Recorded on the 6th November 2024, discover new and improved functionality available in Bevica as well as explore what’s new in the Microsoft Release Wave 2 update.

Watch our 30-minute webinar on demand with Product Director, Claudio Martell where he discusses:

  • The Business Central 2024 Wave 2 update
  • Updates/enhancements available in Bevica
  • Functionality coming soon to Bevica
  • Copilot

Watch here:

Transcript

3:03

So, everybody, thank you for joining us this afternoon for today’s What’s New in Bevica webinar. My name is Danusia Jolliffe.

3:12

I am the Customer Success Director here at TVision, and I’ll be looking after the housekeeping type elements of today’s session.

3:19

I will be monitoring the question box for you to see if any questions come in, and that can be done immediately within the chat or offline if the question takes slightly longer.

3:32

And I’ll be interrupting Claudio as he speaks as those relevant questions pop up.

3:36

This webinar will be available on demand in due course.

3:40

And I’m now going to pass over to Claudio and I’ll take myself off screen and on to mute.

3:47

Over to you, Claudio.

3:49

Hi, afternoon.

3:50

Hi, everyone.

3:51

Thanks for joining us.

3:53

So today, really, we’re going to talk about, I’m going to give you a quick overview of what’s new in the software both from a Business Central point of view and a Bevica point of view.

4:06

A colleague of mine did a similar session to this last week, solely concentrating on Business Central.

4:12

His first slide was really talking about, where do ideas come from?

4:17

I thought I’d copy that slide and just show you that Microsoft get a lot of their ideas from suggestions from people.

4:27

So, feature requests, ideas that people put on their website.

4:30

Obviously, legislation, where there’s good features available out in the market, they quite often, because they have the power, they buy companies and merge that into their software.

4:41

And obviously, they have their roadmap, their roadmap, their own things that they think are important.

4:46

And at the moment, I think everyone kind of knows that AI is a big thing in the tech industry at the moment.

4:52

So, AI and Copilot are a big push for Microsoft.

4:55

Most of their marketing is around kind of those areas.

4:59

From a Bevica point of view, we have our own roadmap as well.

5:03

Details of that are on FreshDesk.

5:05

And at the moment, I’d say we’re concentrating on warehouse integration and web integration.

5:10

We’ve got a lot of customers asking for extra features in kind of those two areas.

5:14

We will also then always add things to the product that come up from legislation.

5:19

So, exercise duty, extended producer responsibilities, all those things as they come up, we will make sure the product can handle it.

5:26

Then we do listen to clients.

5:27

If you have suggestions, ideas, let the Bevica team know, and we will review those and we will release those as nice to haves over time.

5:38

That’s where the background for all these new features come from.

5:45

From a Microsoft point of view, some general stuff that they are putting out there.

5:51

There’s a lot of UX or usability changes to the software, as ever, small little snippets of nice things.

6:00

There’s a new way of searching, which I’m going to show you in a second.

6:03

Attachments, you can upload them in bulk, which is a nice time-saver.

6:07

Multiple VAT numbers, I’ll show you that again in a second, and job queue.

6:12

For a long time, people have been complaining that when you set up job queues, it’s a bit of a dark art to understand if they’re still running or if they’ve errored.

6:21

Microsoft will now put something into the software that will alert people if a job queue stops.

6:29

These quick three areas, I’m going to go in and show you.

6:34

If I just flip over to Bevica.

6:40

The first one is the new way of searching.

6:42

If I go into an item, so the item list, and we’ve got our old search here or traditional search.

6:52

If I click on legacy search and look for Barolo, you’ll see it found all the Barolos, but if I put another word in that’s not kind of in text line with what it’s looking for, it doesn’t find it.

7:08

But the new search kind of does an, and, and it’ll find both.

7:13

So that’s quite nice that you can find, and that works across fields, not just one field.

7:18

So, if you’re looking for like region, sub region, percentage of alcohol, it’ll find across all fields.

7:25

So that’s kind of time saver.

7:29

The next one I want to show you was multiple VAT numbers.

7:32

So, this is useful for people transacting abroad and in Europe.

