Find out more about the new functionality coming to Bevica following the Microsoft release wave 1 update . During this 30-minute webinar Claudio Martell, Bevica Product Director, discusses:
Highlights from the Business Central 2024 Wave 1 Update – particularly improvements that will most affect the drinks industry.
Details of improvements coming to Bevica in the next few months.
VIDEO
Transcript
1:40
OK, welcome, everyone, thanks for joining the session today.
1:43
We’re going to be looking at what’s new in Bevica Business Central for the wave update that’s currently underway.
1:51
Got Michael, with me.
1:52
He’s going to be looking at any questions, any queries people have, please write them in the chat, and Michael will let me know and I can see if I can answer any questions as we go along.
2:01
Otherwise, at the end we’ll have a session, little bit where we can ask questions as well.
2:08
So, in terms of what I want to show today, there are four areas.
2:12
Three of them are things that Business Central are providing. I think some really nice stuff coming up there. And then there’s a few nice Bevica things that we’re releasing with with the Wave one.
2:23
So, in terms of the application area, so basically functionality.
2:29
There’s some nice, nice little bits here.
2:31
We’ve got some salespeople on ship-to’s and I’ll come back to that in a second, there’s a bit more Excel layouts.
2:39
Some testing tools which are nice, and as usual, Shopify, Microsoft are continually changing and improving the Shopify, to give more functionality.
2:49
And then a nice little feature down bottom right there on Customer Ledger Entries, whereas in the past, you could just use a couple of characters to put things on hold. You can now actually put codes, specific codes, which makes kind of reporting a bit easier.
3:04
The three bits, I wanted to show you in a bit more detail on this screen are the customer ship-to the Excel layouts, and the page scripting, which I think people will make will make use of.
3:17
So, if I go into the product.
3:23
So, if we first look at, just a small thing, I wanted to mention about the ship-to’s and the customers, sorry, the salespeople, on the ship-to’s. So, if we look at the ship-to address for a particular customer.
3:38
You’ll see that now you’ve got the fields that you can add to the ship-to. And when you add a ship-to, to a sales order or sales quote, that salesperson will be copied over to that document.
3:50
The one thing I think we need to be careful of is that it doesn’t update the salesperson’s dimension.
3:57
Now that I think is a bit of a shame. So, we’ve mentioned it to Microsoft and they have said that it’s an omission.
4:01
That they will fix it, but we don’t have a date, as of yet, when they’re going to fix it.
4:06
When they’re going to fix it. I don’t think it’ll be for this Wave update.
4:09
It’ll be some minor update, possibly, in the next six months, but as soon as we know, we’ll let you know.
4:15
So that’s the ship-to.
4:17
If I come back to the homepage, my role centre, Microsoft are adding new reports, Excel reports, which should be, oops where… lost it all of a sudden. Hang on a second.
4:35
They should be, nope, they’ve disappeared.
4:39
They were here.
4:40
So, when you get your hands on version 24, you’ll see an Excel reports option here.
4:46
And Microsoft are creating these Excel reports which they provide the basic report, but I think the really neat feature about them is that you can go in and copy them and amend them to yourself. So, you can change and make your own using Report Layouts here in Excel reports that export the data, as well as the, the Report Layout. So that’s, that’s quite nice.
5:08
Then, the page Scripting is a really nice new feature where, effectively, what you can do, is, if I go to page scripting, you can record a process in the software. So, let’s say like, create a Sales Order, Save that, and then rerun it as a way of testing a particular feature. So, let’s say you’ve got some standard sales orders, you’re always creating, something you might want to test whenever there’s a Wave update.
5:38
You can run that routine, save it, and then re call it and get the software to run through that routine. So, I created a Sales Order this morning.
5:47
And I saved it. So, I’m going to open my recording.
5:53
It’s a pickled egg pub sales order.
5:56
So, when I open that you will see these are all the steps that I did. So, the recording records the steps.
6:04
That I did, and then that means that if I run it, you will see it’ll go down the page, and do all the actions that I did, in this case opening the sales order list.
6:14
Clicking new, selecting a customer.
