Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has a very useful tool for accountants that will save you time and reduce efforts in creating repetitive and periodic journal entries. This is standard Business Central functionality in standard journals, however it’s rarely used and optimised by accountants.
Within Business Central you can navigate to the Account Categories via the Chart of Accounts page which will give you an overview of all the categories. You can setup any new category, linking that to a predefined list of major categories, eg Income or Expense.
You can also see here how the system will maintain the range of accounts for you, for example it will know all prepaid expenses are in the range 2200|2400..2440
There is also a fact box on the right hand side which will clearly show any accounts missing a category and also the accounts assigned to the highlighted category. For example below, which G/L accounts are assigned to the Advertising and Marketing sub category. Then G/L accounts 8920 and 8930 are not assigned to a category.
To assign a G/L account to a category, simply access the chart of accounts page, edit the account and assign to the account category and sub category. For example, Purchase WHT Adjustments expense.
Once the categories have been setup and all G/L accounts assigned, you can select to “Generate Financial Reports” (Previously Account Schedule in NAV).
The system will auto generate all of the financial reports rows to match the assigned groupings.
The general ledger setup reporting tab tells the system what accounts schedules will be system maintained. They all begin with “M-“ in the standard setup.
There is also the ability to assign “Additional Report Definition” which is used for Cash Flow reporting where Business Central creates a standard Cash Flow Statement report.
All of these reports can be accessed from the Role Explorer under Finance. These four reports are running the matching financial reports.
Below is a sample of the standard cash flow statement and Income Statement which was completely system generated without any need to build the financial report!
