Why REFRACT Platform for Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a powerful transactional platform for finance, supply chain, sales, and customer service operations. But transactions alone don't solve the compliance and audit challenges that regulated enterprises face: generating complex, data-heavy documents at scale; governing approval workflows with tamper-evident evidence; signing contracts with an auditable signature record; and maintaining append-only, tamper-evident audit trails that satisfy external auditors.

REFRACT Platform transforms Dynamics 365 from a transactions system into a governance platform. Every document, workflow, signature, and delivery event generates append-only, tamper-evident evidence that can be searched, verified, and produced on demand. Rendering, storage, and audit run in your Azure environment; REFRACT Delivery, REFRACT Workflow, and REFRACT eSign use a REFRACT-hosted portal to reach recipients and signers. This is the foundation for modern compliance: documents as auditable business records, not static artifacts.

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1. REFRACT PDF: Enterprise Document Generation

Dynamics Finance and Supply Chain produce complex, high-volume documents: multi-page customer statements with aging buckets and running balances, remittance advice with hundreds of payment lines, purchase orders with hierarchical line items and cost allocations, and vendor bills with GL coding and dual approval zones.

REFRACT PDF uses a schema-driven rendering pipeline. Templates are JSON definitions; rendering follows the template and payload with no manual steps. Aging bucket layouts with running balances, multi-page batches with repeating headers, configurable signature zones, and structured tables with row-level formatting are first-class rendering primitives in REFRACT PDF.

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2. Delivery: Batch Document Distribution at Scale

Generating the document solves half the problem. Dynamics Finance customers who run monthly statement cycles, weekly remittance runs, or daily invoice batches need a way to get hundreds or thousands of documents to the right recipients reliably, with a delivery record for each one.

Standard email-from-a-flow approaches do not scale to this. There is no per-document audit trail, no portal access for recipients who did not receive the email, no token-gated download link, and no way to know whether a specific customer actually opened their statement.

REFRACT Delivery handles batch distribution from a single API call. Each document in the batch is associated with a recipient, a correlation ID, and a delivery record. Recipients receive a branded notification and access their document through a secure, time-limited portal link. Every delivery event is logged to an append-only, tamper-evident audit archive.

Batch delivery covers the core Dynamics Finance document types:

• Customer statements (AR)
• Invoices and credit notes
• Remittance advice (AP payment runs)
• Purchase orders dispatched to vendors
• Goods receipt confirmations

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3. Workflows: Governance and Data Collection

Two workflow patterns dominate in Dynamics Finance and Supply Chain.

Governance workflows validate structured data against a rule set and route to an approver. The AP 3-way match is the canonical example: purchase order, goods receipt, and invoice are compared against tolerance rules before the payment is approved. REFRACT Workflow runs that validation automatically on the data payload and routes to Finance Director or AP Manager based on invoice total. The result is a sealed PDF with a Governance Validation page showing every rule, its result, and the approver's decision. The full audit trail is written to an append-only, hash-chained archive.

Data-collection workflows gather structured information from an external participant across multiple steps. Vendor onboarding is the canonical example: the new vendor fills in contact details, compliance declarations, and file attachments through a hosted portal, then the submission routes to Procurement for approval and seals into a governed onboarding record.

Both workflow types produce an Electronic Evidence Appendix in the sealed PDF, recording the Workflow ID, Correlation ID, approver hash, and seal timestamp.

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4. eSign: Controlled Electronic Signing

The final layer covers documents that require a signature before they can be acted on: vendor contracts, NDAs, master service agreements, and approval documents that must be countersigned before processing.

REFRACT eSign provides a signing workflow built on the same governance architecture as REFRACT Workflow. Signatories receive a notification and complete signing through the centrally hosted REFRACT Platform portal. Sequential and parallel signing orders are supported. The final signed PDF includes an evidence certificate recording each signer's identity hash, signing timestamp, and IP address. The document is sealed and written to the append-only, hash-chained audit archive.

For Dynamics CRM customers, REFRACT eSign maps directly to the contract and agreement lifecycle in Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service.

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5. REFRACT Lifecycle: Cross-Document Visibility and Audit

Every document, workflow, delivery, and eSign session produced on the REFRACT Platform participates in REFRACT Lifecycle automatically. No additional configuration is required.

Lifecycle Search provides a single search surface across all REFRACT Platform activity for a tenant. Operators can search by Correlation ID, Document ID, email, signer, Batch ID, Workflow ID, or customer reference. Results are filtered by status (Pending Approval, In Progress, Completed, Failed/Rejected) and type (Document, Workflow, Delivery, eSignature), with date range filters and saveable search presets.

Every record in search results opens a document lifecycle workspace containing:

• Audit Timeline. A chronological, tamper-evident event log for the document. Every system event (Document Generated, Integrity Validated, Accessibility Checked, Delivery Sent, Signature Captured, Workflow Sealed) is recorded with the event timestamp, performing system, and expandable detail.
• Integrity status. A SHA-256 document hash is computed at generation time and displayed as Verified against the stored hash. The hash covers the complete document output.
• Download Evidence Bundle. A single download that packages the document, its audit timeline, and all associated evidence artifacts for external audit or legal hold.
• Signatures, Deliveries, and Related Files. Tabs showing the full signing history, delivery events, and all files associated with the document lifecycle.
• Actions. Recreate PDF, Verify Integrity, Download Certificate, Send for Signature, and OTC Signature are available directly from the workspace without leaving the lifecycle view.