6:22
Adding external document number, then going down to the lines, adding a product, and in this case, quantity of two and releasing it.
6:31
And then it tells you here if there were any errors. So, the idea is if some functionality has changed or, an option in a different place or something has changed significantly, as it goes through, it will error if it can’t do what you did last time.
6:45
Or when you saved the recording. So, my example here is on a sales order, you can do it all over the software, it’s agnostic of what screen you’re on.
6:54
A colleague of mine, Ian, who did a demo, similar demo last week.
7:00
Used page scripting to run a report. That, that might even be, you can run reports, just as usual.
7:07
Let’s say, if you’ve got a report that’s got lots of options on it, where you have to change dates and change filters. You might just run a page scripting on that then click it, save it, and run it whenever you want to, not in terms of testing it, just in terms of running it.
7:20
So, that’s quite, quite a nice new feature that internally, we are using to do light testing when we release things.
7:35
Back to the presentation. So, the next page, some more application areas.
7:40
So, these are kind of smaller things that Microsoft have added. So nice little tweaks, tweaks here and there.
7:47
The one on this page that I wanted to, or the two that I want to just highlight on this page, are the Inventory Cost Adjustment Tool and Sustainability Compliance. So, the inventory adjustment, the Inventory Cost Adjustment Tool, unfortunately, is not what I think most of you think it is.
8:05
It’s not a user tool for seeing if your costs are correct.
8:11
This is a support tool to identify when the functionality has errored. So, let’s say there’s some setup that’s wrong, or products that’s been created incorrectly, and the process actually errors.
8:22
This is a tool that an IT person, or someone at the TVision support desk can look at and try and understand why a particular item isn’t adjusting its cost correctly.
8:34
Not that, let’s say, you received it at £4.50 and it should have been £4.51 and you want to know where that difference is. It’s not for that, unfortunately, it’s more of a, kind of a, back-end tool.
8:45
Then the other new release for the Wave one is this sustainability compliance.
8:51
So, Microsoft have done some work where they’re creating, effectively a reporting tool for things like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, that you can record as part of your processes.
9:05
Then, report from in the software.
9:07
So, the way it works, there’s a journal, a sustainability journal, and also nicely, a recurring sustainability journal, and that takes into account the charts of sustainability account, subaccounts and sub subaccounts.
9:23
With calculation methods to work out what the carbon footprint is on, on these journal entries, then you post the journal entries, and all goes into a Chart of Sustainability Accounts. So quickly show you what that looks like.
9:39
So, I come back to my role centre.
9:45
Sustainability Chart of Accounts, so this is the demo version, but you can obviously create your own, just like you would create your own Chart of Accounts.
9:56
So, there’s different scopes, different types of entries.
10:01
And then they have their categories and subcategories.
10:04
And I think if I click into the subcategories and show you the details, it’s the subcategories that then try and calculate these emission, or try and calculate the emissions from the information that you put in the system. So, for example, if I come back out here and go down to, we’ve got some vehicles.
10:25
On the subcategory of the trailer or the truck, we’re not recording nitrous oxide, but we are recording methane and carbon dioxide, given on the journal you would say this particular bus has done X number of miles, or X number of units that coincide with how you’ve set this up.
10:46
So, Microsoft have said that this is kind of a first pass at it.
10:50
It is nice functionality, but it’s quite basic.
10:53
I suspect, over time, they’re going to add to it, then make it more comprehensive.
11:08
So, from a user experience points of view as ever, they are doing tweaks here and there, making, telling us the software is easier to use, cleaner to use, et cetera.
11:17
A couple of nice things that I wanted to point out is we have the date picker has changed, so potentially easier to pick dates way the future and in the past. And then for error messages, they’ve made it easier to tell people about the error messages that you’re getting.
11:35
So, yeah. Claudio?
11:38
Just quickly…
11:39
Question in, with the scripting, can you add variables? So, for example, if a different items, if a different item number is used?
11:48
Not at the moment.
11:50
The moment it is literally record and playback.
11:55
But if you have technical knowledge, let me go back and show you.
12:03
So, if I come back in here and go into Scripting.
12:09
So, let’s open, open the recording.