7:38

The way that they make this work is, for example, if I go to a customer and I search for ship to addresses, let’s say I have a new ship to address in Spain.

7:54

So, if I click new, call it Spain, and then when I change country code, it recognises that it’s in a different country and it’s asking me if I want to add an alternative VAT registration numbers.

8:14

So, if I want to, I say, yes.

8:17

And then here, it’s filled in for me.

8:20

And then I can add my number, assuming that it’s in the right format.

8:30

OK, it doesn’t like the format.

8:32

But you can put your VAT registration numbers in there.

8:35

So, if I close this, the other kind of possibly more traditional way of doing it is if you come to the customer list and type in alternative, you get the list for that customer and you can just type them in normally if you know you’re going to transact in advance.

8:58

Then there’s a nice feature where you can actually change the posting routines on sales orders for where things go in the nominal when you transact with these different countries.

9:13

Third one I wanted to show you from that first slide was the job queue and how you can set up some notifications from the job queue.

9:23

If I go to assisted setup, and then I find job queue setup, job queue notifications.

9:37

This one I’ve already set it up, which is why I’m getting this message, but you can run it again.

9:42

I’ll just go talk you through the steps.

9:45

It’s basically saying you’re going to set up notifications.

9:48

You’ve got two groups of people you can notify.

9:52

You can notify the person who set the job queue running, and you can alternatively set administrators, and you set up the administrators here.

10:02

If you’re in a bigger organisation, you might have two or three people here.

10:05

If you’re in smaller, you just might have the IT manager.

10:09

You tell the system what you want to notify or how you want to be notified.

10:15

Then you have the option of either having notifications inside the product, and those are on a tile.

10:22

It’ll tell you errors, but just add a number to a tile or add the notification at the top of the screen.

10:29

That’s the in-product notification.

10:32

If you click the control notifications with business events, that’ll trigger Power Automate.

10:38

You can set up your Power Automate to understand when a trigger has happened, and then potentially send e-mails, send notifications, team messages, anything you want.

10:48

But that’s using Power Automate outside of Business Central itself.

10:54

I click Next.

10:57

Then because on some job queues, you don’t want to be told of every single error, some errors are illegitimate, and the software will try again five minutes later.

11:07

You can set thresholds, so you’re only notified if you get, let’s say a number of errors consistently, then you’re told about it rather than every single error, which might produce a huge number of notifications you need to go through.

11:25

Next, and that’s it.

11:27

So that’s really easy to set up.

11:29

So, if you do have job queues running, set that up and see if that helps.

11:40

Back to the slides.

11:49

So, this is a change that I found this morning that made me chuckle, although it’s probably the smallest change they’ve made for this release.

11:59

I did think it was worth a slide by itself.

12:02

So, on the sales order, when you release or reopen an order, traditionally you come in here and you click release and the order gets set to release, but the caption on the button stays the same.

12:17

What they’ve done for this version is that the caption will change. So, you don’t have to drill into it to reopen it.

12:25

You can literally just click on the same button and the software knows if the order is released or reopened.

12:31

A really small change, but it’d make me smile this morning.

12:44

Another bigger change, I suppose, which is effectively a module in itself, is subscription or recurring billing.

12:52

So, the idea here is that you have a service that you provide to your customers on a monthly or quarterly basis, and you can invoice them for that service.

13:03

and the software can manage that in the background by creating contracts for your customers, service commitments, which is the service thing you’re providing, and then it’ll manage your recurring billing, your schedules, and then from a finance point of view, it will manage the deferrals.

13:22

I’m going to go and show you a simple example I set up just to give you an idea of how it works.

13:30

Then obviously over time we can see if it has other applications and slightly different ways of using it.

13:37

If I go back into Bevica.

13:44

First thing I want to show you was the service commitment packages.

13:50

That is really what are we selling from a service point of view.

13:54

My example here is that we sell, or we loan a customer a fridge, and then we either charge them for servicing the fridge on a monthly basis, or we charge them for renting, renting that fridge to them.

14:10

So, you can set up different service levels, as I’d call them, and then on within each one, you determine what the item is that will get invoiced that’s part of this service agreement, and then how the software will manage the times the schedule and the pricing.

