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How to Get the Most out of MS Business Central with AP Automation
Coming from one of the most widely used and trusted software suppliers on the planet, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can be a huge help in managing your essential business processes. With their recent performance improvements, companies of all sizes are able to leverage this all-in-one enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution as a cloud or on-premise solution.
But while ERPs like Business Central are valuable tools, they typically are not equipped to handle all the details of every business process your company may want or require. For example, MS Business Central provides supply chain support, but its specific focus is more on streamlining receiving and improving inventory management. To get the best purchasing solution, you’ll probably want to integrate an additional business processing automation (BPA) software with your ERP.
This holds true for other financial processes as well. Implementing accounts payable automation, travel and expense reporting software, capital project management, and automated payment solutions via third-party tools will expand the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and provides your company with the robust set of tools you’ll need for achieving a fully modern, effective business process management solution.
What Can Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Do?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you connect operations across your entire company, no matter how large or small the business. It’s flexible, letting you customize how you automate certain workflow and processes. The program also includes app extensions to further customize it to your needs. It’s also designed to seamlessly integrate with other programs in the Microsoft 365 world.
Using MS Business Central, lets your company improve control over financial data and speed-up closing and reporting. You’ll be able to monitor finances across your company, getting a broad perspective on data you need to make more informed decisions.
The system also helps manage sales, returns, and customer service in a variety of businesses, including manufacturing. You’ll also be able to manage projects with more transparency and improve accounting insight for important projects. Business Central also offers supply chain support, with special tools for receiving and inventory management so you’ll know when to restock.
How Can NextProcess Help?
ERPs are amazing tools for coordinating and managing business processes. They give you a big-picture view of your company. However, they do have limitations. Software solutions like NextProcess offer to help fill in the gaps.
As an example, NextProcess and Business Central can work together to vastly improve your AP processes. Using NextProcess AP workflow can automate invoice intake, indexing, and provide specific business rules configurations by invoice type, vendor, PO vs non PO, and more. Additionally, it can completely automate the 3-way matching process for purchase order invoices. With our ability to extract accurate line-level details programmatically and then programmatically compare those to purchase order and receiver lines, there is no human touch required.
Even exceptions or variances can be handled programmatically. If one line out of one hundred requires an additional decision, the NextProcess workflow “elevates” it within the User Interface for ease of identification.
NextProcess solutions work alongside MS Business Central to keep invoices moving, help make payments on time, and provide the accurate and accessible data needed for painless audits and financial planning.
What About Software Conflicts?
If you’ve tried to use software from multiple suppliers before, you might have some experience with software conflicts. It’s often challenging to get different programs to share data efficiently. This isn’t an issue when using NextProcess with MS Business Central.
Our extensive integration experience with Business Central’s APIs ensures that you won’t have to deal with software conflicts between NextProcess and Business Central. We are on the latest API v2.0 (REST), but can also interface with 1.0 for those that may be on older versions of On Prem Business Central
Furthermore, our knowledge of Microsoft AL allows us to go a step further if needed. We can write, modify, and load custom data transfer pages when business requirements dictate. This gives you the flexibility to pull or push any data set requests, even when there is no standard Business Central API or the current API does not support all the data fields residing in the database table.
We also have experience with other 3rd Party APIs that work with Business Central such as Binary Stream. This allows you to use their MEM and other products alongside NextProcess to get an overall solution completely customized to your company.
In an actual Binary Stream example, where they have their own API for sending Invoices and Credit Memo’s into Business Central, we are able to use their APIs for the creation of the Invoices thus allowing for full integration into MEM functionally. From there, we used the default Business Central API to Post Invoices, and our Custom API to Post Credit Memos since no default API exists for Credit Memos currently.
Our experience goes beyond even Microsoft’s documentation. It’s a real-world sum and substance. We stay up to date with new software updates. As MS Business Central adds functionality and improves the software, we also update NextProcess Software modules. An update in Business Central should never cause a glitch in communicating with NextProcess.
What Are the Next Steps?
If you’re already using MS Dynamics Business Central, adding on NextProcess software is simple. We handle all of the integration for you, which means there’s no additional burden on your IT department. During software implementation, we’ll get the ERP integration set up and guide you through configuring our software to meet your company’s exact needs. And once implementation is complete, you’ll have our experts to answer any questions that might arise.
Once you have both software systems up and running, there’s a lot of back-and-forth happening between them. Vendor data, purchasing information, invoices, and other data flows seamlessly between the software. You can pull any data in Business Central into NextProcess, and vice versa. It makes for a clean, integrated, and complete software solution that supports your company’s individual goals. To learn more or set up a free demo, contact NextProcess today.