12:13
So, if I open that recording, you’ll see here in preview pane on Windows, that it is editable by someone who knows what they’re doing. So, potentially.
12:25
If you have the knowledge, you can come in here and edit this.
12:28
Personally, I don’t have the knowledge.
12:31
I think it’s quite a specialised thing, but yes, you could come in here and put variables, but it’s not part of the functionality from BC itself.
12:41
They might introduce that in the future, but I just don’t know at the moment.
12:47
OK, right, where were we, we were looking at error messages and the date picker.
12:55
So, just as an example of the date picker, looks a bit like this now, with that classic moving backwards and forwards with months and dates, and then on the error messages, whichever type of error you get, be that on a line, the dialog, like this one is, you will get some options where you can just copy to the clipboard, which I think you can do now.
13:15
You can share it in Teams to someone internally, or you can automatically put the information in an e-mail, and then, maybe that’s what comes to TVision.
13:25
If it’s an error message for us, or, potentially, a colleague, if they can help you with that, with that error message.
13:35
Copilot, Microsoft has done a lot of work on Copilot.
13:40
They’ve introduced in lots of different places in the software, Copilot functionality. I get the feeling at the moment, they are really just trying out the waters. There’s some nice new stuff, but I get a feeling they’re trying out the waters to see what sticks. What do people like?
13:54
What do people give them good feedback on, that they do use and what are the features that people will ignore.
14:00
So, if you do start using Copilot, I would personally like to know what’s useful, and what you like using, what you think is not very useful.
14:09
The ones I wanted to concentrate and just show you a bit about today was creating sales lines, because potentially, I think that’s a really nice one.
14:17
And then insights, using the analysis tabs. The Reconcile Bank Accounts with Copilot is an improvement on what there is now. And Nicola, my colleague, had a look at that and she says, it’s, it’s a good improvement on what there was before. It’s a bit too complicated to demo today, but definitely have a look at that.
14:38
And see if you can make use of, the kind of the extra AI reconciliation that the software has on version, on the new version.
14:47
So, create sales lines easily with Copilot and Insights.
14:50
So let me show you, a demo of that. So come back here.
14:56
So, if I go to sales orders, you’ll notice that the screens, all the screens now have a Copilot button.
15:04
So that’s Microsoft trying to include Copilot everywhere in the software.
15:11
But if I go to a new order. So here we’re trying to create new sales lines.
15:20
So, I create the header.
15:26
And then you have this, suggest sales lines, which is the same thing there under the Copilot logo.
15:33
So, if I click on that, it basically says to me, describe what you want.
15:38
And it’s going to try to turn that into sales lines.
15:41
Now, something I’ve learnt while playing around with this, this is as much Copilot understanding the area that it’s looking at as much as the phrasing of us, the humans, entering the information. So, we do need to give it some help.
15:57
We can’t just say, give me five cases of that red, and it will magically go and find the red that, that particular customer was thinking about.
16:06
Here’s an example I prepared earlier.
16:09
Just to see so you can see it working, so I’m copying and pasting potentially from an email, from an Excel spreadsheets. So, I’ve got three lines, where I’ve put the quantity, the description, and the unit of measure.
16:23
I can say, what confidence it thinks, it’s found the products in, and then I do generate.
16:29
So, it’s going away.
16:31
Having a look at those lines, trying to work out what they are.
16:35
Now, in my example, my descriptions are quite small and neat. And I do know that descriptions can be ridiculously long and complicated, and differences between units of measure and vintages and so on, might complicate things.
16:46
But just as a way of showing what it does.
16:56
It’s obviously thinking hard.
17:01
OK, and it’s come up with the products it thinks my description were.
17:03
The quantity, the confidence that it thinks, it’s found on those.
17:11
And then if I like that idea, I say Insert. Or than I can delete or try it again. So, it’s actually found the three products that are hugely difficult task given the kind of products that I’ve got.
17:23
But it might be worth you playing around with it to see how accurate or not it is kind of for real life examples.
17:31
So, I can change quantities I want, I can change details.
17:35
But otherwise, if I’m happy with it, I click Insert, and it’s just there. Created, created the sales lines automatically.
