Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Finance in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Finance. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Finance.
Overview
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance enables organizations to monitor global financial operations in real time, predict outcomes, and make data-driven decisions to drive business agility and growth. Dynamics 365 Finance provides deep data and process integrations across Dynamics 365, Office 365, and partner applications to offer a centralized source of financial information that saves time, facilitates cross-org collaboration, and enables faster, better-informed decisions. It empowers users to do business anywhere, anytime, with an intuitive user interface personalized for their role and preferences.
Driving action through intelligent insights
Finance is the core of all businesses, and there's an immense opportunity to innovate through supporting new business models, embedded intelligence and automation, and reimagining how finance individuals work and interact with their data. Dynamics 365 Finance continues to lead in providing intelligence and automation to our users in a trusted way. The 2021 release wave 2 plan will focus on data-driven insights as part of the general availability of Finance Insights. Finance Insights is our intelligent cash flow offering with automation based on predictive results. Now, users are empowered with out-of-the-box machine learning for their financial operations. This would include viewing when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting what the budget should be, and viewing forecasted cash positions based on actual accounts payable, accounts receivable and project transactions, and predicted outcomes.
Enhanced usability on everyday activities
To ensure that financial activities close on time, we're enabling our customers to increase productivity when it critically matters the most. Through automation and modernizing the services that our customers use daily, we're bringing enhanced usability and performance around fixed assets, year-end close, and financial dimensions.
Expanding global coverage, decreasing global complexity, and simplifying extensibility
We continue to enhance our globalization offering by focusing on two main areas. Firstly, we'll ship even more countries and regions out of the box, to simplify global Dynamics 365 Finance usage by our customers. In addition to the six new countries and regions we shipped in the last two waves, we'll add Indonesian localization in 2021 release wave 2.
Secondly, we'll continue enhancing our configurable, no-code/low-code globalization capabilities and transform them into globalization microservices that enable enterprise-scale functionality and performance, and further simplify globalization extensibility. We'll bring our Tax Calculation service to general availability and support complex tax compliance scenarios. We'll extend the functionality and country/region coverage for our Electronic Invoicing service and will enable its integration with any first-party or third-party application via Microsoft Dataverse. We'll also ship several enhancements of configurable business documents and electronic reporting.
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only.
Investment areas
Core financials
This release in core finance is focused on bringing additional enhancements to core financial functionality and preparing customers for successful year-end close and daily interactions. The focus is on quality, performance, and customer-requested enhancements, modernizing the core daily processes to services around financial dimensions and year-end activities.
Globalization
Globalization of Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations covers not only language translation but also compliance with complex, country/region-specific regulatory requirements in areas such as tax, audit, business document layouts, and banking. Our focus for 2021 release wave 2 is on two major areas: global expansion and no-code/low-code globalization services.
Global expansion: We'll ship Commerce localization for Russia and will also deliver highly requested e-commerce localization for India that extends the Commerce localization that's already available there. We'll also deliver localization for Indonesia, expanding our global coverage to a total of 44 countries and regions out of the box.
No-code/low-code globalization services: We'll continue enhancing our configurable, no-code/low-code globalization capabilities and transform them into globalization microservices that enable enterprise-scale functionality and performance, and simplify globalization extensibility. We'll bring our Tax Calculation service to general availability and support complex tax compliance scenarios. We'll enhance the functionality and country/region coverage of the Electronic Invoicing service, and will integrate it with any first-party or third-party application via Microsoft Dataverse, allowing these applications to use our service that supports global trends of real-time tax reporting and business-to-business e-invoicing. We'll also ship several frequently requested features (based on the most popular ideas) for configurable business documents and electronic reporting.
Finance insights
Finance insights accelerate your digital transformation by bringing the power of AI into your finance processes. As organizations look to make decisions rapidly, reduce risk, and focus on strategic initiatives, it's critical to free finance from repetitive, time-consuming, and low-value daily activities. Taking advantage of the power of AI, finance insights enable you to not only quickly understand your company's cash position, but take proactive action to improve it. By having menial tasks automated or removed, the barrier of developing or hiring AI expertise is bypassed, and you're left with insights to move your business forward.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Finance below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Finance
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Finance. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Finance. |
| User community | Engage with Finance experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Finance. |