Back in December 2024, I wrote about whether to buy an ISV solution or build your own functionality in Dynamics 365. We walked through cost, implementation time, technical resources, support, and ownership. I still care about all of those things. Particularly support. An impressive demo has never answered its phone during month-end. But the conversation deserves another look. AI coding tools are changing what teams can reasonably attempt to build, and tools that help them inv

The message came in at 7:40 on a Tuesday, from a controller I've worked with for years: WIP is up again and I can't explain it to the auditors. I've heard some version of that from four different finance teams now, so I'm writing the answer down once. It was day three of close. Work in process was up $812,000 since the last balance sheet, nothing on the shop floor looked unusual, and the plant manager swore every order that shipped was finished. Both of them were right. The o

My kid asked me for $3 for ice cream at the pool last weekend, because "that's what it costs." Twenty minutes later he was back. The ice cream was $4.50, and he needed another $1.50. Congratulations, buddy. You just generated a purchase price variance. Welcome back, DynamicsDads and Moms. This one came straight out of a real client fire drill. Two of our consultants were on a plane, finance wanted to know where PO receipt costs were landing in the GL, and somewhere in the thr

A rep has a customer on the phone. The customer wants 400 of something the company builds instead of stocks, and the question is the one it always is. When can I have it? If that answer comes from a planner's spreadsheet, or from a rep who tacks two weeks onto whatever the last quote said, you already know how the story goes. Capable to promise is the piece of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations that tries to answer the question out of the system's own data. What CTP is doing