17:48
So that’s the suggesting sales lines, worth a look or play around with, to see if it’s of use.
17:56
The other Copilot one I wanted to show you, is the insights on the analysis tabs.
18:03
So, I’m going to show you this on the Customer Ledger Entries, I think it can do some nice things.
18:08
This one, I think, you can start using straightaway. So, customer ledger. So, it goes to the customer ledger entries.
18:18
You’ll notice that the little analyse button on the old version has changed into a nice little icon.
18:26
So rather than that, if I come here and I analyse list…
18:33
So what Copilot is trying to do here, rather than come up with the analysis, given the information that’s on the screen, because I don’t think it’s trying to do that at the moment.
18:44
It’s trying to use Copilot to build the analysis for you.
18:48
So, it’s basically saying, tell me what the layout is. Tell me what the grouping, the pivot table that you want, and it’ll go away and try and do that for you.
18:56
So, again, I’ve been playing around with it, and I’ve got an example.
19:00
So, you’ll see, I’m going to do it in two stages.
19:03
So, the first one is, show customer name with the remaining amount. So, it is quite formulaic saying show and then customer and the remaining amount.
19:12
It is what software at the moment needs to find those fields.
19:18
And then do something with them. Just going to turn that into an analysis.
19:24
So, customer, remaining amounts, description and so on. So, it’s come up with some other columns that it thinks I need. If I like this, I can keep it, save it or discard it and start again, but I want to try and turn this into a pivot table.
19:42
So, I’ve got another copy and paste.
19:52
So, I’m going to try and turn it into a pivot table with dates at the top, groups by month.
19:59
So, that was great, Enter on that.
20:04
And it’s going to go away, do similar thinking.
20:09
So, you’ll see here, I’m going to keep that.
20:14
So effectively, it’s done what, anyone with a little bit of knowledge of the analysis page and Pivot Table could have done themselves manually.
20:22
But they’re trying to kind of expand this out to people who might be scared of pivot tables or don’t like going in and changing. It saved it with its own name.
20:31
So, it’s come up with a name, but it is sensible and then you can definitely come in here and change things, add things and tweak it as you want.
20:39
But this is a quite a nice, nice report, given the information that, I put in. It tried to help me with, let’s say.
20:53
Ooops, moving on.
20:55
So that’s where we were with a Copilot, there is also Copilots help with fields where you can click on a field, and Copilot will try to find from the Internet kind of help text.
21:07
So, it’s primarily looking at Microsoft help text.
21:10
We haven’t introduced this into our Freshdesk help yet, but that’s something we can do in the future.
21:16
So, when you click on a Bevica field, rather than take you to the, the article directly, it’ll go to and it’ll go to amalgamate information that if finds on Freshdesk and give you kind of a synopsis of it and then you can click through into, into the article.
21:38
So, from a Bevica point of view, these are some of the things that we’ve been doing over the past 3 or 4 months, that will all be rolled up into the version 24, if you haven’t already got them.
21:50
So, a number of small things like adding the AWS number to Customer Details Factbox some people might find that useful.
21:57
A reporting tool for the unit of measure.
22:01
So, a few kind of tweets here in that, but the ones that I wanted to highlight, are kind of, I think, will potentially, be useful for everyone.
22:10
So those of you using Vision Warehouses, so warehouses like LCB, we’ve changed the structure slightly so that you can make more use of locations with your one warehouse site.
22:23
Then we have stock reconciliation.
22:27
So, from the multiple locations feature that we’ve changed, this is how, currently, the integration works.
22:36
So, you have one location in Bevica looking at one site in vision, so effectively, one warehouse, and that’s all well and good, but we found that some people wanted us to make it a little bit more flexible.
22:50
So now what you can do with, the release that’s coming up, is you can have multiple locations in Bevica all looking at the one site.
22:56
So LCP for example, and we found this was useful if you’re running Consignments Stock.
23:04
So, from the Bevica point of view, you can separate your Consignments stock in location A and have your stock in location B. But actually, it’s all in the same place at LCB. So, LCB don’t need to know that you’ve split it out, because we don’t tell them.
