Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations – Enhance Inter-Organizational Controls 

Increasing control of your organizations, its operations and enforcement of relevant policies is a huge task for a manager and/or the employer. Modern-day financial technologies like Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations can make this easier and time-saving.  

Below are some of the few benefits of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations: 

Traceability: 
 
One of the major issues regarding the finances of an organization is the maintenance of a clear trail of the cash. Through modern-day FinTech software and solutions, especially Dynamics 365, every transaction and by extension, every penny spent or gained is traceable and tracked to the identity of the person whom either initiated the transaction or was on the receiving end of it. 

The transaction is visible to the gen pop. of the organization with a timestamp and the source of this transaction. Users can now navigate the past history of transactions, view and verify the stimulus for the transaction and can read it back to the origin. 

Through Trial Balance and Audit Trail, visibility of the financial records of the organization is crystal clear. All disagreements in the transactions are easy to catch and both, the organization and vendor can check the debts and credits at all times. 
 
Security: 
 
Through single dashboard access, all the finance and operations data are stacked up into a centralized system which increases the security and protection of data and reduces the leakage or inconsistency in data due to migration to multiple software. 
 
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations also supports multi-layered security. Access to financial records can be changed as per the role of the user. For example, for an accountant, a contract employee and the business head, different levels of information can be set to share. 

The contract resource will view limited, public transactions, an accountant will see a whole lot more while the head will have access to all of the transactions in the past and present. This ensures an ecosystem of extreme financial security, very desirable and valuable for an enterprise or business. The division is called the Segregation of Visibility and helps in combating conflicts in financial records. 
 
Audit Workbench: 
 
Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides an excellent tool in the form of Audit workbench which allows the user to create custom policies and then audit existing financial reports based on the criteria determined.  
 
For example, a user can audit the financial documents for a certain keyword, for example, maintenance and all the expenses on maintenance will be displayed immediately for review.  
 
This option not only helps to determine the source of income and expense but when used properly, can notify the user if there might have been a duplicate expense paid or a duplicate engagement or payment to the client. It can also notify of uncharacteristic payments which can then be tracked by the financial audit teams.  
 
For the sake of example, consider this: You are an employer who made a policy that company dinners will be paid for by the company if they are below a certain value. If by any chance, a transaction is made over this amount, you can be notified immediately with the name, record, date & time and the summary of the event. This can help you locate the POI (Person of Interest) who can then be asked to show cause.  
 
A few types of policies that can be employed are as follows:
 
• Duplicate expenses 
• Duplicate vendors  
• High spenders 
• Out of pocket expenses 
• Monitored employees 
• Random samples 
 
The last one is a policy to audit a random percentage of the financial history of the organization. This can be done by setting the percentage of records you want to go through and let the audit teams have their go on it.  
 
Workflow Approvals:
 
The times of manual approvals of workflows and then processing the transactions is gone now. With D365, you can automate the workflows. This helps in queuing of the transactions. No transaction will be approved without the parallel workflow being approved. The approval will follow a set pattern and until the manager approves the workflow, the payment will stay in the queue. 
 
This ensures that no one from the staff posts some transaction to the main ledger without appropriate permissions and when they do, it is verified before it is completed. This saves time and gives off a sense of hierarchy to the finance department.  
 
Notification centres: 
 
With changes made to the ledger, or the addition or subtraction of clients or new users, policy upgradation, policy violation, you will be notified immediately through Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations through dedicated email service. You can always be kept updated on the ongoing situation of your finance department by having a simple check back to the F & O dashboard.