For over a decade, revenue recognition has remained one of the most complex areas that finance leaders must navigate and manage. At the same time, more and more businesses are introducing subscription-based offerings in an effort to meet evolving consumer needs for innovative and convenient products and services while also creating new and predictable revenue streams. Indeed, the average US consumer now has four subscriptions, according to McKinsey & Company.¹ It is no surprise then that the subscription economy is forecast to grow at a blistering pace in both B2C and B2B markets, rising 18.5 percent year-over-year from $224 billion in 2021 to $275 billion in 2022.²

As organizations add new subscription-based offerings, though, their revenue recognition processes become more complex, and many are challenged to incorporate the pricing and billing scenarios necessary to operate successfully at scale. To meet the growing need of organizations to manage the unique demands of subscription-based business models, we are excited to announce the general availability of Subscription billing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. Subscription billing is offered at no additional cost to users of Dynamics 365 Finance.

Introducing a new approach to Subscription billing

Often, the most difficult challenge of transitioning to new subscription-based business models is adopting the right technology solution and aligning operational processes to support the complexities of recurring revenue. For example, consumers pay for a single, convenient line item with product-as-a-service offerings. Internally though, obligations and financial performance must be managed. This usually requires organizations to become proficient at allocating portions of customer payments for revenue recognition in multiple revenue streams, such as separate accounting for hardware revenue and the monthly recurring revenue from related and ongoing service contracts.

Subscription billing is specifically designed for managing the ins and outs of recurring revenue and does so through three primary features: recurring contract billing, revenue allocation, and revenue and expense deferrals. In the remainder of this blog post, we provide a general overview of these features and explore how they help chief financial officers (CFOs) to tackle the challenges of the subscription economy.

Learn more: Subscription billing overview.

Recurring contract billing

The ability to correctly account for the revenue from complex subscription offerings is critical to obtaining an accurate picture of recurring revenue, maintaining financial compliance, and providing business leaders with the insights needed to accelerate growth. Subscription billing includes a recurring contract billing feature to help organizations overcome this specific challenge. With recurring contract billing, users have advanced control over pricing and billing parameters, contract renewal, and consolidated invoicing. Recurring contract billing can also handle specific billing requirements such as one-off, milestone, and usage-based, and can incorporate tiered or flat pricing strategies. Ultimately, the recurring contract billing feature shortens the quote-to-cash process. The user experience is also improved by providing an easy pathway to consolidate invoices by customer or item and simplifying the contact renewal and termination process.

Revenue allocation

As we mentioned earlier, allocating revenue into several revenue streams for accounting purposes is one of the unique challenges that participants in the subscription economy face. The revenue allocation feature of Subscription billing provides users with the ability to automate complex allocations and to ensure revenue compliance by handling pricing and revenue allocation across multiple items. Specifically, it helps organizations comply with International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 15 and Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 606 by assigning default and standalone selling prices and methods to items. This way, users gain flexibility and control by allocating revenue based on standalone prices.

Revenue and expense deferrals

Another challenge in the subscription economy is remaining in compliance with regulations that are still evolving, especially around revenue and expense deferrals. With changing regulations on how organizations recognize revenue, finance teams are apt to get bogged down in spreadsheets, working manually to create formulas and consolidate data for reporting. However, with Subscription billing’s revenue and expense deferrals feature, users can automate revenue and expense deferral processes in alignment with US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) standards. The solution also provides a robust and straightforward way of creating schedules for future period postings and consolidating invoices. 

What’s next?

In this article, we discussed the growth of the subscription economy and the unique challenges that organizations face when transitioning or adding new subscription-based business models. We looked at how three features, recurring contract billing, revenue allocation, and revenue and expense deferrals, help CFOs tackle the challenges of the subscription economy.

Subscription billing is offered at no additional charge to users of Dynamics 365 Financeand we’re excited to announce some recent enhancements that make this offering even better. Thanks to a new licensing agreement with Binary Stream Software, Subscription billing now includes advanced features such as support for complex billing, both usage-based and tiered models, and advanced reporting capabilities for companies with recurring revenue. To learn more, check out our recent webinar, How to thrive in a subscription economy, where you can hear from our guest speaker, CEO and President of Binary Stream Software, Lak Chahal.

Sources:

1- McKinsey & Company, 2021. Sign up now: Creating consumerand businessvalue with subscriptions.

2- Juniper Research, 2022. What Will the Subscription Economy Deliver in 2022?

The post Dynamics 365 Finance helps chief financial officers tackle the subscription economy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Collaborate, innovate, and deliver with Microsoft

As work becomes more complexwith employees, customers, and partners spread across the globeorganizations must improve productivity and operations to stay competitive. Business leaders and project managers need tools that help them stay on top of their work, align teams around common objectives, and elevate project performance.

On April 20, 2022 at the Project Management for a Connected World digital conference, you’ll learn how Microsoft’s connected project experiencesMicrosoft Planner, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operationshelp you stay organized and deliver successful projects. With multiple breakout sessions to choose from, you can create a schedule that matches your goals. Plus, get your questions answered in a Q&A chat that runs throughout the event.

