Document Chaos in D365 F&O — and How to Fix It

The D365 document management problem nobody talks about

D365 document management is a challenge in almost every implementation. Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM is built to run your business processes — procurement, sales, production, finance. It creates and processes hundreds of documents every day: invoices, purchase orders, confirmations, packing slips, project invoices.

But here is the thing: D365 doesn't keep them.

Standard D365 generates documents, sends them, and moves on. Where those documents end up is anyone's guess — email inboxes, SharePoint libraries, shared network drives, or local folders on someone's laptop.

The result is a document landscape that looks something like this:

• Sales invoices are emailed to customers — and the PDF sits in the sender's Sent folder
• Purchase orders are printed or exported, then filed... somewhere
• Vendor contracts live in SharePoint, with no connection to the vendor record in D365
• Scanned paper documents (delivery notes, signed confirmations) end up in a shared drive, named by whoever scanned them
• e-Invoices arrive as XML files that D365 can process but nobody can read

For day-to-day operations, this works — until it doesn't.

When document chaos becomes a real problem

The pain typically surfaces in three scenarios:

1. Audit and compliance

An auditor asks for all invoices related to a specific vendor for the last fiscal year. In a scattered document environment, this means searching D365 for the transaction records, then hunting through email, SharePoint, and file shares for the actual documents. What should take minutes takes days.

2. Cross-department access

The finance team needs the signed delivery note to release a payment. The warehouse team scanned it — but it's in their folder, and finance doesn't have access. A simple approval becomes a back-and-forth of emails and file shares.

3. External document management

Vendor contracts, certificates, insurance documents, quality reports — these are critical business documents that originate outside D365 but relate directly to records inside it. Without a structured way to attach them, they float in parallel systems.

What a proper solution looks like

The fix isn't adding another storage layer. It's bringing the document archive into D365 itself — so documents live where the business data lives.

A proper document management solution for D365 F&O should do the following:

Automatic archiving of internal documents

Every document that D365 generates — sales invoices, purchase orders, packing slips, project invoices — should be archived automatically at the moment of posting. No manual export, no email forwarding, no additional steps. The document is created, posted, and archived in one action.

Structured storage for external documents

External documents (vendor contracts, scanned paper, certificates) need a way into the archive that preserves context. That means uploading from the relevant D365 form — the vendor record, the purchase order, the project — with metadata that links the document to the business record.

Full-text search

Metadata-based search (find me all invoices for vendor X) is table stakes. But what if you need to find a specific clause in a contract, or a line item across hundreds of invoices? Full-text search across the document archive turns a needle-in-a-haystack problem into a simple query.

Barcode scanning for paper documents

Paper isn't dead — especially in manufacturing, logistics, and warehousing. A barcode printed on an outgoing packing slip can be used to automatically match the scanned return document to the original record in D365. No manual lookup, no misfiled documents.

Security and access control

Not everyone should see every document. A document management solution needs to respect D365's existing security model — if a user doesn't have access to vendor invoices in D365, they shouldn't see them in the document archive either.

e-Invoice rendering

With European e-invoicing mandates rolling out (CII, UBL, XRechnung), D365 environments increasingly receive invoices as XML files. These are machine-readable but not human-readable. Rendering them as formatted HTML — directly in the document viewer — makes them accessible to everyone, not just the integration team.

How FlexxStore addresses this

FlexxStore is an add-on for Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM that implements all of the above — as a native D365 module, not an external system.

Key capabilities:

• 20+ internal document types archived automatically at posting — sales invoices, purchase orders, packing slips, project invoices, and more
• External document upload from any D365 form with configurable metadata fields
• Full-text search across the connected document archive
• Barcode scanning to match scanned paper documents to D365 records
• Document Viewer and Sidebar for previewing documents without leaving D365
• Rights management using D365 security privileges — per document type
• e-Invoice rendering for CII and UBL XML documents via XSLT transformation
• ECM Dashboard for monitoring archiving status and handling errors
• REST API for external systems to add and query documents
• Data Management support for exporting and importing the full configuration via D365 DMF