Adding External Accountant to Your Business Central

If you use Business Central online, I’m sure that you need to connect your external accountant or your reseller partner to your tenant without buying new license. This is something you have included in your license. Never mind how many user you bought or if you have Essential or Premium users, you can invite up to 3 external users (External Accountants). These 3 licenses have the same use rights as your standard license except access to the user setup and admin tasks. What these users can do in your system, depends on you. But just to remind you… I’m talking about external accountant, not about internal accountant. This is important to remember as this license is not for internal stuff.

But let’s focus how you can add them. First open Users page and run Invite External Accountant.

When you run this action, new welcome page will appear. You should read it and if you agree, click I Accept (otherwise you need to stop and you cannot add user 🙂 ).

Click Next and fill in minimum mandatory fields. These fields are your external accountant contact details: Email, First and Last name. You will see there is a welcome message your accountant will get as email. You can change it or type in your language.

When you finish with details, just click Next and wait a little while. How long? It depends on many things, but it is usually a few seconds up to minute until system invite your accountant. When system finish, you will get a message that person you added was successfully invited. Close the page and enjoy.

You accountant will get an email message with text you entered in invitation as well as URL where he/she needs to log in. And yes, when you finish with adding accountant as user, do not forget to add user permission sets you want. And if you check license for this user, you will see: Dynamics 365 Business Central External Accountant.

OK, everything I described is related if everything is OK, but what if you have some trouble. I have two common issues you can often meet in a practice. Both of them will be met on the first step when you run invitation action.

First you can have an issue with licensing. Event if these 3 users are free of charge, they are not automatically added to tenant. CSP partner have to do it and if partner forget it, you will get an error message No External Accountant license available. Contact your administrator.

In this case only what you can o is to contact your CSP and to require adding these 3 licenses to your tenant. When these licenses are added, they will appear in your Admin Portal.

Now we have another case when you are not a global administrator or a user administrator in you AAD. In this case you can give yourself proper rights or you can ask administrator to do this task.

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Counting Named Subscription Users in NAV – 2nd part

In my previous post, I tried to explain how to handle with named users in NAV. But I’ve got a few feedbacks with some additional questions I didn’t cover in this text.

The main question was what if I want to stop to use some account temporary, for example because sick leave or vacation or something similar? In this case, we can disable this user.

DisableNamedUsers

When you try to login the next time, you can see system will not count disabled users. Then you can decries number of users for some period. When your user come back, you need to increase number of users in your license and just enable this user.

Second very important topic is that you must to know when you buy for example 3 subscription users, you will get 5 (you will get 2 users for free, but with limited usage). This is because 1 user is for intended for partner work and 2nd users is for external accountant, but remember an EXTERNAL accountant. You need to create them on beginning to avoid misuse of license rights and use it for internal processes.

And on the end, if you already have the maximum number of full users and want to create new limited user, because you have licensed more limited users, anyway you will get message that this is not possible because the new user don’t meet the terms of the current license.

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This is only because of that, Full User is default user. You just need to change License Type option to Limited and it will be OK.

Counting Named Subscription Users in Dynamics NAV

Waiting Dynamics NAV as full SaaS solution (Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’), a lot of partners are deploying NAV on Azure with subscription licenses. Subscription license has much better price in comparison with perpetual model, even from only BREP.

But we have a small difference here. In perpetual licensing model, users are concurrent, but n subscription model, users are named. Because of that I’ve got a lot questions how system count these users and prevent bigger number of users from licensed.

Generally, this is very easy. NAV counts number of created users and compare it with your subscription license. That moment, when you try to create new user, more than you have licensed, system will stop you.

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As you can see on the previous picture, I’ve got a message that creating this new user will not meet the terms of the current license. OK, it works. That means if you want to change user, you need to delete old one and than create new one.

But in subscription model, you can change number of users monthly. What if you had in one moment, because of business needs, more licensed users and now you scaled down number of users? In this case, when you try to log in, system will show the following message:

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That means with current license and number of users, you are not legal. But if you press OK, system will allow you to log in. But every time when you try run NAV, you will get this violation message that shows you are not legal.

