General introduction to Continia Finance
Continia Finance is your all‑in‑one toolkit for financial accounting. It's a multi-purpose tool that assists you in dealing with a wide range of financial challenges often not met by standard ERP systems, thereby allowing you to enhance and make the most of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Featuring a completely free base module covering the essentials plus an additional eight dedicated modules tailored to simplify and solve various specific financial tasks, Continia Finance can help you manage your daily accounting with ease. You can add as many of the additional modules as you like, and you only pay for what you use. Everything is easy to set up and seamlessly integrated into Business Central, which makes Continia Finance the ideal way to complement your existing workflows and strengthen your current Business Central capabilities.
Tip
In the sections below, both the Essential module and the dedicated modules are described in more detail. To access even more detailed descriptions of the various features and modules, click the links in the leftmost column of each table.
The Essential module
The Continia Finance Essential module addresses a number of important issues relevant to modern accounting, thereby strengthening everyday financial work in Business Central. By gathering a number of highly requested enhancements that streamline core accounting processes into one module, it helps bookkeepers and controllers work faster and more efficiently, gain clarity, reduce errors, and get more value out of Business Central’s standard functionality.
The module is available completely free of charge and includes the following features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| CSV ports | Allows you to exchange data with external systems or between companies. For example, the feature can be used to quickly import or export templates or master data (such as customer, vendor or inventory data), or to import data into journals. It's simple, flexible, and universally compatible and supports easy mapping, smooth integration with other systems, and straightforward exporting for compliance and auditing purposes. |
| Extended application | Refines the standard Business Central user interface using colour-coding and additional fields and columns to make important elements stand out and to speed up your workflow. By enhancing both the layout and the information available on the screen, the feature provides a clearer, more intuitive overview of the entries you’re working with and helps you to complete your tasks with greater accuracy and efficiency. |
| Dimensions for system-generated postings | Allows you to decide how dimensions should be applied when the system posts entries on your behalf. Instead of leaving system‑generated transactions without meaningful categorization, Continia Finance can pull dimensions either from the account being used or from the originating transaction line. This ensures that even automated postings follow the same analytical structure as manually entered data, giving you cleaner reporting and better control. |
| Ledger entry comments | Lets you add line comments that can be viewed after posting, such as clarifying explanations as to why open ledger entries don’t match their related documents – for example, if a payment doesn’t exactly match an invoice amount and you want future approvers to know why. This adds transparency and reduces the need for colleagues to search for context and clarification. |
| VAT key codes | Enables you to set up a key code once and store all required VAT information inside it. After that, selecting the key code automatically populates the relevant VAT fields for you. This reduces repetitive data entry, minimizes errors, and speeds up tasks where VAT settings need to be updated or corrected. |
| VAT key checks | Ensures that whenever you post a journal line or an invoice using a specific G/L account, you must use the VAT key that's assigned to that G/L account. If you try to use a different VAT key, the feature blocks the posting, thereby preventing accidental errors and ensuring consistent VAT handling across all postings that use that account. |
| Fast posting codes | Lets you set up codes that enable you to easily create one or more journal lines or invoice lines including the correct accounts, posting group setups, dimensions, and even fixed amounts. By triggering the entire setup with a single code, you avoid having to reenter the same information multiple times, resulting in a smoother posting workflow and fewer manual errors. |
| Balance confirmations | Allows you to set up balance confirmation codes that make it easy to generate balance confirmation letters for customers and vendors in connection with year-end accounting. You can specify the type of recipient and choose to include a cover letter, a return letter and/or a list of entries, and the text of the included letters is fully customizable. You set up your codes once, and the system then gathers the relevant data and generates the letter for you. This speeds up and simplifies the annual confirmation process and makes it more consistent, less error-prone, and far easier to manage – especially when you need to send a large number of confirmations at once. Tip In the free Essential module, the letters can be printed or saved as PDFs, which can then be sent via email. To send the letters via email directly from within Business Central, upgrade to the paid Extended Financial Reports module, described below under The dedicated modules. |
| Colored report hyperlinks | Visually highlights master data fields in reports that are run and previewed on-screen in Business Central, to make it obvious that the field values are interactive and clickable. Clicking one of these distinctly colored fields opens the corresponding page in Business Central directly, making it much easier to access underlying data straight from a report. |
| Alternating shading | Enables you to make every other line in reports slightly gray for improved readability. The alternating shading makes it much easier for your eyes to follow each row across the page, allowing you to focus on the right lines and quickly scan for information. |
| Payment discount handling | Adds a number of extra columns and fields to the Apply Customer Entries page to provide a better overview of payment discounts for entry lines. The feature also displays fields for applied entries using bold green text and makes it easy to adjust payment discount details directly in the entry lines, adding a significantly higher level of control and flexibility to the handling of payment discounts. |
The dedicated modules
In addition to the free Essential module, you can choose to add any or all of the eight extra modules that are available at a low price point. Each module deals with a specific financial task that's often neglected by ERP systems, despite being much sought after and important in certain contexts. Adding one or more of these modules can help you enhance Business Central significantly in your particular organizational setup.
