This article series explains and demonstrates configurable business document use in real life scenarios. The purpose is to provide a unique implementation resource. Whole series will be in 5 parts as follows:
Configurable business documents allow you to generate or modify reports/business documents without any development work. Using Microsoft Office-based templates, Microsoft offers predefined documents—familiar tools for customizing business documents to your company's specific needs. This approach not only facilitates customization but also paves the way for creating a marketplace. This marketplace features standard and regulatory business documents tailored for specific industries or regions not covered by Finance and Operations apps. Microsoft's ER template library includes about 5,000 templates. Some are available in either Word or Excel formats, or both. Not all templates in the library are for the business documents solution; however, the entire business documents solution relies on the electronic reporting functionality.
Configurable Business Document Components
Documents are generated via 4 layers: Source, data model, model mapping, and format.
Source: D365 Finance and Operations or Dataverse.
Data Model: A data model is a set of business entities and a hierarchically structured definition of relations between those entities. A single data model component can contain several hierarchies of domain-specific business entities. It can also contain model mappings that support a report-specific data flow at runtime.
The hierarchies are differentiated by a single record that is selected as a root for model mapping. For example, the data model of the payment domain area might support the following mappings:
Company > Vendor > Payment transactions of the AP domain
Company > Customer > Payment transactions of the AR domain
Model Mapping: Model mapping links application data sources to individual elements of a data model that specify, at runtime, the data flow and rules for entering business data in a data model component.
Format: The document itself. A format component is the scheme of the reporting output that is generated at runtime.
Component versions: The version that was originally created is marked as a Draft version. This version can be edited and is available for test runs. The Draft version can be converted to a Completed version. This version can be used in local reporting processes. The Completed version can be converted to a Shared version. This version is published in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) and can be used in global reporting processes. The Shared version can be converted to a Discontinued version. This version can be deleted.
Illustration of the electronic report layers is as below:
