Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and Financials

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Jeremy and I'm here with Jared today thanks for joining me thanks for having me we're gonna talk a little bit about business central today so tell me what is business central business central is Microsoft's cloud-based all-in-one business management management solution for small to midsize businesses so it's a financial application that lets you track your financials and lets you track your customers and receivables and payables and project management really anything with a number that's part of your business can be tracked within this financial system and so this is on the Microsoft girl off so what can developers do with the API to do a business central there's a lot they can do we have several api's that are in the graph now and more that are coming some of the key scenarios that we see with with these graph api's is being able to synchronize your financial applicative financial applications with other apps that have managed your business businesses have applications that are specific to their industry that interact with their other financial data and so being able to synchronize those entities makes this an easy experience by having that data available through the Microsoft graph yeah another one is being able to build those business specific apps if you have apps that you want to build on Microsoft graph that interact with your data this makes it a quick and easy experience especially if you want to build it on your financial data and have it interact with other Microsoft applications like exchange and Outlook in Excel bringing that all together in the graph makes it a magical experience that's great and just financial reporting is an additional one being able to get insights from your data by being able to pull that have easy access to it from the Microsoft graph so what's the best way to get started can you show you some stuff on your laptop I'd be happy to awesome so here we are in postman we're looking at some of the API is that we have available through Microsoft graph for business central some of the first ones we'll look at our master entities so we have access to customers vendors accounts inventory services all of these primary entities that you work with and that are important to your business everyday one example let's just do a quick get against our customers we have full crud access against our customers we can see balance we can see information we can update we can delete and create all right here through our rest-based API it's the same for vendors and several of the other master entities that are important for your business let's also look at transactions so a scenario is we have another application that for this example will say a payroll application that's creating payroll batches and paying our employees and then we need to post that information to our general ledger to update our financials so we have a payroll batch of lines created in the application and we just want to add a line to that from our payroll application into our financial financial application so we look at the batch first we see a general Journal's we see this as our payroll batch we have some lines already added here let's add another line by posting this new line for our tax expense look at the body we see we have post against our payroll tax expense account for the amount required and send that will then show us in the response back the line that got created and if we go back to our financial application and update that or refresh the page and say that that payroll tax expense line then got added for the amount that we had defined for that for that tax account so this is where we can integrate between other applications pushing that data back into our financial application keeping that data centralized for our financial reporting one other one that we want to look at is financial reporting being able to see that financial information and pull that out from from business central in this case we have an aged accounts receivable report and we've exposed that reporting functionality through this API of Microsoft graph we have aged accounts receivable and this is a report where for your business it's important for you to know how much money is owed to you by your customers and when is that money due so you can estimate when you're going what your cash flow is going to be over time so if we send this it will show us a response of our total money due balance due to us from our all of our customers and then it's broken down into aging periods so our the 30 days outs our 60 days out or 90 days out or whatever we want to set those periods as actually in this example I have it set to a three month aging buckets but we can change that by updating our filter on that API but that gives us an idea breaking it down even further by individual customers we can then see how much money is owed to us by our customers and when is that money due and then we also have that on the payable side how much money is do we owe to our vendors and when is that money due really helping us manage the financials of our business so these are some of the examples that we have by exposing that functionality through Microsoft graph from business central cool that's really awesome so how can that developer get hold of a trial to get started with this product the easiest way is just to go to business central dynamics comm and there you can sign up for a trial tenant and from there start working with Microsoft graph api's against your trial tenant and seeing how this all works together awesome thank you Tom Jack that's great thank you just so to get started go to graph Microsoft comm and you can start trying these api's with that test tenant straightaway