Currently, the following dedicated modules are available for you to add on top of the Essential module:
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| Associations | Lets you link related customers or vendors into groups – associations – so that you can view and manage all their open entries gathered in one place. This allows you to apply entries accross multiple accounts, making reconciliation much easier. The feature is particularly useful for chains, parent-subsidiary structures, or other constructions in which several accounts belong to the same organization. For any company that functions as both a customer and a vendor, you can link the company's customer and vendor accounts, allowing you to view all transactions together and allocate amounts or clear entries across both accounts in one go. |
| Extended Fixed Assets | Expands Business Central’s standard asset management by giving you more control over how assets are created, tracked, and retired. You can streamline asset creation using predefined templates, manage identical assets by grouping them, handle partial retirements without workarounds, and automate processes like rounding, depreciation, multi-book posting, discount adjustment, and cancellation alignment. The module also provides a clearer overview of your assets' statuses and lifecycles, making it easier to maintain accurate and consistent asset records. |
| G/L Open Entries | Brings the open/closed entry logic – normally used for customers and vendors – into the general ledger, allowing you to create, track, match, clear, reconcile, and report on open entries directly in G/L accounts. The module makes it much easier to monitor ongoing transactions such as payments in transit, interim postings, or other items that aren’t fully settled yet. By giving you a structured overview of which G/L entries are pending, partially applied, or in progress, the module provides clarity and control, accelerates reconciliation, and reduces manual labor. On top of this, it enables you to generate open-entry reports for auditing, analysis, or review purposes, providing increased transparency, accuracy, and context. |
| Installments | Enables you to split sales and purchase invoices into installments, giving customers and vendors greater payment flexibility. The module makes it easy to create, track, schedule, adjust, and cancel payments over specified periods of time. You can define reusable installment templates and apply them either before posting or to already‑posted documents, and installments can be used for any transaction and have any size and frequency, even varying. The module integrates smoothly with your existing processes, helping you handle recurring or staged payments directly in Business Central with far less manual work and no need for third-party tools or services. |
| Extended Financial Reports | Streamlines your year-end financial reporting with optimized displays and lists as well as the ability to set up G/L account groups instead of working with individual accounts in every report. The module enables you to print proof for account totals, conduct plausibility checks, and customize column layouts to ensure your reports are accurate and reliable. You also get access to various VAT features (such as generating summarized sales VAT notifications and resolving purchase VAT deduction issues) and detailed lists for G/L accounts, customers, and vendors with extended layouts, filtering options, and export capabilities for a deeper understanding of your financial data. |
| Multi-Level Payment Discount | Lets you set up multiple discount tiers for both sales and purchase documents, each tier with a different discount percentage and each tied to a different payment date. This gives customers flexible payment options while encouraging earlier settlement by offering higher discounts for faster payment. The system automatically applies the correct discount based on when the payment is made, reducing errors and manual work while helping you to streamline your payment and discount management. |
| Factoring | Helps you improve your cash flow and liquidity by selling selected customer invoices to a factoring company in exchange for immediate payment. You can set up one or more factoring companies, assign customers to them, and easily choose which invoices to include in each factoring proposal. The module generates CSV export files in the required format and gives you a clear overview of all sold and applied invoices, making it easy for you to both monitor and manage your liquidity. |
| Treasury | Gives you a consolidated, cross‑company overview of all liquidity‑related data, making it easier to monitor your cash flow across all companies. You can set up treasury groups and filters to display key information – such as bank balances, open customer and vendor items, and selected G/L account balances – with real‑time updates. This centralization helps controllers in your organization quickly analyze payment‑related data for multiple companies in one place while streamlining liquidity management. |