Business value

In today’s evolving supply chain landscape, there is a growing trend of wholesalers and producers selling directly to end consumers. This shift has led to an increase in integrations between e-commerce platforms (e.g., Magento) and multi-channel solutions (e.g., ChannelEngine) with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations .

A common integration pattern involves using a single customer account in F&O per sales channel. This approach is practical because most Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions do not establish long-term customer relationships. For example, all orders originating from a Magento webshop—either globally or per country—are typically assigned to a single predefined ("Magento customer") account in F&O. This account is used as the order account and the invoice account on all incoming sales orders from that channel.

Address Handling Challenge
In standard Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations there are different address purposes. In the scope of this business value we distinguish:

• Invoice address: Fetched from the invoice account on the order when the invoice journal is created (For example when interfacing Magento web orders, this is the invoice address of the generic Magento customer).
  
• Delivery address: Populated with the shipping address provided by the end consumer during checkout on the web shop.
  However, modern consumer behavior often favors convenience: many choose to have their orders delivered to a Pick-Up/Drop-Off (PUDO) point instead of their home.

In such cases, the PUDO address is imported as the Delivery address. Due to this, unfortunately there is no space/fields for the invoice(residential) address.

This becomes problematic in B2C scenarios where warranty regulations require the consumer’s residential address to appear on the invoice. Without this, the consumer may not be able to claim warranty rights, and the business may fall out of compliance with consumer protection laws.

Process

With this feature enabled, additional fields named "Alternative invoice address" become available on the sales order header. The data from these fields will be used to populate the Invoice address on the journal posting of the sales order, e.g. Packing slip and Invoice.

Where in standard the Invoice address of the Invoice account is used. So with this feature enable Invoice account invoice address data is not used, only the address fields from the sales order itself.

Two options:

1. On the sale order both the Delivery address and the Alternative invoice address are populated. The Alternative invoice address is used as "Bill to" address and the Delivery address is used as "Ship to" address.
2. On the sales order only the Delivery address is populated. The Delivery address is used as "Ship to" and as "Bill to" address.
   

Assumptions

• This feature is intended exclusively for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) scenarios. This will not be enforced by the system, it is the responsibility of the user/company.
• Alternative invoice address is based on One-time address functionality, meaning that the address will not be stored in the Global Address Book.
• Since One-time addresses are non-editable, any corrections or changes require entering a new address rather than modifying the existing one.
• The logic for populating the Alternative invoice address from external interfaces is handled entirely within the interface itself. The feature does not impose or manage this logic; it is the responsibility of the interface implementation to supply the appropriate address data.
• Summery invoice functionality is not supported for customers where Alternative invoice address is enabled. Also if the Invoice account is populated on the customer, the Alternative invoice address will be set to ‘No’ automatically.
• Intercompany and Direct delivery scenarios are not affected by this feature. Alternative invoice address will not be synchronized to those related orders.

Setup

Configuration key and license key

This feature is linked to the HSO Order Entry Optimization configuration key and the ALF License: Order Entry Optimization.

Customers

On the customer form the parameter “Alternative invoice address” has been introduced. If this parameter is enabled, for the concerning customer additional address field named ‘Alternative invoice address’ will become available on the sales order header.

Accounts receivable > Customers > All customers > Customer form > tab Invoice and delivery

Field	Description
Alternative invoice address	This parameter is intended exclusively for B2C scenarios. When enabled, the Alternative invoice address will be used to populate the invoice address data on the sales order journals postings. If empty the system will fill the invoice address data with the Delivery address data.

Sales orders

Sales and marketing > Sales orders > All sales orders > Sales order header > tab Address

For this feature we copied the standard Address section, so you see the same fields as for the Delivery address.
Field Description.

Field	Description
Name	Name of the Alternative invoice address

‘+' (button)

Option to add a new address

Alternative invoice address

Alternative invoice address

Address

Display field of the address