23:17
But you from a management point of view in Bevica can split it up nicely for reporting, and so on. And then, just in general, I think it’s, it’s nice. Gives you a bit more flexibility for managing stock.
23:28
You can create multiple locations for different reasons and still not worry about having multiple accounts at LCB. So, I think …
23:36
That’s, that’s useful.
23:39
Next, we’ll just go back a page, the one what I wanted to show you, the stock reconciliation.
23:45
So, again, the idea here is that we can query the vision warehouse. So, EHD, LCB and so on…
23:58
Overnight, pull in what they think, the stock quantities are on your account, and then we can match that against the Bevica quantities and then tell you if there are any discrepancies. So, there’s a bit of setup, but effectively, a job queue runs every night.
24:18
Let me try that again.
24:23
So, a job queue would run every night.
24:37
There we go.
24:39
The job queue runs every night, and pulls in the details from the website, from LCB.
25:10
OK, I seem to have lost. Yep, I seem to have lost the screen here.
25:16
So I’ll have to talk you, talk you through how it works. So, we’re pulling in the product file from vision. So, that’s one line per product.
25:26
We’re not pulling in the rotation number, um, file, which goes down to number and rotation. So it’s purely at the product level. The file comes in.
25:35
We compare that to the Bevica stock quantities and stock balances.
25:42
Then, in Bevica we create a batch and a list per the time that it’s pulled in and we highlight in red any lines where there’s a discrepancy, then you would filter to that list. So, you’ve got a nice list of maybe 4 or 5 products that there’s a discrepancy.
25:56
And then you can investigate why that discrepancy might be. And that might be the phase that you’ve received if they haven’t or vice versa.
26:04
Or they’ve picked it and you, you haven’t yet dispatched. So, whatever the reason, you can investigate and then you can set it to either resolved, under query. And then if there is a discrepancy. So, there is a legitimately difference in the quantities.
26:20
You’d have to go into an item journal, or some transaction, and fix it outside of the reconciliation page.
26:26
The reconciliation page just gives you the information for you then to investigate, but it runs every night.
26:33
So, you can keep a good track of how accurate your stock is rather than doing it once a month. Or more often.
26:42
OK, sorry, unfortunately, it’s a shame. I couldn’t show you that something happened to the database where the functionality is just being wiped out, someone must be doing something in the background, so apologies for that.
26:56
Do we have any questions?
27:05
Nothings come through as of yet Claudio.
27:11
OK, in that case, if I’ve got a little bit of time, I just wanted to show you two quick things before our time is up. So, the reconciliation, or the easier reconciliation on the duty ledger entries and paid reserve records withdrawal values.
27:26
So, if I come back here..
27:33
Different database.
27:36
So, we’ve done a bit of work just to make things a bit easier. Both from the paid reserves the point of view and duty ledger.
27:44
So, here on Bevica if I go to the duty ledger. Duty ledger entries, where the entry has been created by a sales order.
28:02
We’re putting the sales order number on the side here.
28:04
So, if the warehouse, when they send you the deferment, or when they send you the report of what, what duties being posted, they will give you a reference.
28:14
So, we can easily match that. So, it’s easier to say, that line that the warehouse is telling us about is the line that we, we’ve got here in our duty ledger.
28:23
Then the other kind of reconciliation or information type. Addition that we’ve created is, if I go to Paid Reserves.
28:38
So, these are our paid reserve entries, and if I scroll over to the side, we’re actually calculating the values, if someone was to withdraw it.
28:49
So, the duty, the VAT, and the, the total of the two. So again, more for information at this stage.
28:56
But some people might, might make use of this on websites, on reports, to give people a bit more information about their, their Paid Reserves and what they might do with it when they withdraw it.
29:17
So, that’s the end of the stuff that I wanted to show you.
29:22
Ian my colleague did do a session on what’s new in Business Central last week. That’s on our websites, and this recording will be on our website if not this week, early next week. So, you can review, if you want.
29:37
Do we have any questions before we close up?
29:45
There’s nothing come through just yet.
29:48
OK, well, thanks everyone for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.
29:54
Thank you very much.
