How NOT to send an order confirmation per e-mail

When utilizing configurable business documents (Electronic Reporting) in Dynamics 365, additional steps are required to dispatch various documents such as invoices, delivery notes (referred to as packing slips in the US), sales order confirmations to customers, or purchase order requests to suppliers. Begin as usual with Accounts receivable > Setup > Forms > Form setup, Print management. Select the appropriate Electronic Reporting (ER) configuration as a Report format.

It’s important to note that the conventional flexible print destinations outlined in Set up print management for a module | Microsoft Learn are not applicable for ER reports. Instead, navigate to Organisation Administration > Electronic Reporting > Electronic reporting destination. Here, for each ER configurable business document, create a dedicated line where you can specify Email as the destination under the Settings.

Programmable e-mail recipients

Here’s where it gets interesting: for each From, To, Cc address, clicking Edit provides you with the flexibility to choose between the traditional hard-coded method of extracting business party account details (+Add, Print Management email) or the Configuration email, featuring a low-code ER formula. When opting for the latter choice, Electronic Reporting grants access to the corresponding ER model.

The From formula can be a simple hardcoded text with the unattended e-mail address: "noreply@erconsult.eu". The mails will be sent via SMTP on its behalf, thus it must be a true Exchange 365 account.

The To = @Business@ field is employed to choose one among several electronic contact addresses (emails) of the party based on the electronic address Purpose. This configuration remains consistent with the classic Print Management setup.

For the Email source account for the To e-mail address, consider the following examples:

Configurable Business Document	Party	ER Formula to extract the account number
Sales order confirmation	Customer	`model.SalesConfirm.BuyerCustomerParty.Party.PartyIdentification.AccountNumber`
Sales order packing slip	Customer	Missing in the mapping; modify `model.BuyerCustomerParty`
Sales invoice	Customer	`model.InvoiceBase.InvoiceAccount.AccountNum`
Free text invoice	Customer	`model.Customer.AccountNum`
Collection letter note	Customer	`model.AccountingCustomerParty.AccountNum`
Purchase order	Supplier	`model.PurchaseOrderInquiry.SellerSupplierParty.Party.Reference`

The subject of the email can either be set as a fixed value, such as “Lieferschein / Delivery note” or dynamically constructed from components of the document model. This dynamic approach is particularly useful for the Body of the email. The FORMAT function with placeholders does not work. Instead, HTML tags must be concatenated sequentially. Thank you Ludwig Reinhard for this hint. Here is a sample:

"Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,"&"<br>"&"Attached you may find invoice "&model.InvoiceBase.Id&” for your order"&model.InvoiceBase.SalesId&".”&"<br>"&"Best regards, XXX"

Reprint documents safely

In the described setup, Dynamics 365 will automatically dispatch your configurable business documents to your business partners via email every time, even if you attempt to reprint or review the invoice, order confirmation, etc. The customers and suppliers will go nuts. Fortunately, a solution has been introduced since 2021: a feature known as Configure action-dependent ER destinations – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn. This feature responds to the button clicked by the user—whether it’s ‘Copy,’ ‘Original,’ or ‘Use Print Management‘—and redirects the document to a different destination, providing a more controlled document distribution process.

With the configuration shown below, reprinted copies of an invoice are directed exclusively to the screen. The ‘View‘ option corresponds here to the buttons Copy preview and Original preview. The ‘Print‘ action is initiated during every post-and-print action when the configurable document is initially generated. Additionally, the ‘Print‘ action is triggered when the user deliberately selects Use print management for reprinting.

Do not send pro-forma documents to your business partners

The electronic reporting destinations unfold their devious nature when the people first preview a document before sending. Dynamics 365 is going to send the document via email regardless of whether the user opts to Use print management or not, proforma or not a proforma. Namely, both generating a pro-forma sales order confirmation and posting a final sales order confirmation are considered Print actions. This aspect bears potential legal consequences.

The recent feature, “Allow ER destinations adjustment at runtime (Phase 2)“, introduced in version 10.0.36, may offer assistance. However, I consider it intrusive and unsafe as it opens an additional dialog window placing the decision-making in the hands of the user: humans make mistakes.

We’ve identified a somewhat unconventional but more straightforward solution by manipulating and corrupting the Email source account mentioned earlier. Consider the following example:

IF(LEN(model.InvoiceBase.Id)>0, model.InvoiceBase.InvoiceAccount.AccountNum, "FUBAR")

If the invoice number is empty, the system returns a fabricated account number; otherwise, it returns the legitimate account number.

