Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Implementation, Extensions and AX Upgrades

What is Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, and what does Solzet deliver?

Finance and Operations is Microsoft's ERP family for larger and more complex organizations: Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Project Operations and Human Resources capabilities. Microsoft's own term is finance and operations apps, the name it uses for Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce and Human Resources together. Finance and Operations is the label we use for the service line, because that is what most buyers type into a search box.

What sits inside it is broad. Dynamics 365 Finance covers general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, budgeting, cash and bank management, cost accounting, fixed assets, asset leasing and financial reporting. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management covers inventory, warehouse and transportation management, procurement and sourcing, master planning, manufacturing and production, product information, asset management and service management. Dynamics 365 Commerce runs the retail side on the same back office, Dynamics 365 Project Operations covers project management and accounting, and Human Resources capabilities are available within finance and operations apps.

Solzet implements and extends Finance and Operations, builds X++ extensions and integrations, migrates data, and upgrades Dynamics AX customers to finance and operations apps. The consultants who run the design workshops stay on the project through build, testing and go-live, and the X++ developers work from the same design document rather than from a ticket written by someone they never met. The pages below go deeper on each part, and the rest of what we do is on the services page.

• Dynamics 365 Finance implementation: ledger design, payables, receivables, budgeting, cash and bank, fixed assets and financial reporting.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management implementation: inventory, warehouse, procurement, master planning and production.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce implementation: stores and online channels on the same back office as finance and supply chain.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations implementation: project-based work from quote to project accounting.
• Dynamics AX to Finance and Operations upgrade: AX 2012 R2 and R3 upgrades and AX 2009 data migration.
• CRM and ERP integration: dual-write and virtual entities between Finance and Operations and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
• Finance and Operations assessment, optimisation and support for implementations that are already live.

Who is this for, and who is it not for?

Business Central fits small and mid-sized companies that want finance, inventory, projects and light manufacturing in one cloud system. Finance and Operations fits larger organizations with several legal entities, deep supply chain or production needs, or retail operations on Commerce. If you also run Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, both connect to it through Dataverse.

In practice the organizations that need Finance and Operations recognise the symptoms quickly. Consolidation across entities happens in spreadsheets. Intercompany trading is reconciled by hand. Production planning lives in a separate tool that the ledger never hears about. The warehouse runs on paper and memory. Or the company is still on Dynamics AX, extended support has ended, and every new requirement is another customisation on a platform with no future.

Finance and Operations is the wrong answer in three cases. A single company with standard finance, stock and light manufacturing will pay for depth it does not use, and Business Central is the better fit. If you want SAP, Oracle, Odoo or 1C implemented or upgraded, Solzet is the wrong supplier: non-Microsoft ERP implementations are the one ERP line we keep out of our work, while moving you from any of them to Finance and Operations is squarely in it. And if the immediate problem is the CRM, start with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and plan the ERP connection alongside it.

• Groups with several legal entities and countries that need consolidation, intercompany and local statutory reporting in one system.
• Manufacturers and distributors with real master planning, production, warehouse and transportation requirements.
• Retailers that want stores, online channels, stock and finance on one Microsoft back office through Dynamics 365 Commerce.
• Project-based organizations that need project accounting tied to the ledger through Dynamics 365 Project Operations.
• Companies on Dynamics AX 2012 or AX 2009 that need an upgrade or migration path now that Microsoft support has ended.
• Microsoft partners that need X++ developers and Finance and Operations consultants on a white-label basis.

Finance and Operations or Business Central: which one fits your company?

Both are Microsoft ERPs, both connect to Dataverse, and Solzet implements both, so the question is fit rather than which one we happen to sell. Revenue alone rarely decides it. The deciding factors are the number of legal entities and countries, the depth of the supply chain and production requirements, whether you run retail operations, and how much of your current complexity is a real requirement rather than a habit inherited from the old system.

Most organizations land clearly on one side of the table below. For the ones in the middle, such as a group of small entities that each look like a Business Central company, or a mid-sized manufacturer with one complicated plant, we run a short fit assessment against your actual processes and give you a written recommendation, including what you would give up with each option. Our article on Business Central versus Finance for mid-market manufacturers works through the choice for one industry.

