Dynamics 365 Business Central: Release Update 2020 Wave 1: Create Vendor Bank From Contact

Release Update 2020 Wave 1: Create Vendor Bank from Contact

Okay, so now we're going to talk about one more thing in the 2020 Wave One release. This one is not a big one, but it's kind of cool, and again, it's naturally extending the solution. Again, kudos Microsoft for thinking that way. What it has to do with is the CRM system in Microsoft BC, which is not often used extensively. It should be used more, I feel like. If we have a contact, and if it's of type company, you can actually, and you could do this for a very long time, you can hit a function to change that into a customer. This is really great because... and the function is called Create Customer.

You could take the contact, you could have a hundred contacts you've got from a trade show or whatever, you dump it into the contact table, and it hangs around there until you get a quote. You can actually quote the contact, and then when the quote converts to a sales order at the same time as it does that, the contact is converted to a customer. So finally, then it goes into the customer list. So you don't want it in your customer list before that because you have it overcrowded with people you've never done business with.

Now, what Microsoft added is... of course, since the contact list does not only contain prospects that become customers but also bank contacts and vendor contacts. They added something called create vendor and create bank, which makes sense because why not have that in the same list as the customer. So, just naturally extending the system so that it's symmetrical and works nice and always. So, kudos, Microsoft.

Let's take a quick look at that and then go try it out yourself. Let's take a look at this little neat trick from Microsoft. I think this, again, is an example of natural extensions to the system. I'm really happy when I see Microsoft doing this. If we go into Contacts and take a look at the contact list here, I can actually get into, for example, Peter Connolly here, and before, we could have converted this contact here into a customer. Actually, if it was a company, just move it into a customer. So, it starts out being a company contact. Actually, pick just the Gibson Law Firm and take a look at that contact card and then convert that into a customer.

To do that, actually, go here into Functions, Create as, Customer. But right now, we also have vendor and bank. Of course, we're normally creating customers from contacts. It's not often we're creating vendors or banks, but it's nice that Microsoft will allow you to do that because the contact list is actually made up of not only customers but also vendors and banks. So it makes sense that this is part of it.