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Showing posts from April, 2021

AI in Financial Reporting

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...

Use Power Automate to alert the credit team that there is a new customer in Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM

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  Business scenario – Sales team needs to be able to add a new customer to Dynamics 365 Finance, but before the customer is used in Sales the Credit Team needs to review the record and set the proper credit limit and payment terms.   The customer should automatically go on hold until the review is complete, and an email should alert the Credit Team to act. Components used in the scenario – Dynamics 365 Finance business alerts and Power Automate Synopsis – By combining the business alert functionality of D365 with Power Automate the system can automatically manage this business process.   Power Automate will watch for a new customer to be added in D365.   When the new customer is added, Power Automate will automatically put the account on Hold with a status reason of New.   Power Automate will also send an email to the Credit Manager including the information from the new customer as well as a link to the On Hold Customers in D365. Step 1 – Create a custom...

Creating a Sales Assistant using Power Virtual Agent and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain

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As I continue to learn more and more about Power Platform, I have been intrigued by Power Virtual Agent.  However, I have not spent too much time with it because I could never come up with a business scenario around Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply.  Whenever I think about a “Bot”, I think about the annoying little boxes that pop up on some websites trying to help me, and I just could not think of how I would use that with D365.   Recently as I was reading through various blogs, I learned I did not need a website to use Power Virtual Agent.  I could use the Bot inside of Microsoft Teams.  I also ran across an article from Henrik Marx Larsen https://henrikmarxlarsen.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/creating-a-customer-service-bot-for-dynamics-365-for-finance-and-operations-using-power-virtual-agents/ where he created a customer service bot with Dynamics 365.  I decided I would try to create a Sales Assistant to quickly answer some common questions that the sa...