Which finance and operations apps does Solzet implement?

All of them, and usually more than one at a time, because the value of Finance and Operations is that finance, supply chain, retail and projects share one data model. Designed well, an order taken in a Commerce channel draws on the same stock that Supply Chain Management plans and lands in the same ledger that Finance reports on, without anyone exporting a file. Designing that flow end to end is most of the work, and it is why we scope the apps together even when they go live in phases.

Dynamics 365 Finance is the core for most projects: the ledger and account structure, payables and receivables, budgeting, cash and bank management, cost accounting, fixed assets, asset leasing and financial reporting. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management adds inventory, warehouse and transportation management, procurement and sourcing, master planning, manufacturing and production, product information, asset management and service management. Dynamics 365 Commerce brings stores and online channels onto the same back office. Dynamics 365 Project Operations handles project-based work, and Microsoft documents project management and accounting under Project Operations rather than under Finance.

Human Resources is a capability rather than a separate project on this list. As part of the infrastructure merge, all capabilities of the Dynamics 365 Human Resources application are available in finance and operations environments, so Human Resources capabilities within finance and operations apps are configured as part of the same implementation where the business needs them, sharing the same organization structure, legal entities and workers as the rest of the system.

• Dynamics 365 Finance: account structure, intercompany, consolidation, budgeting and financial reporting.
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management: inventory, warehouse, transportation, procurement, master planning and production.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce: retail channels, stores and online, on the finance and supply chain back office.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations: project management and accounting for project-based organizations.
• Human Resources capabilities within finance and operations apps, configured alongside the rest of the implementation.

How does a Finance and Operations implementation run, phase by phase?

A Finance and Operations project is a programme of decisions with software attached. Most of the risk sits in the global design: the legal entity structure, the account structure and reporting dimensions, the intercompany model, the product and inventory model, and which processes are standardised across the group versus allowed to vary by country or site. Get those right and configuration is steady work. Get them wrong and every later phase pays for it, so the design gets the senior attention.

Environments are part of the plan from the first week. Since 16 February 2026, new cloud implementation projects for Finance, Supply Chain Management and Project Operations are created in the Power Platform admin center instead of Lifecycle Services; existing Lifecycle Services projects, Commerce and upgrade projects from Dynamics AX 2012 are unaffected. We set up the environments, source control and build pipelines for X++ before the first extension is written, so test and production receive exactly what was reviewed.

How long it takes depends on the apps in scope, the number of legal entities and countries, the rollout sequence, the data you migrate, the extensions and integrations, and how fast decisions are made on your side. A single-entity Finance rollout and a multi-country rollout with production and Commerce are different projects. Licensing is sized during discovery from the roles that use each app and bought through your Microsoft licensing channel. The discovery and design phase produces the plan, the rollout sequence and the estimate, with the assumptions written down.

• Discovery: process workshops per area, the current system landscape and integrations, and a fit-gap list split into standard, configuration and X++ extension.
• Global design: legal entities, account structure, dimensions, intercompany, product and inventory model, security roles, integrations and migration scope, signed off as a design document.
• Build: configuration in a development environment, X++ extensions in source control with code review, integrations built against agreed contracts.
• Data migration: master data, open balances and open transactions loaded through repeatable rehearsals and reconciled against the source system after every run.
• Testing: end-to-end scenarios such as order to cash, procure to pay, plan to produce and record to report, run by your key users.
• Cutover and go-live: training on your own data, a cutover plan with a rollback decision point, then the final migration in a planned window.
• Hypercare and rollout: support through the first period closes, then the next entity, country or app in the agreed sequence.

How do you extend and integrate Finance and Operations without making updates painful?

Finance and operations development is done in X++ with the Visual Studio extension, and the unified developer experience brings finance and operations and Power Platform developer tools together. We extend the standard application rather than altering it, keep every extension in source control with code review and automated builds, and test extensions against Microsoft's updates in a non-production environment before those updates reach production. The aim is a system that takes updates as a test cycle rather than as a project.

The discipline that matters most is saying no to the wrong extension. Many requirements that arrive as a request for custom code are a configuration option, a workflow, a report, or a process the business can change. Each one on the fit-gap list gets a decision with a reason recorded against it, and the X++ that remains is the code that genuinely earns its maintenance cost.

