User access to Finance & Operations data via Power Apps

[fredrik_farm]

Hi, I am working on a business project in which the goal is to develop a Power App in Microsoft Power Platform to simplify a tedious business process. Among other things, the app-users need various access to data that is stored in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations.

We are still in the scoping-phase of the project, and I am currently trying to gain a better understanding of how to design an efficient integration with D365 Fin&Ops. I have tried to read up on information about the subject, but I am a bit confused on how to handle this properly. I therefore want to turn to the community for help, and any tips and reflections will be much obligued.

So far, I have read about several potential ways of integrating with Fin&Ops, i.e. Dual-Write, Virtual Tables/Virtual Entities, Fin&Ops connector in Power Apps. As alternatives to direct integrations between Power Apps and Fin&Ops, we are considering a solution in which Fin&Ops data is regurlarly exported/imported to/from a BYOD or a Custom Dataverse Table. Our main concern at the moment is that we do not fully understand how user-licenses and data access can/should be handled when it comes to the direct integrations between Power Apps and Fin&Ops.

Say we want to use virtual entities via Dataverse to access Fin&Ops data, which seems to be a viable and well integrated option. Do all users of the Power App then need individual user-licenses in Fin&Ops simply to read data stored in the virtual entity tables? I have read about "anonymous access from Power Apps Portals", which seems to describe a scenario in which anonymous users (which I read as random users, i.e. could be anyone on the internet), can gain CRUD rights in Fin&Ops through designation of a user who is used for anonymous access. Do I understand this correcly if this means that "anonymous users" can "proxy" a user with specific rights within Fin&Ops, and thus a Power App (not portal or power app pages) can be developed using virtual entities and anonymous access to allow for users without user licenses in Fin&Ops to perform CRUD operations via the app?

Short description of the project and what we want to achieve.

- We are using Dataverse as a main database for our project and environment.

- The app will be used by company employees only, and there is no need for external exposure.

- The app will be used by ~50-60 people (of which approximately only 10 currently have a Fin&Ops user license)

- The users who have Fin&Ops licenses are working within Fin&Ops on a daily basis, but the remaining users (those who currently do no have Fin&Ops licenses) will only need to access Fin&Ops data via the new Power App that is under development once or twice a year.
- All users of the app need "read-access" to data stored in certain tables in Fin&Ops, which will be used as selection-alternatives in application processes.
- Users who currently have Fin&Ops licenses should be able to perform full CRUD operations via the App (this can be implemented in stage 2 of the development process, but the design should account for this requirement from the start).

Ultimately, we want an efficient integration between Power App and Fin&Ops which does not require us to obtain/purchase 50 new Fin&Ops licenses simply to handle application processes that most individuals will perform once or twice a year. In other words, we want to find a solution which makes it easy for non-fin&ops users to access specific fin&ops data needed for the application process. How can we best achieve this? 

Hope someone in the community can help me/us with some information that can help us design our solution.

Regards,
Fredrik

[prakashp]

We are also working on a similar solution but there is no clear answer.