In Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations you can automatically generate and email invoices to your customers. What if there is a demand to secure the emailed invoices with passwords, for example the customer VAT number? D365FO doesn’t offer such a possibility OOTB, but fortunately Docentric introduced this option with the 3.3.8 version. Not only PDF documents generated by Docentric Generator but also those generated by SSRS Reporting Services can be encrypted with passwords. And not just that! You can configure passwords per report for each company, using static text or placeholders mapped to any data from the report data source.

Password setup

Passwords used to encrypt generated reports in PDF output format are configured in Docentric report setup: Organization administration > Docentric AX > Reports > Settings > Document Generation > PDF Security. You can choose when to encrypt a particular report (e.g. Encrypt when emailing the report or saving the report to Azure storage).

Learn in detail how to setup passwords for PDF encryption >>

Using Placeholders and Custom fields

To make fields in Docentric report setup dynamic you can use so-called placeholders. There are Standard placeholders, which are common for all reports, whilst Custom placeholders are report specific and provided via Docentric SSRS Replicas.

If you want your passwords to be bound to a report specific data, which isn’t already offered as a Custom placeholder, you can create a new so-called User-defined placeholder. User-defined placeholders also came out with the 3.3.8 Docentric version. The prerequisite for creating a new User-defined placeholder is that the data that it should point to exists in the report data source. If this is not the case, there are two approaches for adding missing data to the report data source.

The first approach is to add the missing data via X++, using simple APIs in the custom DSP class. Learn more >>

The second approach is to switch to ER Data Models as report data sources, where you will have the opportunity add missing data using ER Designer. Learn more >>

Send out emails with encrypted PDF reports

Let’s now email a PDF encrypted invoice document to the corresponding customer. We will also save the report to Print archive and turn on the Preview before print option.

Let’s now run the report from Invoice journal. The report is first open in Docentric Viewer, since we used Preview before print. From Docentric Viewer you can download the PDF, which is not encrypted and you can open it without entering the password. But if you download the email, which will be sent out after clicking Continue, you will see that the attached invoice is locked and that the password is needed to open it.

Password will be saved in Print archive too

Let’s now check how the invoice has been saved in Print archive in regard to PDF encryption settings. As shown below, we can preview the archived invoice or download it as the PDF document without any password protection. On the other hand, we can also download the encrypted PDF document, and view the password that was used to encrypt it.

Summary

You can now secure your outgoing PDF documents in D365FO such as invoices and orders with configurable passwords by using Docentric. And if you already designed your invoices with SSRS, no problem! Password protection can be done not only for documents generated with Docentric reporting engine but also with SSRS Reporting Services.

Now we can get back to our invoices and protect them all :).