Analyse your chart of accounts by dimension using financial reporting in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Financial reporting (formally known as Account Schedules) in Dynamics 365 Business Central allow us to access and report on this information within the general ledger. The following blog article builds on from an earlier post explaining the use of Dimensions.

What is Financial Reporting in Business Central?

The financial reports in Business Central are used to get insight into the financial data stored in the chart of accounts. You use account schedules to analyse figures in general ledger accounts or to compare general ledger entries with general ledger budget entries by Dimensions. 

Being a Microsoft product, the account schedules can be exported directly into Excel, it is also possible to export them directly into PDF to attach to an email as a report pack. 

The Account Schedule Layout

The account schedule is split into two sections, the first is the Row Layout, and the second is the Column Layout.

The row layout contains accounts from the General Ledger (GL) Chart of Accounts. These rows can be for a single GL Account or a range of GL accounts depending on your requirements. The rows can show the net change, balance at date or a beginning balance. Rows can also use Formulas so you can include user defined calculations like Sales lest cost of sales = profit or a simple sum of the rows.

You can also use Dimension filtering on the Account Schedule rows to examine GL accounts or groups of accounts by your Dimension Values. For example, you can show your total revenue across your ”Program Code” Dimensions, as in the example below. Each line represents the same GL accounts filtered by ranges of the Dimension Values.

It is also possible to create headings and structure the report into sections in the same way you would in Excel.

See example of Row Layout below

The Column Layouts determine how the numbers will be displayed there are many ways they can be used but some examples might be: 

• Calendar vs financial days, weeks, months, years
• Multiple periods showing monthly columns
• Budget figure for a period
• Actuals for a period
• A calculated column of the variance between budget and actual
• Columns showing the period to date previous year / month and variance to current
• Compare Actuals and budget against different budgets (i.e., Budget, Forecast & Reforecast)

See an example of Column Layout below: 

So there you have it, account schedules allow for the financial users to create their own financial reports & statements and use the dimensions in the system to allow for a high level of detailed reporting.

The rows and columns that are created by the user when they create new reports can be re-used meaning making new reports or adapting current reports becomes easy.