David Boehm Professional Business Software, Inc. President

Currently, BC has financial and budget ledgers. This product also needs statistical ledgers. As an example, if I run a car wash, I would like to be able to track how many cars I wash per month. If I run a hotel, I would like to keep track of how many rooms were rented each night.

This would make it far easier to import Projects and Tasks to Business Central

It would be very useful to have an "Exit without saving" capability on each card. Often times, users make more than one mistake when changing data on a card. At that point, they simply wish they could exit the screen without saving any of the changes they've made on the current screen. Then, they would come back in and try again. I know this rollback capability exists within VS Code/AL. It surprises me that Microsoft doesn't make use of it within the screens of Business Central.

Currently, a phone call is recorded as an "interaction" within Business Central if the phone call is initiated from the Contacts List page, using the "Make Phone Call" action. This is useful, but involves a lot of navigating in order to get to the screen. It would be very useful to be able to set a parameter within BC, so that BC will track an interaction (phone call, email, text message) initiated from other Microsoft products (e.g. Outlook, Teams, Skype for Business, etc. This would do a thorough job of documenting all interactions, and would be much more convenient. As an example, many inside sales people do most of their contact work from within Outlook. Because of Business Central's Outlook Add-in, Outlook contacts can be synch'ed with Business Central contacts. Consequently, interactions could be recorded in Business Central. The "Conversation History" folder within Outlook already notates incoming and outgoing phone calls made through Outlook, Teams, and Skype for Business. If these interactions were tracked within Business Central in the same way, a complete record of interactions would exist within BC. This would make it easier for an employee to stay organized, and much easier for a manager to track the actual performance of his/her employees.

Consider: an entity with 3 separate companies in the same BC tenant (e.g. Company A, Company B, and Company C). All 3 companies occupy the same rented building. Company A receives the monthly vendor invoice for rent. Company A will be paying this invoice. The rent expense of $10,000 will be distributed across all 3 companies. I should be able to create a 4-line entry in BC's Intercompany General Journal that would look something like: The first line would be a document type of invoice, account type vendor, credit $10,000. The second line would debit G/L rent expense for $3,000. The third line would debit account type "IC Partner", Account Number "Company B" for $2,000. The fourth line would debit account type "IC Partner", Account Number "Company C" for $5,000. This is an abbreviated description, but the point is that it should be possible to book this entry from the Intercompany General Journal screen. Currently, this isn't possible.

Consider a situation where you send invoices to several related companies, where the parent company ultimately pays the invoices. In the Payment Reconciliation screen, you can apply a cash receipt to only one company's invoices. If you try to apply part of the cash receipt to an invoice from a second company, you get an error message that informs you that you've already applied cash against invoices from a different company. I suppose this design decision was meant to keep users from mis-applying cash, but this approach is poorly reasoned. This doesn't take consolidated disbursements from a parent company into consideration. This "error message" should actually be no more than a warning message. Alternatively, a set-up parameter in either "Sales and Receivables Setup" or "General Ledger Setup" should allow for posting a cash receipt in the (Payment Reconciliation screen) to invoices from multiple customers.

Most list screens within BC have the "Page>Edit in Excel" functionality built in. This includes the "General Journals" screen. Oddly enough, this functionality isn't built into the "Intercompany General Journals" screen. "Edit in Excel" is one of the most useful productivity features within BC. Although not all BC customers have a need for intercompany functionality, intercompany general journals can often be as voluminous as "General Journals". Consequently, it is imperative to include the "Edit in Excel" functionality within the "Intercompany General Journal" screen.

We are now able to delete extension data when uninstalling an extension. This is wonderful. However, I would suggest changing the placement of the control, or in some other way modifying this so that it is not quite so easy to do. The control is placed in the same spot as the control that allows you to "accept" the terms and conditions when installing a new extension. I normally make these changes in off-hours. At 11:00 P.M., I am not always at my most alert. It is currently too easy to accidentally delete the extension data. This is especially true when I am uninstalling a prior version of an in-house extension prior to installing the latest version. I have yet to actually mistakenly delete my extension data, but it would just be too, too easy to do.