Public sector enhancements

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Note

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. To see when this functionality is planned to release, please review What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy).

The following new capabilities for Public Sector are being added for accounting and finance professionals and are planned to release between April and September 2019.

Accounts payable

Associate federal 1099 default value to main account

September 2019 - Some invoice lines identified for 1099 federal tax reporting might be reported for a different 1099 box from the vendor’s default box. Because vendors might receive a payment on an invoice that correlates to multiple 1099 boxes, it’s preferable that a line funding distribution using a main account be consistently reported in a specific 1099 box. With this new feature, you will be able to recalculate the 1099 box values for vendors to more accurately report the accumulated balances with the IRS.

Payment journal summary report

September 2019 - Use the Payment journal summary report to print a listing of the invoices that will be included in the next check run. The report displays the vendor account, vendor name, invoice number, any discounts from the vendor, and the amount to be paid. The information is grouped by the bank through which the checks are paid and for each bank, the invoices are grouped by vendor. The report includes invoice amount subtotals for each vendor and displays the number of invoices that are being paid and the number of checks that will be created. The information comes from the vendor and the vendor transactions. The report groups by currency when multiple currencies are present in the report.

Restrict ability to edit accounting distribution on accounts payable vendor invoices

September 2019 - You can set up specific financial dimensions that must match between a purchase order (PO) and an invoice created from that purchase order. For example, matching is required for all financial dimensions between purchase orders and invoices; on invoices associated with a PO, the general ledger accounts on the invoice detail lines cannot be changed from what was entered on the PO lines.

Budgeting

Hourly rate field on forecast positions

April 2019 - You can specify that forecast positions in a particular compensation group have an hourly rate calculated.

Summary budget vs. actual report

May 2019 - Use the Summary budget versus actual report to generate a summarized report comparing budgeted amounts to actual expenses and revenue activity during a time period you specify. For each account, the report lists budgeted amounts, actual expenses or revenues, encumbrance amounts from purchase orders, and pre-encumbrance amounts from purchase requisitions. Additionally, the report lists the remaining budget amount for each account and fund. The report can be sorted by fund and then account number and displays subtotals within each fund based on the financial dimension set you selected to group by. The grouping determines how the Navigation Pane, a tool helpful for reviewing activity, displays activity.

Financial dimension allocation on forecast positions

May 2019 - You can maintain financial dimension default templates for forecast positions on the Forecast position form by using controls on the Financial dimensions FastTab. You can also create a new template directly from the form. You can validate whether a forecast position's default dimensions are legal in your organization's chart of accounts. For any forecast position, click the new Validate button on the Action Pane to see whether the financial dimension setup for your forecast position is valid. The validations are made against the account structure that you identify on the Human resources parameters form. This quick validation can help you catch errors before you attempt to generate a budget plan from a forecast position. You can validate many positions from the Forecast positions list page.

Forecast position reports

June 2019 - Two new forecast position reports are now available. The Forecast position details report contains most of the information displayed on the Forecast position form. The account distributions assigned to the forecast position via financial dimensions and financial dimension templates are shown, along with the costs associated with each distribution combination for the forecast position. The Forecast position summary report shows forecast position costs by account distributions. The forecast position costs are shown, grouped by their assigned account distributions. The cost amounts are factored by the percentage assigned to the account distribution.

Job description update for Forecast position and Position

September 2019 - A new parameter has been introduced that will make the Description field on both the Forecast position and Position read-only and it will remain in sync with the selected Job ID. When Job ID is changed on either form, the description field will be updated to reflect the description associated with the changed Job ID. The new parameter is available on Human resources > Setup > Parameters > Human resources parameters > General tab. 

Remove option to replace budget plans

September 2019 - Specify the users who can replace existing budget plans. On the Budget planning configuration form > Parameters tab, select the Prevent replacement of budget plan scenarios check box to hide the Replace the existing budget plan scenario option in the Budget plan generation processes, Action field for all users, including the system administrator.

Cash and bank management

Escheatment

April 2019 - You can set up an account to allow stale-dated warrants or checks to be escheated using the Cash and bank management module. The escheatment process creates an advanced ledger entry to transfer funds from the dormant payment accounts to the unclaimed funds accounts, for possible claim at a future date by the original recipient or a designated representative.

