Dynamics 365 & Power Platform – 2023 release wave 2 plans

Today, Microsoft released the new plans for 2023 release wave 2. These plans will tell you about the short-term investments to be released by Microsoft for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Microsoft is releasing these plans twice a year to indicate what they are working on. In this post, you will find the links to the 2023 wave 2 plans and some of the highlights mentioned in these plans.

2023 release wave 2 plans

With all the recent buzz around Copilot, the release plans have a common theme: Copilot. If you search within the documents, this word has been used over 270 times!

In the two release plans, Microsoft reveals a lot of new upcoming features. These features are planned to be released between October 2023 and March 2024. Again, a lot of new features announced to be released. You can choose to read them online or download the PDF version. You can find the plans here:

Dynamics 365: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2023wave2/

Power Platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2023wave2/

Microsoft Cloud for Industry: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/release-plan/2023wave2/

Note that the plans are subject to change. New features might be added, and dates may be changed, but also some topics might be pulled from the current plans. The changes will be trackable in the Change history. You might review the changes for the previous release plan as an example: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2023wave1/change-history/.

Additionally, you might have a look at the Release planning portal.

My main area of focus in this blog is the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations features. You can read a short summary below. Ensure you read the full release notes as I just listed some of the hightlights per application.

Dynamics 365 Finance

Where Microsoft released previews for extended planning and analysis, and business performance analytics, in this period, they will become generally available.

First data archival support was added as per the previous release plan. In this wave, archival for Tax transactions will be added to the product. You can schedule your own process automation for processing the archival jobs.

In the current version of Dynamics 365 Finance, there is a gap where realized gains and losses in reporting currency are not calculated during ledger settlements. A new enhancement will fill this gap and will post the result when the settlement in accounting currency balances. Later, settlements in transaction currency will be supported.

The bank revaluation will get some updates as well. You will be able to determine if a calculation should be performed including all dimensions or none. In addition, there is a focus on audibility where the definition of the calculation can be reported to auditors.

A new vendor invoice center will be added to the product where accounts payable clerks will have a central place to check progress and quickly can act on exceptions.

Recurring vendor invoices will also be a new feature in the application where you can set up amounts and frequency of invoices for e.g. rent and electricity. The invoices will then automatically be created and posted.

Support for customer refunds and generate payment file with ISO20022 Credit transfer format in customer is also expected as part of the release plan.

Another big ask by customers is a support for customer prepayment invoices. A feature similar to the purchasing side will be introduced.

Also, there are additions from the globalization team. There are efforts for electronic invoicing formats and efforts for the Tax Calculation Service. In addition, there is focus for localizations for LATAM countries: Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.

You can also watch the overview video for Dynamics 365 Finance updates (the video includes changes for Human Resources and Project Operations).

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

The first feature to mention is Copilot and AI. A conversational experience will be added to make purchase order changes easier for incoming order responses from vendors that needs to be disussed with other stakeholders.

Related to Inventory and logistics, a pricing management workspace will be added where sales managers will be able to judge on pricing changes and easily adjust and enable prices.

The global inventory accounting add-in will get a support for evaluating costs in discrete manufacturing using standard cost.

Inventory visibility will be integrated in Dynamics 365 Commerce. Key changes in inventory will be directly updated in Inventory Visibility. There are also some other updates for Inventory Visibility. Also, a new mobile app will be released that will replace the deprecated on-hand mobile workspace.

Microsoft is also working on being able to setup and sell product bundles where it will ensure items will be priced and sold together. Other sales improvements are around surcharges. Compound surcharges functionality will be added for sales orders and quotations. Next to this, you can expect a feature for order classes and advanced holds with automation rules.

In the area of manufacturing and asset management, you can also expect changes, like detection of spikes in sensor data, a feature to act on last minute production order changes. Also, there will be support for over picking for production and batch orders.

For procurement, there will be an additional ship date that can be communicated to vendors in case of specific delivery terms where you would need to tell your vendor when to ship the goods.

The last feature I list in this blog is the option to manage compliance with export control restrictions. You can manage and track restrictions prior to confirming, picking, packing, shipping, and invoicing sales orders. The policies can be managed in a Dataverse based app where you can setup rules with easy to understand functions, provided by Power Fx.

Microsoft also released a video with an overview of the changes for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Cross app capabilities

Microsoft is working on a convergence story to bring the F&O apps closer to the Power Platform. In the release notes, you can read about One Dynamics One Platform. Read about how Export to Data lake transitions to Synapse Link for Dataverse. It will support both tables and entities, making it easy to access data from multiple Dynamics 365 applications.

There is more…

In this post, I tried to just quickly summarize some feature highlights. With the links provided at the top of this post, you can read about all the details of the planned feature enhancements for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and Microsoft Cloud for Industry.

Usually, the April and October releases are the moments where Microsoft is cleaning up deprecated features and obsolete objects. Some DLLs might be deleted or updated to a more recent version. Ensure you will get hold of the preview releases in time to check if your customizations are still compatible or if you need to adjust them to ensure they will continue to work in the future.

Also note that quite a number of features in feature management will become mandatory or enabled by default. Ensure you read the release plan for these changes.

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!