Explore when to use Planner, Project, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations

Planner, Project, and Project Operations enable people to effectively manage projects of all sizes and complexity. Planner works with Microsoft 365, and specifically Microsoft Teams, to help you create and share plans and information-rich tasks with collaborators. Project is the simple and powerful project management solution that helps you execute initiatives of varying sizesfrom quick projects to larger, more complex programs. Project Operations connects sales, resource management, project management, and accounting teams for greater visibility and collaboration.

Project Management for a Connected World is a great opportunity to dive deeper into each of these products to learn which one is most appropriate for your needs. Sessions like, “Choosing the right project management products for your organization” will help you connect the right tools with your upcoming and ongoing projects. You’ll also learn about the differences and benefits of Planner, Project, and Project Operations.

Get up to speed on the latest product updates and roadmaps

At this event, you’ll be able to connect with Microsoft product engineering to learn how the most recent product updates keep pace with the growth of your business and the evolving market. You’ll also get to delve into how the product roadmaps will meet the needs of a more complex hybrid workplace.

For example, the “Microsoft Project introduction and roadmap” session will show the releases over the last year that help drive more collaboration and visibility across your projects, and you’ll get a peek into the exciting innovations planned on the product roadmap.

In “Microsoft Planner: Introduction and roadmap” you’ll learn about the latest Planner updates and future releases.

You can also choose to attend sessions that dive deeper into Project Operations. Explore how the latest releases help boost efficiency in project planning and delivery. Learn more about investments in onboarding, estimating, and resourcing, and find out what Microsoft has planned for Project Operations in the coming months.

Learn how to deliver successful projects with Microsoft solutions

Running successful projects requires smart management of people, attention to budgets, and mitigation of project risks. The right tools give you good visibility across all these aspects of project management, and they allow you to dig into the details as needed.

Whether you’re interested in facilitating teamwork across a hybrid team, effectively resourcing your projects, or managing risk, there will be sessions that will help you understand how project management solutions from Microsoft support you.

Sessions like, “Collaborate better and turn connected project operations data into impact,” will show you how Project Operations helps you work smarter by breaking down the silos between customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and project management. “Accelerate projects while maintaining project management organization (PMO) governance” will give you a view into how other organizations manage programs, develop governance workflows, and mitigate issues and risk. These and other sessions will give you strategies for using Planner, Project, and Project Operations to run your projects more effectively.

Save your spot

Attend Project Management for a Connected World on April 20, 2022 to learn how Microsoft’s connected project experiences help you run projects more efficiently and deliver results.

The post Attend the Project Management for a Connected World digital event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations that run their Dynamics 365 Business Central or Dynamics NAV workloads on-premises often have large amounts of data built up from a high volume of transactions. Over time, it may become too expensive to host it on Business Central online.

In addition, many organizations want to glean insights from their ERP data by combining it with external data sources such as IoT, AI, or machine learning capabilities. In both cases, having direct access to information hosted inside the Business Central cloud can be useful.

You can access data in Business Central using REST APIs, of course. However, we’re piloting a way to host the information in an Azure Data Lake outside of Business Central. This capability will allow you to:

• Maintain a lower-cost alternative data warehouse that syncs to your production data.
• Run analytics without disrupting Business Central operations.

Our solution opens up some interesting possibilities for organizations using Business Central. If you’d like to try it out, we’re making it available as a proof of concept at aka.ms/bc2adls.

Configuration guidance

There are two parts to the solution:

• A Business Central extension that pushes incremental data from the database to Azure Storage
• An Azure Synapse pipeline that reconstructs the full dataset from the increments pushed by the extension

Configure the extension with an Azure Storage account and access credentials, and then determine the tables and fields to export. Each time the export process runs, the Business Central extension places the inserts, updates, and deletions that were made since the last export in a container in the Azure data lake.

The Azure Synapse pipeline assimilates updates from multiple exports and creates a replica data warehouse in Common Data Model format. If an entity doesn’t yet exist in the data warehouse, the pipeline creates it.

Use case 1: Periodic exports of Business Central data

The export process can run as a recurring background batch job or as a one-time operation, allowing you to maintain your data in the lake over time. Combine it with a recurring run of the Azure Synapse pipeline to have the final data updated at the lake. You can tune the frequency of recurrence in accordance with an acceptable delay between when changes are made in Business Central and when they’re updated in the lake.

Use case 2: Business Central data archive

Over time, older information in the Business Central database may need to be removed to make space for new operational data. Our solution duplicates the information from Business Central in Azure Storage, while giving you the option to skip exporting deletions. This feature is indispensable to auditing and historical tracking scenarios, because records can be maintained in the lake when they have been removed from Business Central.

To skip deletions for specific tables, uncomment or edit the relevant lines for the subscriber OnAfterOnDatabaseDelete procedure.

Use case 3: Richer analytics

Using Business Central data that resides in Azure Data Storage as a source of analytics decouples it from the Business Central database. The database can then focus on running operational workloads.

Because the data is available in the Common Data Model format, it’s available to an increasing number of analytics services, such as Power BI and Azure data services. Query your Business Central data in the lake using familiar T-SQL syntax using Azure Synapse Serverless SQL pool endpoints, too.

Next steps

Get more information, try out our solution, and read some instructions at aka.ms/bc2adls.

Information about the proof of concept is also linked from the BCTech repository. We encourage your contributions and suggestions.

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