Unclaimed payments are reclassified based on the posting definition for escheatment that is set up in the Posting definitions form, and assigned to the Escheatment transaction that is set up in the Transaction posting definitions form, General ledger tab.

Cash control

May 2019 - Cash control allows you to define a limit for preventing additional transactions from posting if no cash balance is available or if the transaction causes the balance to be reduced below the defined limit. Accounts payable vendor invoices and General ledger advanced ledger entries are validated when they are created, edited, and posted. If the transaction’s posting would cause the related cash account’s balance to be reduced below the limit defined for the account, the user receives an error message and must change the account to continue.

You can also allow specific users to override cash control. If an authorized user receives a warning that the cash balance for the account will be reduced below the limit, the user can optionally choose to continue with posting the transaction. Users might override the cash control limit when the expenditure must be posted in advance of receiving the funds to cover it; or when an approved transfer must happen, but has not been entered or posted yet.

The cash control limit is compared to the cash control balance (cash account balance minus all posted, unpaid AP invoices). The limit is surpassed when the cash control balance is less than the cash control limit (threshold).

General ledger

Interest distribution

April 2019 - Your agency can allocate interest on a bank account to specific General ledger accounts, based on the average daily balance in cash accounts. You can use this process to generate an advanced ledger entry for the interest amounts or generate the interest amounts for review without posting.

Before distributing the interest, you must set up your participating cash accounts in the Interest distribution rules form. Each cash account and grant combination can be used to calculate interest for a different interest account.

Update bank balances when posting transactions using advanced ledger entry

July 2019 - You can associate a bank account with one or more main accounts. If a bank account is associated with a main account, the bank account's balances can be updated when advanced ledger entries are posted to the associated main account. Note that the bank account must have an account number and routing number associated with it.

Daily statement of treasurer's accountability

August 2019 - Use the Treasurer's statement of accountability report to generate a trial balance report specifically for the treasurer’s fund to be used for reconciliation purposes. For example, you can generate the report on a daily basis to review the activity in selected accounts for the treasurer’s fund and compare that to the equity activity in other funds. This daily report allows you to search for discrepancies, unexpected balances, and possible adjustments needed, and to complete other general audit functions.

Canadian Harmonized Sales Tax

September 2019 - Certain Canadian provinces use the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), which is a combination of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and Provincial Sales Tax (PST), and which is paid to vendors when products are purchased. Certain portions of the HST can be recovered by public sector entities after having paid them to vendors, depending on what the purpose of the purchase is. The purpose of the purchase is designated by the financial dimension values and main account on the transaction document line (for example, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, or vendor invoices).

Procurement and sourcing

Ability to apply general budget reservation to multiple purchase agreement lines at once

April 2019 - You can now streamline data entry for purchase agreements by selecting one or more general budget reservation lines to apply simultaneously to multiple selected lines of a purchase agreement, or to all lines in the purchase agreement.

Ability to apply general budget reservation to multiple purchase requisition lines at once

April 2019 - You can now streamline data entry for purchase requisitions by applying general budget reservation information to multiple lines on the purchase requisition at one time.

Calculate purchase order delivery dates based on lead times and working days

May 2019 - Calculate a delivery date for a line based on a vendor's lead time (Request for quotation reply form, Quotation tab) and your organization's working days calendar. Vendors can enter a lead time for each line. When a purchase order is confirmed, a delivery date for a line is calculated from the confirmation date, based on the lead time and the working days calendar. If no lead time is specified, the delivery date is the confirmation date. The lead time information for a line is available on these forms: Request for quotation reply, Purchase requisitions, Purchase agreements, and Purchase order. The lead time details are not overwritten when delivery dates are calculated for all lines in the form, by using the Delivery dates button on the Calculate tab, on the Action Pane. You can update the lead time details for unconfirmed or unapproved records.

Vendor bidding

May 2019 - RFQ questions from vendors and summarized responses. When your agency has sent a request for quotation (RFQ), vendors might have questions. The vendors can ask questions and receive answers through Vendor collaboration. When vendor questions are allowed, the Vendor questions FastTab is available on the Request for quotation form. Users can publish answers to vendor questions to the Vendor portal more than once. After a vendor is selected and the RFQ is awarded, or the cutoff date for questions is reached, vendors can no longer enter questions.

