Dan's Corner on Power Platform and D365

When One Agent Tried to DO Everything The second article in my Finance Agent series My first Collection Manager Agent worked well - until I kept giving it more jobs. What started as a customer-review assistant grew to hanle automated credit-hold analysis, collection-call preparation, and customer email drafting. Each addition made sense. Together, they created a problem. In my first article, I mentioned the importance of narrower scope. This time, I want to show you what happened when I ignored that lesson. Watch: Why I Split One Agent Into Three What the First Version Was Asked to Do The first Collection Manager Agent started with a simple job. Review a customer. Pull the aging, the credit limit, the open invoices. Tell me what to do next. It did that well. Then I started adding to it. • I wanted it to react automatically when a sales order was placed on credit hold. • I wanted it to prepare me for a collection call. • I wanted it to review disputes and promises to pay. • I wa...

The first article in my Finance Agent series Over the last couple of weeks, I've been experimenting with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365 ERP MCP, and Power Automate to see what was really possible inside Dynamics 365 Finance. What started as a demo scenario quickly turned into something much more interesting. The original goal was simple. I wanted to help credit and collections teams respond to credit holds more efficiently. As I continued building and testing, I started discovering that agents could fundamentally change how people interact with ERP systems. And honestly, I don't think we're anywhere close to seeing the full potential yet. Quick Video  The Problem I Wanted to Solve If you've spent time working with Credit & Collections in Dynamics 365 Finance, you've probably seen this scenario before. A sales order gets placed on credit hold. The sales team starts asking questions. The credit team may not even know the hold exists until someone ...

It has been a while since I posted, but I have been getting a lot of questions lately from clients and from my accounting students about the same topic:  Where does AI actually belong in the financial reporting process?  Everyone wants to know if they should be using it, and the honest answer is that it depends a lot on which part of the process you are talking about. I have been working with several clients on this over the last few months, plus I have an upcoming speaking session on AI in reporting, so I thought I would put some of these thoughts together here. For each point, I am also going to push back on myself a little, because I think that is a more useful way to think through this than just picking a side. Where AI is actually helping right now The clearest win I have seen is variance analysis. AI tools are good at scanning through a large number of GL lines and flagging the ones that look different from what history would predict. Think of a vendor payment that...

MCP Servers Arrive in Preview for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Recently, Microsoft has introduced MCP servers in preview for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain, marking a significant leap in the ERP ecosystem. This new capability means that organizations using Dynamics 365 can now leverage MCP servers to supercharge their interactions and analytics—all while maintaining the compliance and security standards expected from a modern cloud service. What Is an MCP Server? An MCP server is a specialized, cloud-managed platform designed to handle advanced analytics workloads for enterprise applications. By offloading data processing and analytical computations from the core operational databases, MCP servers enable faster, scalable, and more secure reporting and analysis. These servers are optimized for handling large datasets, real-time queries, and complex analytics scenarios, providing organizations with the agility to adapt to dynamic business needs. You can learn more abo...

 It has been over 10 years since Microsoft hosted their Convergence conference for Microsoft business applications.  It is happening in Miami, FL on December 10th & 11th.  I am lucky to be attending and also presenting a session.  My session will be Using Power Platform to automate the accounting department in Dynamics 365 Finance.  Hopefully you will be attending and have an opportunity to join my session. I am posting my slides here, so if you attend and want the slides, you can get them here.  Using Power Platform slides   Even if you are unable to make the session, feel free to download my slides.

It has been a while since I posted a blog article.  Things have been busy and unfortunately my blog has suffered.  Not only have I been busy working in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform arena, but I have also been teaching at a local university.  This past semester I taught Business Analytics and Visualization.  It was a fun course to teach and I was able to introduce business students to the power of analytics using both Power BI and Tableau.  The text for the course was Introduction to Business Analytics, 1 st Edition by Vernon Richardson & Marci Watson.  The text did a great job of covering the types of analytics and the mindset and approach you should follow as a business analyst.  I recently used some of this material in a presentation at an FPnA conference, and it was well received, so I thought I would put the thoughts together here for everyone to read. In today's data-driven world, the ability to transform raw data into meanin...