14:32

So, everything’s set up in advance so that when you come to do your sales order it’s as easy as possible and everything kind of is automated because it’s kind of a scheduled billing process.

14:42

So, you can have as many of these as you like linked to as many saleable items as you like and they can be attached to multiple, multiple items.

14:54

That’s the setup, the initial details you have to do.

14:59

So, if I then now go to a sales order and sell one of these fridges.

15:06

We’ll see what happens in the background.

15:08

So do new, I’ll sell it to, I’ll sell a fridge to the Asado Bar and Grill.

15:25

And now if I come down to the lines and I sell my bottle fridge, the software knows that there’s a service, a commitment behind it, and it’s asking me which one do I want to sell with this product?

15:39

I can obviously sell nothing, but I can decide to pick one and say, okay.

15:45

And then that’s stored as a service commitment against that particular line.

15:50

You’ll see here with the price that we’re going to charge and details in the background tell it the schedule.

15:57

So, this now gets invoiced, release.

16:05

Oh, I need to put a quantity in first.

16:07

Let’s sell two of them.

16:12

Release it and post and ship an invoice.

16:19

So, the way the software works or the way that I’ve found the software works is that the billing is done via a contract.

16:30

And when you create, when you sell the service, it doesn’t automatically add it to a contract.

16:35

You have to tell it which contract to apply it to.

16:40

And if I scroll down on the role centre in my subscriptions are recurring billing section, we’ll see here we have service commitments.

16:46

So that’s what I’ve just sold but haven’t been attached to a contract.

16:50

And I’m guessing that so that you have the flexibility of either having one big contract per customer or everything you sell could be a separate individual contract.

17:00

I suppose it gives you the flexibility to decide.

17:03

So, if the customer has a contract, they might sell the Asado Bar & Grill.

17:08

You can decide which contract you assign it to.

17:11

Let’s see if The Pickled Egg Pub has one.

17:14

And Tristan Supermarkets from here, I can click on full details or create new and that would create a new contract.

17:22

And then you assign the service, let’s put that all back in.

17:29

So now that particular sale is attached to a contract, and then I do my recurring billing.

17:40

But this is what you typically run every month to pick up all these service commitments that you’ve sold that have kind of already got all their details against them, and then you create documents.

17:57

And there are other options for how you create the documents and so on, but I’m just trying to keep it simple just for the showing at the moment.

18:04

It’s create two documents because of those two contracts.

18:09

And if I go to my sales invoices, let’s pick the Asado Bar & Grill.

18:20

You’ll see here that we have the details of what was sold, the service, and it knows all the details in the background.

18:28

And if I go to, if I do post, that’s what I want to do, I want to do preview posting, as well as the traditional postings it’s done because it’s a sales invoice, it’s also created customer contract deferral.

18:56

So, this is what will allow you to recognise the revenue over time as the invoice, as the service is provided.

19:06

So, you’ll see here that we have a contract deferral for this particular contract.

19:10

And it’s going, in this case, monthly into the future.

19:13

And there’s a routine that you can run every month that will recognise these amounts as time goes on.

19:22

So, you’ll see here, if I change the view analysis, that by month, these deferral quantities are being posted.

19:39

So, you then post that invoice.

19:40

and then on a monthly basis, recognise that revenue.

19:44

So, my example was for a fridge.

19:47

I haven’t investigated enough yet to see how it might work for wine clubs.

19:52

If you’re trying to sell, let’s say, cases of wine on a monthly basis, but you’re just on a subscription basis taking money from the customer, and then potentially you’re selling them or sending them bottles or cases of wine on a monthly basis.

20:06

That’s probably the next thing I’m going to investigate on recurring billing.

20:11

Hopefully, that gave you a bit of an idea of how that works.

20:27

They’ve been quite a few changes on Shopify.

20:30

These, I would say, they’re incremental changes, nothing huge, but there are a couple of nice ones in here.

20:37

The refund process has been improved.

20:41

In the past, the refunds were quite blunt, and now there’s some extra options there to make them bit more user-friendly in the real world.