RFQ activity

July 2019 - You can now use Activities with requests for quotations (RFQ) to create tasks, appointments, and events that are assigned to other users in your organization. You can choose to use these activities as a means for gathering feedback on an RFQ from users who might be familiar with the request, but who are not typically involved in any workflow process. Activities for RFQs also appear in the Home modules with activities that have been created for other documents.

Purchase agreement enhancements

July 2019 - Added the following attributes to the Purchase agreement and Purchase agreement classification forms:

• Allow users to identify the employees who are responsible for maintaining purchase agreements.
• Mark a purchase agreement as 'closed' to signal the agreement is no longer actively used, making it so users will not be able to create release orders from the purchase agreement.
• Define an invoice matching policy to use for purchase orders released from a purchase agreement.

Add RFQ link to purchase order line details

July 2019 - When a buying agent converts a purchase requisition into a purchase order (PO), if the requestor has not referenced a purchase agreement (PA) on the requisition line, but the PO should be associated with a PA, the buying agent can link a PO line to a PA line. This ability to link PO line to PA line eliminates the need for canceling the purchase order and generating a new one with the proper purchase agreement information.

Increase unit price to 5 decimal places

May 2019 - In many commodity areas, contracts are signed at prices out to the fifth decimal place (for example, many chemicals and fuel charges are priced this way). Now the system supports tracking unit prices in certain procurement areas to the fifth decimal place. These areas include requests for quotations, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, purchase agreements, vendor invoices, and products.

Purchasing card processing

May 2019 - Purchasing cards are used by agencies to allow employees to procure goods and services outside of the standard purchase requisition process. The purchasing card forms and fields provide a method for tracking the purchases and the expenses that your agency incurs. Each purchase made by an employee with a card is recorded with a vendor invoice, but the invoice is not paid with a check. Each of these invoices is associated with another vendor invoice that is created to pay the vendor that provides the purchasing card service (the financial institution); the expenses incurred by the card purchases are paid off when the balance owed to the card service provider is paid each month.

New field on receipt form for entering quantity to receive

September 2019 - Sometimes purchase orders are received over multiple shipments. Now it is easier to correctly record the actual quantities received and keep track of what remains to be fulfilled from a partial shipment. The Product receipt form contains the following columns:

• Quantity ordered reflects the original purchase order (PO) quantity, including any change orders processed against it.
• Quantity received (blank by default) requires you to enter a value for the quantity currently being received.
• Quantity remaining displays the quantity from the original PO line reduced by amount of all posted receipts for the line.

Delegation of multiple purchasing work items

September 2019 - You can delegate multiple documents to another user in a single action. This saves time, as previously each work item had to be delegated separately.

• Only purchasing documents in workflows that have multiple delegation enabled will allow you to delegate multiple documents from this list page. If delegation is not enabled for a specific workflow, then the Delegate option does not appear in the workflow for that specific document.
• If multiple purchase agreements, purchase orders, purchase requisitions, or vendor invoices are selected from the list page (Work items assigned to me), then when you select to delegate and you select the person to delegate to, the standard workflow process performs the assignment, just as when a single document is selected.
• No other workflow actions are available when multiple documents are selected.

Projects

Project contract funding limit committed amount detail

May 2019 - Exposes the details behind the committed values on funding limit records on the Project contract form.

Circular A-133 report for grants (SEFA)

September 2019 - Agencies that receive federal funds are subject to audit requirements, also known as single audits, according to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-133. The single audit includes the Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards (SEFA) report to report expenditures of federal grants on a recurring basis. This report includes the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) title and number, grant number, year of grant, name of the federal agency providing the funds, and name of the pass-through entity. The report is for a specific period of time, typically the same as the financial statement period—a fiscal year.

Project invoice proposal selection parameter by funding source

September 2019 - The creation of project invoice proposal can only be started by first selecting either the project contract or project before the funding source filter is available. As such, if a grant is referenced in more than one project contract, then the creation of a single project invoice proposal will not be possible. Consequently, the grants manager will have to manually sum up the multiple project invoice proposals to determine the amount to be reimbursed.

Generate earnings statements from project timesheets

September 2019 - You can create earnings statements from project timesheets. Earnings statements are created for the workers with approved project timesheets in the timesheet period.