When attempting to send a copy of a pro-forma invoice to the customer’s email address, an exception will be raised, stating, “The email address in the To field is not valid.” The Screen destination will still succeed despite this exception.

Electronic reporting blog series

ZUGFeRD 2.2/ Factur-X 1.0 for Dynamics 365 FO

We are excited to announce the release of the common German-French electronic invoice ZUGFeRD / Factur-X in Dynamics 365 for Finance and SCM. This plug-and-play solution in its “Light” version does not require any customisation and can be easily installed in the standard Electronic Reporting module of D365. It supports the ZUGFeRD 2.2/Factur-X 1.0 profile EN 16931, also known as the “COMFORT” profile, which meets all tax law requirements and must be accepted by customers unless explicitly denied.

In the ZUGFeRD/Factur-X standard, the invoicing information is included in an XML payload attached to a human-readable PDF file (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZUGFeRD). This is in contrast to the Italian electronic invoicing system, where a PDF is embedded in a Base64 encoded block within an XML. The PDF document is just a visualisation of the electronic content, what counts is the XML attachment. The XML file is always named factur-x.xml and it is attached to at the PDF document level, not to a single PDF page:

Here is an example: factur-x.xml

Our solution, which utilizes Configurable business documents in D365, supports Sales invoices with separate buyer, seller, and order accounts. Other types of invoices such as the Free text invoice or any of the 3 Project invoices, can be provided upon request at a discounted price. Our solution also handles form notes, line and header notes and footers, line discounts, total discounts, and cash discounts, document level charges, properly reflecting VAT for domestic, EU, and export sales. The settlement instructions orchestrate a SEPA credit transfer or a SEPA direct debit withdrawal; partially prepaid invoices are properly interpreted. The solution is available in French, German, and British English.

Price

The solution is offered at a fixed fee per end customer / D365 tenant:

Version	Price	Deliverables	Notes
Light	€890	A ZUGFeRD Sales invoice ER configuration, the XML file only	This option does not require any X++ customisations or 3rd party software and can be installed and used right away.
Light+	€1200	Same as the Light version but with 5 hours of prepaid support and installation
Heavy	€2200	Contains the full solution, including a PDF template, and a PDF post-processor with 8 hours of prepaid support.	Includes the iTextSharp 5.5.13.2 .NET library under the GNU Affero General Public License Includes the BouncyCastle 1.8.9 .NET cryptographic library under a variant of the MIT license.

You may acquire the solution on the official Microsoft App Source portal: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365-for-operations/er-consultgmbh1674479095356.zugferd_light_plus

