The Dynamics Explorer

Introduction

As I learn and familiarise myself with Dynamics 365 Business Central I often post something in Dynamics GP and then wonder how this same task could be achieved in Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Today’s pondering was looking for the equivalent to the “Payables Transaction Entry” window that we have in Dynamics GP.

I know you can post to G/L accounts via the “Purchase Invoice” page in Dynamics 365 Business Central but to me this is primarily a “Purchase Order Processing” type window. I wanted to post a sundry payables invoice, onto a vendor, to multiple GL codes, without the need to touch the “Purchase Invoice” window.

As usual there is more than one way to do this however I focus on the “Purchase Journal” page. I also elude to why I think you can achieve the same using other “journal” pages, although you might not necessarily want to use those anyway 🙂

Dynamics GP – Payables Transaction Entry

In Dynamics GP you can post a sundry payables invoice in a very straight forward and easy to understand window called “Payables Transaction Entry”.

This window has no link to Purchase Order Processing. We tend to advise users to use this window for posting invoices for sundry items and things you wouldn’t necessarily have a Purchase Order for. You can click “Distributions” and record multiple GL codes for this one invoice. Its also handy to import transactions into very quickly and users seem to prefer this window for speed of entry.

Dynamics 365 Business Central – Purchase Journal

There are various “journal” pages in Dynamics 365 Business Central so I turned to the “Purchase Journal” page to achieve my goal.

The first thing I found I had to select was the option “Show more columns” as per below.

Crucially this adds the “Account Type” option which gives the user the ability to add “G/L Account” when keying in the Payables document:

Now I had the “Account Type” field available for entry I found as long as you keep the Document Number, External Document No and Posting Date the same you are able to add a payables document with multiple lines.

First you add the “Account Type” of “Vendor” and key in the first line with the total amount of the document. On the subsequent lines you can choose “G/L Account” as the account type and enter the G/L distribution breakdown. Also, if you wish to analyse tax to any of the distributions you must populate the “Gen. Posting Type” with “Purchases” and then populate the “VAT Prod. Posting Group”.

In the end you should have something like this and the document will post successfully

Other takeaways

As with any investigation you usually find some interesting things along the way.

The major takeaway I found is that you can post the same purchase invoice using the “General Journal” page. After looking more closely it seems this is possible as both pages are based on the “Gen. Journal Line” table. Therefore all the fields (and business logic) you need are available on the “General Journal” page as well.

See below. The “Purchase Journal” and “General Journal” pages are based on the same table:

However, as a word of caution, if you were to post the same purchase invoice from the “General Journal” page the transaction is given a “Source Document” of “GENJNL” in the “G/L Register” rather than “PURCHJNL”.

See below. The top G/L Register was posted using the “General Journal” page and the other using the “Purchase Journal” page.

Therefore I’d suspect its best to use the specific “Purchase Journal” for these postings.

Thanks for reading!