Integrations get the same treatment. Finance and operations apps act as a virtual data source in Dataverse: OData entities are available as virtual tables (virtual entities), and their data does not reside in Dataverse. Alongside that sit file-based and API integrations with banks, logistics providers, EDI partners, e-commerce platforms and reporting, each with authentication, logging, retries and an error queue someone owns. Microsoft partners can use our X++ developers and Finance and Operations consultants on a white-label basis through Dynamics 365 subcontracting.

How do you upgrade Dynamics AX to Finance and Operations?

Dynamics AX 2012 R3 mainstream support ended on 12 October 2021 and extended support ended on 10 January 2023. Dynamics AX 2009 support ended on 12 April 2022. Every month on AX after those dates is a month of unpatched infrastructure, ageing integrations and customisations that get harder to move, so the question is how to upgrade with the least disruption rather than whether to.

Finance and operations apps provide a documented upgrade path for Dynamics AX 2012 R2 and R3 data and code, in Analyze, Execute and Validate phases. Analyze inventories the customisations, integrations and data, and decides what is upgraded, replaced by standard functionality or retired. Execute moves code and data across in repeatable runs. Validate proves the result with your users against real processes. AX 2012 RTM is not supported for upgrade on that path, and AX 2009 uses a separate data migration tool, so those starting points are planned as a migration rather than an upgrade.

The upgrade is also the best moment to remove customisations the business no longer needs, and to replace old point-to-point integrations with dual-write, virtual entities or documented APIs. The full approach is on the Dynamics AX to Finance and Operations upgrade page, and the wider options for on-premises Dynamics products after end of support are in our guide to Dynamics 365 on-premises end of life.

How does Finance and Operations connect to Customer Engagement and Power Platform?

Solzet works on both sides of the Microsoft business stack. We know Dataverse and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement deeply, and we implement Business Central and Finance and Operations. That means one team designs the CRM, the ERP and the integration between them: Customer Engagement with Business Central through the Dataverse connection and virtual tables, Customer Engagement with Finance and Operations through dual-write and virtual entities, and Power Platform across both.

Dual-write keeps Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Finance and Operations in near-real-time, two-way sync through Dataverse. Microsoft describes it as an out-of-box infrastructure that provides near-real-time, bidirectional integration between customer engagement apps and finance and operations apps. Virtual entities are the other route: the data stays in Finance and Operations and is read from Dataverse when needed. Choosing which tables are synchronized with dual-write and which are only read through virtual entities is the core design decision, and our guide dual-write explained covers the trade-offs in detail.

Many companies run CRM and ERP with two suppliers and end up reconciling the two by hand. Solzet scopes the CRM, the ERP and the data flow between them as one design, so customers, orders, invoices and stock mean the same thing in both systems. We recommend the right solution: Dynamics 365 (Customer Engagement, Business Central or Finance and Operations), Power Platform, or a custom-built CRM. One team for CRM, ERP and the integration between them. The integration work is described on CRM and ERP integration, the CRM side on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement consulting, and for organizations that need CRM outside Microsoft licensing we build custom CRM that connects to Finance and Operations through its APIs.

What happens after go-live, and can you assess an existing Finance and Operations implementation?

After go-live the people who built the system support it through hypercare and the first period closes, then hand over to support with documentation. Support covers user questions, configuration changes, X++ fixes and enhancements, integration monitoring, and regression testing of extensions and integrations against Microsoft's updates before they reach production. Changes go through the same source control, build pipeline and test environments as the original build.

Already live on Business Central or Finance and Operations? Solzet can audit your existing project and give you a stabilisation plan. For Finance and Operations the assessment covers the global design against how the business really operates, the X++ extensions and their quality, integrations and their error handling, performance, security roles and segregation of duties, data quality and the backlog of open issues. The output is a prioritised list of findings with an estimate for each, which you can deliver with Solzet, with your own team or with your current supplier.

Typical triggers: period close takes longer than it did on AX, every Microsoft update needs emergency fixes, a phase two that was promised never started, or the original implementer has moved on and nobody can explain the extensions. The method is the same as our Dynamics 365 health check and technical audit, applied to finance and operations apps.