Context: Dynamics 365 Project Operations integrated with Finance via Dual Write. Organisation standard mandates no customisations (configuration only).

1) Executive Summary

Dynamics 365 positions itself as a project-centric solution, designed to support organisations where projects drive revenue, cost control, and resource utilisation. However, the current architecture lacks an out-of-the-box mechanism for managing in-life amendments to confirmed contracts and projects. This gap forces organisations into workarounds that compromise governance and operational efficiency, even though financial integrity remains a core principle of the platform.

2) Current Gap Analysis

Confirmed Project Contracts become read-only after confirmation, preventing any amendments to scope, timelines, or pricing. While this design protects financial integrity, it fails to accommodate standard business practices such as contract amendments and change control. The absence of a Dataverse-based Change Order entity and the inability to supersede contracts without creating new records introduces fragmentation and reporting complexity.

Key limitations include:

• No ability to amend confirmed contracts without leaving them in Draft (which destabilises baselines).

• Invoice schedules tied to original Expected Delivery Date, blocking billing flexibility for extended timelines.

• Budget revisions provide financial snapshots but do not extend operational timelines or invoice schedules.

• Closing contracts as Lost reverses unbilled actuals and closes projects, making it unsuitable for amendments.

3) Impact on Project-Centric Organisations

Project-centric organisations rely on accurate baselines, auditable change control, and financial integrity. The inability to manage amendments within the same contract and project disrupts these principles. Workarounds such as creating new contracts and projects introduce fragmentation, complicate reporting, and increase operational overhead. This gap undermines Dynamics 365’s positioning as a comprehensive project-centric ERP solution.

4) Comparison with Standard Methodologies

Industry standards such as PMI and PRINCE2 emphasise structured change control processes that allow amendments to existing baselines while maintaining audit trails. Contract management best practices include formal amendments linked to the original agreement, ensuring continuity and compliance. Dynamics 365’s current approach—forcing new records for changes—deviates from these methodologies and creates governance risks.

5) Recommendations for Microsoft

To align Dynamics 365 with project-centric best practices while maintaining financial integrity, we recommend:

• Introduce an out-of-the-box Change Order entity in Dataverse, linked to Project Contracts and Projects.

• Enable controlled amendments to confirmed contracts, with audit logging and approval workflows.

• Allow extension of invoice schedules and Expected Delivery Dates without breaking baselines.

• Provide configuration options for superseding contracts while preserving historical data and financial postings.

• Ensure Dual Write mappings fully support amendment scenarios across operational and financial layers.

6) Conclusion

Dynamics 365 must evolve to support in-life amendments natively, as this is a fundamental requirement for project-centric organisations. By introducing structured amendment capabilities, Microsoft can strengthen governance, maintain financial integrity, and deliver on the promise of a truly project-centric ERP solution.

The Revenue Project ID field (Project management and accounting → All projects → Project → Revenue recognition) is designed to give flexibility in how revenue is recognized. When several sub‑projects roll up under a parent project, assigning the parent’s Revenue Project ID to each sub‑project allows the system to combine revenue recognition entries across all those related projects.

If each sub‑project uses its own Revenue Project ID, running revenue recognition will consume only one number from the voucher number sequence.

However, when multiple projects share the same Revenue Project ID, the revenue recognition process consumes voucher numbers based on the number of projects included under that Revenue Project ID.

Example:

If the current voucher number is PPV_0015, and you have 15 sub‑projects all mapped to the same parent Revenue Project ID, posting revenue recognition will generate vouchers up to PPV_0030.

It would be very helpful if the system provided a way to track which voucher numbers were consumed during this process, or an option to prevent this kind of voucher number “skipping” from occurring.

In the current design of the Project management and accounting module in the Finance and Operations application, when a purchase order is linked to a project, users are prompted to decide whether the vendor’s default financial dimensions on the purchase order header should be overridden with the project’s default financial dimensions.

However, there is no option that allows users to retain the default financial dimensions for item lines. As a result, users must manually restore the item-level financial dimensions, which is both inefficient and time‑consuming.

We would like to formally request a design enhancement to introduce an option that allows users not to override the item’s default financial dimensions when adding lines to a project purchase order.

Once a project milestone is created on the contract line details you cannot delete the record.

There should be an ability to delete the milestone if the status = not ready to invoice, so that if a mistake is made, the milestone can be deleted

To Whom it may concern,

I would like to suggest developing a multilingual keyboard.

At present, keyboards (especially mechanical keyboards) are limited to one language setting/layout. For instance, if I would like to purchase a FR keyboard, I would need to buy an AZERTY with all the settings and accents that come with the language. This same keyboard would be suitable to use for English too. However, if I would need to type a text in another language such German, Slavic, Asian or any other linguistic setting else than English or French than I would need to purchase another keyboard.

In order to overcome this, the idea would be to combine physical keyboard + virtual keyboard. The keyboard would be a touchscreen where the user can use keys and shift keys to the language needed like you would usually do on a smartphone.

As a result, you would issue one a unique product and would be more sustainable on the long term.

Many thanks.

Current Business Process Flow looks very muted and not very configurable. Since this is very important and each organization have their own way of addressing these process flows, it will be good if we can make this configurable by the customer IT Admins. Can we make this visually appealing also?