Dynamics 365 Finance Premium Needed for Advanced Planning

• Dynamics 365 is adding advanced financial planning features to help planners gather data and automate planning tasks.
• The features fill gaps that could help customers replace third-party solutions and rely on Microsoft for support.
• The features are licensed through a new Finance Premium subscription, although there are no options for upgrading existing licenses.

Dynamics 365 Finance has released advanced business and finance performance planning capabilities under the name Extended Planning and Analytics (xP&A), based on recent acquisitions and third-party technology. The features are licensed via a new Finance Premium User Subscription License (User SL), which is only required for a subset of Dynamics 365 Finance users who are responsible for creating strategic plans, budgets, and forecast or who create reports and analysis related to these activities. Read-only and minor update rights for xP&A data are included with lower-level licenses, such as Finance, Operations Activity, and Team Member User SLs. Finance Premium is significantly more expensive than the Finance User SL, but it could be less expensive than maintaining and paying for third-party solutions, and it provides features that are supported directly by Microsoft.