Setup and use

Import the Electronic configuration “ZUGFeRD Sales invoice” provided to you (Organisation administration > Electronic reporting > Configurations, button Exchange / Load from XML file). For the ease of installation, configuration and integration, the standard Invoice model Invoice model v 277 and the standard Invoice model mapping 277.258 are used, make sure they have been imported upfront.
Beware: the standard Invoice model mapping from Microsoft has a number of shortcomings. For instance, the buyer and seller addresses are passed in a de-normalized form as multi line strings. As a walkaround, some heuristics and regular expressions have been applied to extract the ISO2 code of the country and the zip (postal) code. A well-known modification to the standard Invoice model mapping will fix that and reinforce the report. Futhermore, the current Microsoft Invoice model mapping does not pass the EU Tax directives to the report. At the moment, the report relies on the non-EU Tax exempt codes in the same way as the standard Excel invoice does. To leverage the Tax directives, fix the model mapping, then modify the ZipFolder/InvoicePDF/SalesTax/SalesTax* mappings in ZUGFeRD Sales invoice format like this:
IF(OR(@.Value.TaxExemptDescription<>"",@.Value.TaxDirective<>""), IF(@.Value.TaxExemptDescription<>"",@.Value.TaxExemptDescription,@.Value.TaxDirective), @"GER_LABEL:PlusVAT")
Under the button Configurations / Application specific parameters / Setup, provide a mapping of the VAT (en-us: Sales tax) Print codes to the ZUGFeRD categories S, K, AE, G, O (for example, the 19% and 7% VAT belong to the “S” category). Also provide a mapping of the D365 Unit of measure codes to the UNECE Recommendation No. 20 list called “Codes for Units of Measure Used in International Trade” (see https://tfig.unece.org/contents/recommendation-20.htm). For instance, a piece has the standard code H87. A sample parameter setup can be downloaded here: 03-01-2023 03.29.45 pm_ZUGFeRD Sales invoice.277.11
Pay attention to the sample VAT print codes on the screenshot above: the standard Invoice model mapping does not pass the tax rates to the report, and the VAT Print code must contain the VAT rate in numbers, if applicable. In other words, they should look like “19%” and “7%” in Germany or “20%” and “5,5%”in France. The mapping of the sales units of measure is against the language-specific, translated unit code (if exists), not the UoM symbol used in D365 globally, i.e. not pcs but Stk. Beware: these symbolic “print codes” persist in the tax transactions and invoice lines along with the VAT codes, i.e. they are historized and must be set correctly from the beginning. Once both the mappings have been established, set the Application specific parameters State to Completed.
Open Sales ledger (en-us: Accounts receivable) > Setup > Forms > Form setup. Make sure that the VAT specification option is set to Registration currency. You will also probably Print VAT number on invoice, show some invoice line inventory dimensions and/or notes, and display external item numbers (Item number in forms = Both).
Finally, open Print management and select the Report format = ZUGFeRD Sales invoice at the Customer invoice node. The Light version setup ends here.
For the Heavy version, first deploy the X++ customisations and libraries from a D365 deployable package provided to you.
Create a new File document type in the Organisation administration > Document management > Document types list. Name it exactly like this: ZUGFeRD.
Create a new ER destination (Organisation administration > Electronic reporting > Electronic reporting destination) for the report ZUGFeRD Sales invoice. Under File destination, add a new line and divert the ZipFolder file component to the Archive: click Settings, then Archive, set Enabled and Save in job archive, and choose file Type = ZUGFeRD. The Archive destination is namely the only one to plug in/subscribe to.
Make sure that the feature Configure action-dependent ER destinations is turned OFF: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/dev-itpro/analytics/er-action-dependent-destinations. It doesn’t work well anyway.
The steps to configure the Heavy version end here. The Electronic Reporting engine will fill out the PDF form, populate an XML file and put both into a ZIP (i.e. a folder). This ZIP file is intercepted, unpacked, and the XML part is embedded into the PDF, adding some links and attributes required. The resulting PDF is rendered on the screen in a separate browser window. Other output destinations than the Screen may be offered upon request at a discounted price. The PDF file is not fully PDF-A/3 compliant, but it can be read and parsed, the XML payload passes all validations. Please bear in mind that PDF forms never contain repeatable ranges or cells. This is the reason why the number of invoice lines is currently limited by 10, this number will be extended on demand; see also Design ER configurations to fill in PDF templates – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn.
Print or reprint an invoice with the option Use print management turned on.
The resulting PDF document is displayed on the screen (the Light version offers an XML file to download). Here is a sample, you buy what you see:

Useful links

End user license agreement: ZUGfERD_Heavy_EULA
The PDF / XML validator is available online at Factur-X Validator (fnfe-mpe.org).
A rich interactive ZUGFeRD schema navigator is hosted here: EN 16931 – FacturX 1.03 – ZUGFeRD 2.0.1 – COMFORT (gefeg.com)

E-invoice and configurable business documents blog series

Enumerate lines in Configurable Business Documents

The delivery note, invoice etc. Report Data Providers in Dynamics 365 for Finance do not expose line numbers for no obvious reason. For instance, the SalesInvoiceTmp table sent from D365 to the report renderer – whatever it is – misses the line number. The situation becomes dire when it comes to Electronic Reporting / Configurable Business Documents.

The ENUMERATE(Lines) function applied to the lines makes a totally new object {Number, Value} and every binding “@” becomes “@.Value“. This is a massive change in the report, very hard to maintain and upgrade (rebase).

In XML or CSV outbound formats there is a Counter element, it auto-counts itself. In Excel and Word outbound formats there are just Ranges, Cells. I thought we worked with lists as isolated objects and there were no internal variables in Electronic Reporting which were aware of the execution history.

But today I finally understood what the DATA COLLECTION does. It is a listener, you pass a value to it, it returns it back unchanged but keeps a global variable to count and summarise the values.

For example, to enumerate delivery note (en-us: packing slip) lines, first create a root Data collection class of the integer type in the Mapping to the right, Collect all values = Yes, let’s call it a LineNumberCollection.

Then put the following formula into the Excel Cell with the line number:
LineNumberCollection.Collect(1)+LineNumberCollection.Sum(false)-1

The first LineNumberCollection.Collect() call takes 1, records 1 internally, and returns the 1 back into the cell. The second call LineNumberCollection.Sum(false) adds the running total of 1’es recorded so far. The last operand subtracts 1.

Here is the result: Bingo!