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...

Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain with Power Automate - Part 3 - Adding a new vendor workflow


I recently presented a session on using Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain.  The session was very well received, so I wanted to post some videos and details to help users better understand the examples I covered in the session.

In the following video I will walk through using Power Automate with Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain to manage a workflow around adding a new vendor.

Business scenario – To on board a new vendor, the organization requires a new vendor request be submitted, an internal review process is used, including sending an email to the vendor with the required tax documents (W9) and instructions.

Components used in the scenario – Dynamics 365 Finance virtual entities, Power Automate, Microsoft Forms, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Teams and Outlook

Synopsis – By using an Automated cloud flow in Power Automate the system can automatically manage this business process.  Power Automate will listen for new vendor request form to be submitted.  It will add the information to D365 (on hold), notify the AP team in Teams, and it will send an email to the Vendor attaching a blank W9 form.

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Step one is to create a form to gather the key vendor information.  In my example, I will use Microsoft Forms as it connects easily with Power Automate.  It also connects with Microsoft Teams, so it is easy for users to access.


Once the form is setup, you will have the information needed to start the Flow.  This will be an automated flow with the trigger "When a new response is submitted"

The beginning of the flow is to get the information from the new form that was just submitted.  The form id is the form that is being used to collect the Vendor information.  You will add a step of "Get response details" and the Response ID is from the trigger step above.


Now that you have the information on the vendor, the remainder of the flow will use that information to get approval on the new vendor, if approved we will add the vendor to Dynamics 365, put the vendor on hold, post a message to Teams, and send an email to the vendor.

First we will use Power Automate's approval functionality to ask for Approval on the new vendor.  Using a condition, we will have two branches for the remainder of the flow.


If the vendor is not approved, we will simply use the Outlook connector to send an email to the original form submitter letting them know it was not approved.


If the vendor is approved, we will add the information to D365 using the Dataverse - "Add a new row" connector.  


Once the vendor is added to D365, we will post a message to Teams using the "Post message in a chat or channel" connector


The last piece of the flow is to send a W9 to the new vendor.  To do this, we have place a blank W9 form in our OneDrive for Business.  So we can use Power Automate to get the file information.  Once we have the file, we will send an email to the vendor with the file attached.




Below is a video building out the entire flow from scratch.



Hopefully you find this information helpful.  Please subscribe to my blog and video channel for more information on Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain, Project Operations and Power Platform.




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