For Dynamics Finance customers, this means every invoice, statement, remittance, and AP document has a permanent, searchable lifecycle record. Support and audit teams can locate any document by Correlation ID (the Dynamics record reference) without needing direct database access.

Lifecycle Workspace: Jump Directly From Dynamics to Evidence

REFRACT Lifecycle surfaces audit history directly in context, without manual searching.

Any source system - including Dynamics 365 Finance, Business Central, and Dynamics 365 Sales - can launch REFRACT Lifecycle directly using a Correlation ID, Batch ID, Workflow ID, or Document ID. The Lifecycle Workspace automatically loads the relevant records and presents the complete document history in context.

For Dynamics 365 users, this means an invoice, statement, contract, workflow, or signing request can open directly into its lifecycle record without additional integration logic.

No custom audit APIs. No manual searching. No system switching.

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6. Accessibility: Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA Tagging and Validation

When accessibility is enabled, every document rendered by REFRACT PDF undergoes automated PDF/UA validation immediately after generation. The validation is performed by the Accessibility Service and recorded as an Accessibility Checked event in the document's Audit Timeline. No manual step or post-processing is required.

REFRACT tags each rendered PDF for Section 508 / WCAG 2.1 AA and PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) structural requirements, then checks the output against the engine's own validator; Refract Logic does not certify conformance. This covers proper heading structure, tag tree, reading order, alt text for images, and table accessibility markup in the PDF output.

For Dynamics customers serving US federal agencies, state and local government bodies, or healthcare organizations subject to accessibility mandates, this addresses accessibility compliance requirements for document output.

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7. Evidence: Audit Artifacts

REFRACT Platform produces a structured evidence record for every document lifecycle, not just workflows and eSign sessions.

At generation time:

• A SHA-256 hash is computed over the complete rendered PDF and stored in the append-only, tamper-evident audit archive.
• An Integrity Validated event is written with the hash value and timestamp.
• An Accessibility Checked event is written recording the PDF/UA validation result.

At any point after generation, the document's integrity can be re-verified against the stored hash. A failing verification indicates the file has been modified since generation.

The Download Evidence Bundle action in the lifecycle workspace packages the document, the full audit timeline, the document hash, and any associated workflow or signing evidence into a single downloadable artifact. This bundle is suitable for external audit submissions, legal hold responses, and regulatory inspection.

For Dynamics Finance customers under audit, this means every AP document, signed contract, and governed workflow has a downloadable evidence package that can be produced on demand without involving engineering.

The REFRACT Platform Capability Stack

All platform capabilities are active for every tenant. Most Dynamics Finance customers start with rendering and delivery, then expand into workflows, eSign, and lifecycle audit as the platform proves out.

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Business Impact for Dynamics Organizations

Accelerated Compliance and Audit Readiness
Audit investigations that require manual document reconstruction - locating invoices, retrieving approval chains, reconstructing delivery logs - are replaced by REFRACT Lifecycle's searchable audit timeline and downloadable evidence bundles, turning compliance from a reactive burden into a demonstrable, automated capability.

Operational Efficiency
Template versioning, batch delivery, and automatic workflow validation eliminate manual document management overhead. Finance teams spend less time on document hygiene and more time on strategic analysis. Support teams resolve customer delivery issues instantly through the audit workspace rather than submitting database queries.

Audit and Regulatory Confidence
Regulators and external auditors see a cohesive, compliant platform. Document integrity is verifiable, workflows are sealed with evidence, and every decision is recorded in an append-only, tamper-evident timeline. This eliminates a class of audit risk that disconnected point solutions or manual processes cannot address.

Reduced Compliance Risk
Append-only, tamper-evident audit trails and integrity verification protect against accusations of document tampering. Every AP invoice, signed contract, and approval workflow has a SHA-256 integrity hash and audit trail recording its lifecycle.

Data Sovereignty and Regulatory Control
Documents are generated and stored in your Azure subscription. Every document download, for REFRACT eSign, Delivery, and Workflow alike, redirects the browser to your own Dispatcher or SharePoint site, which serves the bytes directly; the REFRACT-hosted portal never receives them. This enables compliance with data residency mandates (e.g., sovereign data requirements, GDPR, HIPAA).

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Dynamics 365 Sales Integration

REFRACT Platform integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, adding document generation, SharePoint storage, e-signature routing, and workflow enforcement directly from CRM records - with no Power Automate flows required.

If you are deploying REFRACT Platform on Dynamics 365 Sales (rather than Finance or Business Central), see the dedicated guide:

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Dynamics 365 Business Central Integration

REFRACT Platform integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, enabling on-demand PDF generation, SharePoint storage, e-signature routing, and audit trails directly from your Business Central documents.

If you are deploying REFRACT Platform on Business Central (rather than Finance, Supply Chain, or Sales), see the dedicated implementation guide:

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Power Platform Integration

REFRACT Platform integrates with Microsoft Power Platform (Power Automate and Power Apps) through the REFRACT Platform Connector. Connect cloud flows to your customer-hosted Dispatcher to generate PDFs, send documents for signature, trigger approval workflows, and track document status - all without custom code.

See the dedicated connector documentation:

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