Why You Should Use Office 365 with Dynamics 365 Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft’s cloud-based ERP targeted towards the small, medium and corporate markets. Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft’s office productivity suite that is targeted to pretty much everybody. One of the questions we often get is “Should I, or why should I, use Office 365 with Dynamics 365 Business Central?”

The main reason you should combine Office 365 with Business Central is productivity. The Business Central Outlook plugin allows you to access customer and vendor data without leaving Outlook. That means no alt-tabbing or clicking through windows to get to the accounting software to look things up. It can save A LOT of time.

Here are some specific examples:

• If a customer sends you an email, you can open, directly in Outlook, the Business Central plug-in, which will recognize the customer and open their customer card. From the customer card you can see their sales history and drill down on, and open, historical documents.  You can also create a sales quote and send it to the customer without ever leaving Outlook.
• You can also do the same thing with vendors, such as automatically pulling up their vendor card, historical documents and creating and sending purchase orders and invoices.
• If you are a project or service-oriented business that bills based on billable appointments scheduled in Outlook, you can create the invoice for the customer right from the calendar item. You simply open the appointment, and then the Business Central plug in will be available for you to create an invoice right then and there.

The picture I included shows an example of a customer requesting a quote for a couple of items, a chair and a table. The plug-in doesn’t just let you manually create documents, it has smarts. It leverages Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence technologies to read the email and suggest the line items to build a quote, saving even more time.

The Business Central Outlook plug-in is included free with your Business Central subscription.