timesheet facilitates rapid, accurate time entry.
• Edit default project fulfillment hours - Project resource managers can edit the default hours as part of the project booking fulfillment process.
• Reserve project resources past the task end date - Project resource managers can fulfill resources on tasks past the current planned end date for the task.
• Person search report - You can find a person and their personal data in Finance and Operations.
• Data sharing for customer and vendor tables - Data can be shared across customer and vendor tables and many related tables across multiple legal entities.
• One voucher deprecation – One voucher is turned off by default, through a General ledger parameter.

Extensibility and customization

• Customizations through extensions only - Migrating customizations from one release to the next has been simplified by moving away from over-layering to the use of extensions.
• Extensibility requests - Customers can submit a request to Microsoft for extension support to be added to the product for a needed scenario. The Spring '18 release enhances this feature by moving it to Lifecycle Services.
• Embedding PowerApps in workspaces and forms - Use PowerApps to embed data from external sources into Finance and Operations data.
• Custom fields - Organizations can add custom fields to tailor their application to their business requirements, using a no-code extensibility experience.

Integration

• Integration with Common Data Service (CDS)
• Integration with Dynamics 365 for Field Service - Provides data integration to support scenarios where Field Service activities are done outside Finance and Operations, leveraging the data integrator.

Improved support experiences

• Telemetry-based KB recommendation - Telemetry from a production environment can be used to identify the application hotfixes that apply to a tenant.
• KB recommendations when entering a support case - LCS provides telemetry-driven KB recommendations.
• Report production outage - Provides a quick and effective channel to escalate issues to Microsoft Support if the services in a production environment are degraded or become unavailable.

Supply chain management

• Vendor collaboration – RFQ process - Enhancements make it easy to tell who entered a bid (a vendor or a procurement department).
• Partial shipment of a load (split load) - Allows single loads or multiple loads to be fully or partially loaded.
• Immediate replenishment of locations - Used during wave execution if allocation fails for a location directive line that has a replenishment template.
• Reason codes added to warehouse counting and adjustment - Users can add a reason code when performing counts and when making an adjustment.
• Batch balancing enabled for advanced warehousing processes.
• Analytical workspaces with embedded Power BI for Cost management – New Cost administration and Cost analysis workspaces.

Globalization

• India localization – project and upgrade - Users can manage India Goods and Services Tax (GST) for the Project management and accounting module, and AX 2012 customers can upgrade to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
• Translation Service enhancements - In addition to supporting user interface translation, Dynamics Translation Service (DTS) now supports documentation translation in Microsoft Word and HTML formats (.docx, .html).
• Enhanced configurability - New features include import and testing scenarios, and also broader support for configurability without coding.

Servicing, performance, and deployment

• Improved delivery of platform and financial reporting updates - Enhancements to how software updates are provided, to improve deployment time and the reliability of servicing.
• Service hardening - Added service monitoring and alerting for core business processes, and improved form load performance of the most commonly used forms.
• On-premises deployment updates.

Compliance

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - Investments address the European privacy law’s requirements. Go to the Trust Center to learn more and find resources to help you comply.
• Accessibility enhancements - Go to the Trust Center to learn about our industry-leading accessibility standards.

April 2018 - Preview

• Regulatory service – configuration (available at the end of April) - Regulatory service targets a no-code programming approach, allowing users to configure electronic reporting formats or tax rules rather than write code for them in the underlying application.
• Customer payment insights (Preview) - Customer payment insights (preview) uses machine learning to predict when an invoice will be paid and provides optimization strategies that can be tailored to maximize the probability of customers paying on time.
• Credit and collections (Preview) - Credit and collections insights provides analytics that help organizations effectively manage their credit and collections processes.

Integration

• Integration with Dynamics 365 for Talent - Provides data integration of the appropriate HR information into Finance and Operations.
• Integration with Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation - Supports scenarios where project and resource management activities are done outside Finance and Operations, and the project accounting activities are done in Finance and Operations, leveraging the data integrator.

May ’18 – General Availability

Globalization

• United Arab Emirates (UAE) localization – The Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Fall 2017 release (version 7.3) has been updated with support for mandatory regulatory requirements in United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Extensibility and customization

• Extensible project work breakdown structure – Enables customization of the project work breakdown structure through extensions. This replaces the hierarchical grid control that was previously used for the project work breakdown structure with a standard grid that supports hierarchical data. This feature is available in the May 2018 application update.

July ’18 – General Availability

• Lifecycle Services sandbox self-service automation and RDP lockdown.
• Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations 8.0 with Platform Update 16 on-premises is available.

July ’18 – Preview

• Upgrade automation - Upgrade automation makes application upgrades a self-service operation for the customer, using LCS for non-production environments.