What's New in Sustainability (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video walks through what the 2024 release wave 2 adds to Business Central sustainability, building on the wave 1 foundation. It demos the new role center, scorecards and goals, the Emission Fees page, emissions entered directly on purchase orders and invoices, carbon credit purchasing and posting, and ESG reporting built on financial report row definitions.

The presenters say most features come with major version 25. The updated demo data tool follows with the next minor version, 25.1, in November. They also say they could not deliver everything and will keep investing in sustainability.

Key points

• The Sustainability Manager role center shows KPIs, daily emissions, goals, baselines, targets and charts by scope and gas type. A user must have the ‘sustainability manager’ field marked to own a scorecard.
• Only one goal per company can be marked as the main goal, not one per scorecard. The baseline is calculated from sustainability entries in the previous period.
• Emissions on purchase orders and invoices must be enabled in sustainability setup, on the procurement fast tab. Once enabled, users see only sustainability-related purchase documents in the tiles. Emissions entered on a line are the total for that line, and the system calculates the per-unit-of-measure values.
• The new Emission Fees page sets carbon equivalent factors and internal carbon fees by emission type, date range, country and responsibility center. ‘Update Carbon Fees’ applies changes retroactively to existing entries.
• For carbon credits, mark the item as a greenhouse gases credit and set its unit of measure to match the tracking unit in sustainability setup. On posting, the system creates negative-value sustainability ledger entries, so no minus sign is entered.
• Financial report row definitions support sustainability totaling types with sustainability accounts, and carbon equivalent and carbon fee amount types. They can be combined with statistic accounts and posting accounts for metrics such as emissions per employee or per revenue.
• Vendors and items get certificate fields, and the certificate type is filled in automatically from where it is created. All features except the demo data tool come with major version 25.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• other “Sustainability Accounts Chart” at 2:21
• table “Sustainability Scorecards” at 7:46
• table “Sustainability Goals” at 8:26
• table “Emission Fees” at 10:05
• table “Sustainability Ledger Entries” at 2:42
• other “Sustainability Journals” at 2:42
• page 9308 “Purchase Invoices” at 12:35
• page 56 “Purchase Orders” at 4:10
• table “sustainability accounts” at 17:08
• table “statistic accounts” at 17:48

Not found in BC28-30: table “Sustainability Scorecards”, table “Sustainability Goals”, table “Emission Fees”, table “Sustainability Ledger Entries”, table “sustainability accounts”, table “statistic accounts”.

Quotes

• 2:01 “to build proper foundation part so fundamentals will be good enough to enable us for building new advanced features”
• 3:30 “we made a lot of research what is the most important for partners for customers and we couldn’t deliver everything”
• 4:50 “we additionally added internal carbon fee because this is required in some regulation and i”
• 6:11 “make any difference for users who will not use sustainability features at all”
• 8:26 “only one can be Main and when I say only one not only one per scorecard only one in company can be main goal”
• 10:57 “what is important maybe we started as you maybe started with the previous features without having emission fees and now you want to update”
• 13:06 “this is much easier for user who are working with sustainability they will see only um documents related with sustainability”
• 14:20 “emissions will when you enter here emission it will be total emission for this uh for this line but we have Fields emission per”
• 15:20 “you do not need to enter nothing manually in the documents you just need to say okay I bought one or three and system”
• 16:13 “you do not need to enter minus in a document you just need to enter a regular number system will automatically when system recognize”
• 17:08 “in amount types we can use carbon equivalent and carbon fee so can use these two options uh for reporting”
• 17:48 “you can enter for example number of employees you can enter put your revenue from posting accounts and now I want to calculate emission”
• 22:02 “all of them except demo data will come with a major version 25 uh demo data will come with the next minor 25 5.1”
• 22:02 “try to test all these features in preview as the majority of them actually all all of them except demo data will”

Disclaimers in the video

• 5:31 coming-later: will come in 25.1 we will update demo data tool so now you have all demo data for previous features but for all these nice great new features updated demo tool will come in November
• 13:47 preview: if you look in a preview posting this is regular document but you have sustainability Ledger entries
• 21:01 other: this is not that we have this functionality embedded in a busy Center yes we already started previous fa now we uh en Reach This functionality we will continue with investment in sustainability features
• 22:02 subject-to-change: all all of them except demo data will come with a major version 25 uh demo data will come with the next minor 25 5.1

Presenters (as heard): Alexander Toic, Unknown speaker.