20:50

A nice feature is that you can create sales invoices in Bevica and send them to Shopify for the customer to pay in Shopify, and then those payments can get reconciled back in Bevica when it’s done.

21:04

That’s a really nice feature if you want send notifications to customers that they have to pay something.

21:10

It’s quite clean and neat if you’re using Shopify.

21:14

Then from an item point of view. There are more bits of information, if you like, going backwards and forwards between Bevica and Shopify, so attributes that we can assign in one or the other, that get updated whenever item details are updated.

21:35

From a reporting point of view, these are another area that Microsoft are putting a lot of effort into.

21:42

The layouts, so Microsoft have made it easier for people to create their own layouts from a Word point of view. So, your templates that you send to your customers, invoice a statement, they are easier now to manage, easier to customise.

21:56

They’ve produced a set of financial Excel layouts that have come out of the box that are customisable, that I think will make life a lot easier just to click on quickly and see your financial reporting.

22:12

There are more account schedules or financial reports as they’re now called.

22:16

For this version, they’ve added a whole raft of new ones.

22:21

Then on Power BI, we haven’t seen this yet.

22:24

It’s available November, but not quite yet in early November.

22:28

They are creating a pack of their own Power BI reports that will plug in automatically to the software so that you can run your reports.

22:37

Now that is aside from the TVision or the Bevica Power BI report, so you’ll be able to run these irrespective if you have our Bevica Power BI pack or not.

22:52

Just want to show you the Excel layouts, where they are.

22:56

So, if I go back into the software, you’ll see here on the Excel reports, if I click on there, at the moment they’re in preview mode.

23:08

If I pick something like aged accounts receivables.

23:12

So, the request page is just like it always has been.

23:18

And now when you download, it takes information, puts it into Excel, a couple of warnings, and then it grabs the data and makes the data available just in Excel with its own pivot tables and filters.

23:43

And I believe this can be refreshed.

23:46

So, you can just run it once, keep it on your desktop. And then when you want to refresh it, you can just open the Excel spreadsheet, click Refresh, and it’ll take the data as at that point.

23:56

I just need to confirm that, but I believe that’s what it does.

23:59

The data itself is held here in the background.

24:03

So, you can, like I said, customise it yourself, create new ones that you prefer rather than the standard ones.

24:09

But the standard ones are a good starting point to understand how they work and what sort of information you can be shown.

24:28

From a Bevica point of view, we’ve been doing quite a few things in the last couple of months.

24:33

So, on the item ledger entries and the paid reserve lists, we’ve been adding fields to make it easier to find information, understand what you’re looking at and filter.

24:44

We’ve created possibly something that’s a bit more technical, a schema.

24:49

So, if you are a developer or report writer, or you’re interested in looking kind of behind the scenes as to what the system, how the system fits together.

24:58

There is a table in the field schema that I can show you in a second.

25:03

We’ve been working on the sales line worksheets.

25:05

Now that was published or released quite a few months ago, but we are continually adding things to that.

25:11

So, keep an eye out for Bevica releases that we will be adding new things to the sales line worksheets.

25:18

We’ve done some work in the warehouse for those that run their own warehouse.

25:23

And something that we’re releasing tomorrow is integration between vision warehouses.

25:30

So that’s LCB, Lanchester, EHD, Vinotech and Bevica.

25:35

So, you can reconcile your stock balances overnight.

25:39

And I’ll show you that now.

25:42

I just want to show you the schema and just the screens for the item reconciliation.

25:55

On the schema, we have schema tables and schema fields.

25:58

So, if I click on the tables, there’s someone who might be report writing, might be interested in looking at this to see all the different fields that are in the database.

26:10

And if you can filter on the Bevica tables, so these are all the ones that Bevica provides.

26:16

So, if you’re interested in a particular table, you can click on that table and look at the fields.

26:28

So, what each individual field is in that table, what it represents, how it works, so you know what to do.

26:40

So, from the item reconciliation.

26:44

Let me do.

26:56

So, the way that the Vision approach item reconciliation is that they have a report that they can send, an API in fact, that they can send with all the stock quantities.

27:07

So we can, on a job scheduler, import that information, bring it into the software automatically overnight, and then produce a list here that shows you what balances the warehouse are telling us they have, what balances we believe we have, and if there’s a discrepancy, we highlight that as discrepancy, and then you can investigate and decide if it’s something the warehouse needs to change or something you need change in Bevica, in which case you would do an item journal to fix the quantity.

27:44

And then possibly the next night or the next week, the report would import again, and you would be told of any new discrepancies.

27:50

So that’s being released tomorrow.

27:52

So, if you’re interested in setting that up, let us know.

27:55

There is a bit of set up that we can help you with that.

28:05

So, some things that are coming soon, we’re doing more work on warehouse integration.

28:10

So, sending pre-advices to the warehouse, receipt confirmation, pick confirmations, they’re all coming in the next months.

28:16

Then from a general point of view, we are changing slightly the way we do duty calculation to allow for multiple alcoholic percentages on items if they occur.

28:27

That we’ve decided not to release it before the busy period at Christmas, so that’ll be released in January next year.

28:37

From a Microsoft point of view, they’re doing a lot of work on Copilot.

28:42

There’s a new app on the Microsoft Stack called CoPilot for Business, where they are creating what they call agents, and an agent is something that does a particular piece of work.

28:55

One that we’re interested in for Bevica is the sales order agent that goes across apps.

29:01

It does Outlook, it does Teams, it does Business Central, but the idea is that it can identify customer requirements and create orders or reply to customers.

29:12

There’s a short one-minute video from Microsoft that I’d like to play now that gives you a bit of an idea.

29:20

We haven’t got to play with it yet because it hasn’t been released but let me play the video.

29:30

For small businesses, every order matters and with limited resources, quickly responding to orders can be challenging.

29:37

The sales order agent in Dynamics 365 Business Central sets out to change that.

29:44

Let’s say you are a sales manager.

29:45

You can easily activate the agent right from your Business Central home screen.

29:50

Once the order intake email address is provided, you are ready to go with no additional configuration required.

29:57

The agent highlights tasks to be reviewed, and it’s easy to see how it’s engaging with inbound orders based on the timeline view.

30:04

If an order email is vague, the agent can correspond with the customer to clarify and takes into account available inventory and any previously flagged customer preferences.

30:16

The agent does the bulk of the work, and you only need to check the correspondence and sales quote before it’s shared with the customer.

30:23

With the sales order agent in Business Central, customers now get an improved ordering experience and faster delivery while your sales team can spend their time focusing on expanding the business. So, kind of a snippet of what it does in typical Microsoft fashion.

30:56

We’ll learn more as they release it and that’s due to be released in December or preview in December and released properly for next year.

31:05

So as soon as we have that available, we’ll play around with it and let you know what it does.

31:15

So, there’s more information out there both from a Microsoft point of view and a Bevica point of view. These links you’ll have access to them soon.

31:24

So, there’s a lot of videos on, on Microsoft’s YouTube channel and we’re adding videos to our YouTube channel so have a look at those and just try the, the new, the new stuff out.

31:42

Danusia were there any questions?

31:43

There were a few, quite a few people actually said is it possible to arrange some more in-depth sessions around some of the areas in particular Shopify and what’s the best way to do that?

31:57

Yeah we can, we can arrange general webinars if people want, if we have enough interest.

32:04

Or alternatively, if someone’s interested in Shopify for themselves, we can arrange just a one-hour overview of what it does to see if it fits the bill.

32:14

Great, thank you.

32:15

As I said, a number of people asked that specific question in particular about Shopify.

32:20

That’s obviously a main area of interest for people.

32:24

Okay.

32:25

Great, okay.

32:26

If there’s no further questions, I’ll have them monitoring the chat.

32:28

and I know several of you did ask that.

32:30

Thank you so much everybody for joining us today.

32:33

A copy of the, or a link rather, to the webinar will be available to you all in due course to watch on demand.

32:40

And as always, Claudio, thank you so much for sharing what’s new and what’s coming in Bevica.

32:44

Thank you everybody.

32:45

Yes, thank you for joining.