Troubleshooting G/L Budget Issues in Business Central

Are your budget figures not up to date or showing zeroes? This article explores the potential causes of these issue and provides a solution to resolve them.

You may have discovered there are several dimensions that are not readily available & accessed through Business Central Financial Reports. Analysis Views can be created and are designed to provide easy access to all dimensions, similar to global dimensions. You can create Analysis Views with up to four dimensions at a time.

The Analysis View creates analysis view entries and the financial reports are then generated from these entries. These are based on G/L entries, budget entries and the dimensions that are assigned to the Analysis View. Once you create an Analysis View, there is an update process that is needed to create new analysis view entries.

When using G/L Budgets with Analysis Views for reporting in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, or any reporting tool that utilises analysis view entries, such as Jet Reports, you might encounter issues where the budget figures are not up to date or even show no values at all. If this is the case, you may be using Analysis Views. 

Consider this scenario:

1. The new G/L Budget data have been loaded into Business Central using the Import from Excel function.
2. In the Analysis View Card setup, the Update on Posting and Include Budgets fields are enabled which means the G/L actuals and budget entries will be captured by the Analysis View.
3. The Update function in the Analysis View has been run to pick up the new budget entries that have been loaded in the first step.
4. You then run your reports in Business Central or in Jet Reports, and decide to change your budget amounts. You revise the budget data in Excel and reload it in Business Central using the Import from Excel.
5. Finally, you review the reports again to check the revised amounts, however, this time you find that the Budget amounts have all reset to zero and the budgets loaded in the first step are all gone!

Let us inspect how the issue has occurred:

1. Check the Analysis View Card setup, from here you will notice that the Last Budget Entry No. has reset to 0 which means that the Analysis View has not captured any budget entries causing the budget amounts to show as zero in the reports.
2. The issue occurs when the G/L Budget is loaded using the Import from Excel function, causing the Analysis View Budget Entry to be deleted.
3. The issue can be fixed by running the Update function again in the Analysis View Card. When the update has been completed, you will notice that the Last Budget Entry No. will be updated with the latest Analysis View Budget Entry No.

Apart from manually running the Analysis View Update, a Job Queue Entry can also be setup to run Report 84 (Update Analysis Views) nightly as per the screenshot below.  This will ensure that the Analysis View gets updated daily if, for example, the user has missed manually running the Update.

In Summary, when the G/L Budget is loaded using the Import from Excel function, all the budget entries in the Analysis View are deleted. This requires the Analysis View to be rebuilt by manually running the Analysis View Update function for a second time.  Therefore, it is recommended that this process becomes part of the workflow in Business Central to manually run the Update after the G/L Budget is imported from Excel.