Licensing in Dynamics 365 for Talent

In a last period, I’ve got a lot of questions about how to make a proper licensing for Dynamics 365 for Talent. As it is a new solution, it is understandable. As I’ve already wrote a few articles about this product, I think I can help with some answers.

The first and very important, all users in this solution are named users. And if we speak about HR core part, we have two different user types and you can buy them on two separate ways. We have Full Users with total access to all HR core application and we have Team Members with very limited access (mostly, but not only for read tasks).

As I mentioned Full Users (Talent Users) can be bought on the following ways:

  • as a regular Talent User (you must take minimum 5 users) for 40 USD
  • buying Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, i.e. you will get full Talent Users buying Unified Operation (for 190 USD) or full Dynamics 365 Plan (for 210 USD); in both cases you will get much much more than just Talent, but Talent will be part of your completely system.

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If we are speaking about Team Members, you can buy them for 8 USD, but again you will not get only access to Talent with them, but also to all other Apps in Dynamics 365 package. As I mentioned, Team Member are not limited only with read rights, because you can use them for example as employee for Employee Self Service.

OK, but this is not the end. Recently, Microsoft announce two additional AI Apps for Talent (Attract and Onboard) and that means if you want to use them, you first must be a regular Talent User. Then, you can subscribe them. Price is 8 USD for each of them separately or if you want both, price will be 12 USD in total.

And again, this is not the end. Actually, it doesn’t mean it must be the end. Why? Because if you want to customize something. As you already know (I hope), this App is full SaaS and you cannot just open a code and change it. If you want to change something on forms and similar, you can do it using PowerApps. In this case person who will make these customizations must have PowerApps Plan 2 (40 USD) license, but other users who will use these forms, have to have minimum PowerApps Plan 1 (7 USD) license. That means, not all users, only these who will use these new features. And just to know, if you are buying some Dynamics Plan, you will get PowerApps for free.

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And again, it is similar situation if you want to use PowerBI for additional reports or Flow for additional workflows.

I hope I covered all models of licensing here. But just keep in mind, it is possible to be some changed, because it is a new App in Dynamics 365 family and with new releases, it is possible to be some changes. And I didn’t mentioned, but just to be sure: all pries are on monthly basis.

How to Configure Limited Users in NAV?

A few days ago I’ve wrote about new possibilities in using of Limited Users in NAV 2016. I think this is big improvement, because we can use limited users for much more roles.

But I got a few comments about configuration limited users. OK, you can configure users as limited and this is all. Nothing more.

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But people wants to configure what three additional application tables these limited users can use. Base on the standard NAV, this is not possible. These users get write access to a maximum of three application tables in the object range 0 – 99,999,999 other than the General Ledger Entry table. But system will count the first three used application tables beside the default tables. This is counted by the session. That means, users can use different three application tables in different sessions.

Some of administrators still want to limit these users on some specific tables. There is not feature for this requirement, but it can be made using User Permission Sets. We can create one permission set with all read permission on all tables (or less if you want this). Then, we can configure additional permission set with all permissions (insert, modify, delete) on our default 151 application tables. And on the end we can configure specific permission set based on our requirements for three additional tables.

Every time when we want to configure new limited user, we just need to add him these first two permission sets and one specific for him (or his role). In this case this limited user will have read permission to all tables and all other permissions to default tables and three we added to him. In this case, his three application tables will not depends of his first usage in session.

This is not some specific feature, but it is useful work around solution for configuration.

Limited Users in NAV 2016

I suppose the most of you have already used Limited Users. It is pretty good possibility to save some money for users who have not a lot different processes to work in NAV. But limitation was a big; you could insert in only 3 tables by your need and in 80 additional by default. It was enough for some basics processes (creating contacts, HR, warehouse and similar).

But from NAV 2016, we have a pretty greater possibilities. That means we can use for inserting even 151 default tables; you can find completely list here. Some of the most important default tables for insert are:

  • Customers and Vendors
  • Customer and Vendor Invoice Discounts
  • Sales and Purchase Headers and Lines
  • Deferrals
  • Sales/Puchase Price and Line Discount
  • Assembly Order Headers and Lines
  • Incoming Documents
  • Workflow tables

You can see that with these tables in combination with three additional by your needs, we can use Limited Users for a lot different processes. It can decrease project cost and improve quality.

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