David Ross Senior IT Business Analyst

I work for an organization that sells multi-channel retail products and has integration points with Ecommerce, Microsoft Dynamics MPOS, and our Shipping Department using batch jobs for invoicing and other processing.

At period-end we have not been able to solve a cut-off issue. If a product has been sold and shipped on the last day of the fiscal period but was invoiced, due to batch processing timing and/or transaction volume until the first day of the new fiscal period, the sales are not properly recognized.

We would like to see a configuration option that allows for invoices to be dated and posted using the Shipment/Delivery date. This would prevent cutoff issues at period end.

We are still working to resolve the issue experienced at period end and believe, at this point, this can only be accomplished with customer development or a product extension.

Background:

We have an issue where gift cards are being used for Marketplace returns when they should be credited to the customer's account which is cleared later when the Marketplace settles with our company. We want to enforce this behavior by potentially having Marketplace orders go through their own channel and applying a default return policy to credit the customer's account. Or simply applying the return policy to "Customer Account" payments for all of Ecomm.

In our DEV environment I tried creating a Return Policy and applying it to a node under Ecommerce and was prompted with the error that Return Policies could only be applied to stores.

Request to Microsoft -

Extend the "Return Policy" functionality to nodes in the organization other than stores (e.g. eCommerce). This is something I can see we could use across our sales and customer service organizations.

Background -

Indirect customers may have credit card terms and have a tokenized card reference on file used when their orders are fulfilled and shipped to collect the funds when the orders are shipped. Also, Direct customers may be part of a product subscription service where select items are shipped to them, automatically, once a month or once a quarter. The Direct customers would also have a tokenized credit card reference on file to charge when each shipment is processed. It is possible that the card on file could expire in the time between when it was placed on file and when it is scheduled to be shipped. We want to be proactive, contacting customers in advance, prior to the shipment date to ensure we have a valid card once the items are ready for shipment to prevent shipment delays.

Other than the credit and collections processing and the retail transaction processing, I have not found any other built-in automatic email notification for proactively contacting customers with open orders or subscriptions when their card has expired or is about to expire.

Request to Microsoft -

Add built in function that will email customers, utilization the customer pools, similar to how past due invoice are handled for customers with open sales orders or active subscriptions that have (tokenized) expired cards or cards expected to expire within a specified number of days.

Background -

Using the "Receipt Format Designer" tool can be a challenge and is very dissimilar to other form building tools that Microsoft uses. Unfortunately, I have used this tool and found the several weaknesses including:

• Difficultly of using this design tool on a smaller display (e.g. a laptop or tablet screen).
• It is time consuming to get the objects placed where you want on the screen.
• Formatting is not very robustly implemented.
• There is really no "tool tip" or any other indicator that I have found explaining what is contained in the fields for the receipt.
• The look and feel is "windows-like" and is inconsistent with the way other Windows products handle form design/build.
• No really good integrated ability to "preview" what my document will look like for receipts (currently, I am find myself running the 1070 and 1090 distribution jobs in our dev environment and testing a new transaction in POS every time I want to see that results of the layout changes.)

Recommendation:

I believe Microsoft has a significant opportunity to leverage the technology used in Microsoft Forms by integrating a "Lite" version of Microsoft forms for D365 to be used to, at minimum, create/update receipt formats for the POS as well as create/update screen definitions for POS.

You probably could even "take some business away" from businesses like FormPipe/Lasernet that offer tools that integrate with D365 and offer your own add-on for creating the templates and generating the documents for common business documents that the other tools are used for currently by businesses that have implemented D365,

We have a set of larger clients who routinely include many references (over 100) to deductions that they want to take. All of the deductions are usually contested with about 75-80% of them being successfully resolved and do not result in credit applied to the customer account (e.g. the potential deduction created in deductions workbench is denied and is not "written off")

We have attempted to find an entity (or create a new, custom entity) to bulk load new deductions into deductions workbench. Microsoft support and the escalation engineers have confirmed that no such entity exists withing D365 that would be used to bulk load new deductions into deductions workbench.

Unfortunately, we have found the performance and response times loading the deductions workbench to be very slow (1.5 minutes to refresh after navigating to the page or clicking the OK button to save a new deduction). However, even if this performance were significantly improved, it is unreasonable to expect an accounting clerk to enter >100 new deductions manually (It is time consuming, mind-numbingly repetitive and error prone. Also, unnecessary when you usually have the customer remittance that can be used to format into a file that could be bulk loaded if the structure was in place to allow this).

There may be a way of having a multi-step process of using more than one entity to load (1) the journal and (2) using the journal ID to include as a reference by the new deduction that is created. However, this would require some type of development by every Microsoft customer who has larger marketplace-type accounts which is very inefficient as all of these customers would be doing their own custom development efforts that may need to be refactored as new Microsoft Dynamics 365 releases are installed in the future.

For this reason, we are requesting Microsoft to do some development that will either (1) create an out-of-the-box entity published that can be used in conjunction with either the Excel add-in or the data management import function or (2) full development of a bulk load utility to load/create new deduction using a file to bulk load the information in to the system.

Deductions workbench, even after Microsoft tuned the query, takes 1 minute 30 seconds to load a small set of data.

According to support and my personal review of a Trace file, there are MANY queries being executed. We are only using Deduction workbench because we have a customer that routinely deducts amounts that must go through a dispute process. This removes, at least temporarily, the open receivable from the customer account and place it in another receivable account until we have a decision from our customer and can write off or deny the deduction.

It is my understanding that we are not using all the features of deductions workbench.

Maybe it is possible to have the process of loading deductions workbench or creating a new deduction be streamlined based on the configuration. (e.g. If the user does not have deductions as part of their rebate process then the processing skips over that part.)

Even 10 seconds for a small set of data is too long for users to wait. Especially if the user is waiting for a refresh after saving/creating one of many records.