Hi, I’m Pippa Odell from TVision Technology Ltd. and this is our TechTalk.

As the managing director of a leading Microsoft Gold ERP partner, we have spent the last 20+ years working with UK companies that are struggling with their current financial systems and outdated processes. We help them transform their finance and operations departments with a product called Dynamics 365 Business Central. If you like Office 365, Business Central is a great way to replace legacy systems that aren’t working for you.

People often ask me: “What is Dynamics 365?”. Simply put, it is a group of different software products that integrate with each to help you run your organisation. Unlike the other Dynamics products Business Central has functionality to manage all the different areas of your company, bringing all your data together in a single cloud solution.

Now let’s talk about the issues we solve in more detail. We are regularly asked to solve the issues created by disparate legacy systems. That don’t scale, have poor connectivity leading to excessive manual tasks, lengthy reconciliations and key processes and key data sitting in excel.

Few solutions can bring together all these processes in a single platform, but without them visibility across the business slow if not impossible and the management team rarely see one version of the truth.

We all know how important reporting is when growing a business yet PWCs 2020 report on the future of finance has 67% of those surveyed producing management reports manually.

Another major consideration in selection is how to future proof the business when choosing new technology. Businesses no longer want the responsibility and cost to maintain on-premise solutions that quickly date and often restrict the mobility of their workforce.

We think Business Central (formerly known as NAV or Navision) brings competitive advantage

As well as the standard finance functionality you’d expect in a single cloud solution users get automated processes, role-based menus and workflow guidance with actionable insights and AI predictions, real-time data visualisation and built-in business intelligence to help digitalise your organisation.

As you’d expect from any Microsoft product, the solution has extensive functionality within Outlook bringing productivity efficiencies.

With Business Central, finance management is made simple, with data feeding in from all your core processes across the business. Users find the platform intuitive, and you can quickly increase financial visibility and performance with accelerated month end, improved forecasting, and high levels of process automation.

Our customers are normally ambitious agile organisations that want to stream line their processes and gain greater visibility of their data. They come in all shapes and sizes from business turning over £5m+ all the way up to a FTSE 100 company.

No two clients are ever the same which is part of the joy of working with them. We always have finance to roll out but regularly deliver projects with elements of inventory, job costing, distribution, international business and service management.

Our customers are in a variety of sectors including professional services, engineering, distribution, even other IT and software suppliers as well as a number of accountancy firms.

During the implementation process we ensure we fully understand your requirements such that the solution we deliver provides real business benefit from day one. We see buy in from your project team as critical, which is why we consistently have successful implementations.

Business Central manages everything from opportunity through to invoice in a single environment negating the need for disparate systems.

TVision will help setup your processes and workflows to deliver greater automation and efficiencies. We create your custom dashboard that prioritises key tasks, shows your KPIs and allows you to slice and dice the data giving you that all important visibility in real-time.

Business Central has regular automatic updates giving your organisation access to latest technology with no additional costs. . And as the solution is subscription, you can easily add or remove users as needed. It grows with you, you can add new companies, and start using more functionality at any time.

A recent study produced by Forrester looks at the cost savings and benefits gained by companies that move to Business Central in the cloud. The highlights show a 162% Return on Investment with payback in less than one year.

I’ll now give you a quick overview, other videos are available on our website

The home screen is a customisable, role tailored dashboard that includes action buttons and chart elements.  Every element is interactive and clicking on one takes you to the source information. The Chart of Accounts are also fully customisable showing account balances at a glance and drilling down on a balance navigates to the transactions making up that balance. On any list view in the system it is easy to add custom filters to select rows that match the given criteria and act accordingly from there. List pages have a shortcut button to take you to reports related to that list and if you cannot find a report then the search function can be used to display what you are looking for. If the predefined reports are not sufficient then account schedules let you create your own.  You chose the rows and you can even customise the columns to show period-on-period or actual-v-budget reports.

BC is fully integrated with Office 365.  From BC we can open outlook for instance and if an email references a document in BC then a link is provided to view that document. In outlook we can also get insights about a contact, the company they work for, statistics and ongoing activities relating to that company. We can even create a new document in BC without leaving Outlook.  If we create a sales document then it will be immediately available for all other BC users to view. Excel integration is also available. We can highlight rows and then copy them; open Excel; and paste them. There is also a shortcut button to download an Excel workbook containing the information on the screen. Finally, an Edit in Excel option opens the list on screen in Excel where it can be edited and synchronised back to BC almost instantly.

We work with a large number of customers, too many to mention here but what we really enjoy is bringing our clients big tangible benefits. Examples include…

A Recruitment PLC with weekly billing where we automated their processes enabling all their 2000 + sales invoices to be issued at the press of a button rather than the 3 days that it used to take.

A financial management company where we replaced 4 separate databases and brought all of their processes into Business Central.

A venture capital company who regularly acquire Tech businesses that love how quickly can get the new business up and running on Business Central bringing them in line with the rest of the group.

A water company that has to meet Ofwat reporting standards.

A distillery that has benefited from the flexibility and visibility of their data that was featured in a recent Microsoft video.

Some of the solutions we build involve more than just Business Central

This is a really busy slide, but I like to show it as it helps decision makers visualise just how much technology is available to your business when you choose a Microsoft product like Business Central.

Your users will already be familiar with Office 365, but let me tell you about some of the other products you can see.

The Power Platform lets your key Business Central users built out no code applications giving them the ability to automate non-core processes.

Then if we look at the Common Data service – now called Dataverse that gives your business infinite opportunities to integrate using standard APIs or building your own.

Business Central runs on the Azure platform. Azure services are constantly expanding and include the cognitive reasoning that allows Business Central to interpret outlook emails and action them, not to mention bots that carry out a range of telemetry.

Investing in Business Central with the Microsoft stack really does give your business the future proofing you need.

We are always asked how quickly can we you get up and running with Business Central, and how much will it cost?

Very simply, the answer is linked to the complexity of the project you have and the business requirements.

Simple projects can be live in less than a month, or where there are multiple areas of the business to modernise it could be 3 to 6 months plus

Currently a full user costs £52.80 a month plus one off implementation fees

We use our own agile project methodology & work with key users in each area of your business as well as your nominated project manager and project sponsor. Our goal is to get your users proficient on the system as quickly as possible.

98% of our projects in the last 3 years have been delivered on time and on budget giving you reassurance we are a great partner for change

I hope this has answered some of your questions, but do get in touch, we’d love to discuss your individual business needs.