You may ask, “What is the difference between a Recurring Journal and Standard Journal in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?”
The following table will give you an idea of difference between these two journals.
Feature | Recurring Journal | Standard Journal |
Reversing Setup | Yes | No |
Allocate the balance of an entire G/L Account against another G/L Account based on fixed rate or distribution percentage | Yes | No |
Same Journal Batch Posting | No | Yes |
Future Date Posting | No | Yes |
Periodic Activity | Yes | No |
What are Recurring Journals?
Recurring Journals are useful for transactions that are posted frequently with few or no changes to G/L, customer, vendor, bank and fixed asset.
In a recurring journal, users enter only the variable data, such as posting date, amounts, and accounts to be used for posting. After posting a recurring journal, new journal lines are created containing the posting date for the next recurring period. The posting date recurrence is defined in the Recurring Frequency field.
What are Standard Journals?
Standard Journals give users the advantage of storing transactions details and reusing it multiple times at later dates.
For example, monthly utilities payments. Users will manually enter the details for the first payment of the current month and save the journals lines entries for later use as shown below.

On the following month, part of the data will remain the same such as G/L Account, bank, and dimension code (i.e. Department, Project). If the user has saved the initial monthly payment as a standard journal, they can then reuse it to create the draft of the next monthly payment.
When a user invokes the Get Standard Journal function, a list of codes appears, so they can decide which standard journal to restore and copy to the Journal Line. Once the draft lines are created, they can be updated with the current month’s information as shown.

The standard journal function is available in General Journal and Item Journal.
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Katrine Ng is a Senior Solution Specialist at EBS and has a successful track record in project managing, implementing and delivering high-quality solutions. She likes to help customers translate their needs into business and user requirements. She has worked with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV in Australia and Malaysia since 2003.