The Dynamics Explorer

Introduction

You may have situation where you have an outstanding customer invoice, and an outstanding purchase invoice for the same company. (i.e. the company is both a customer and a supplier)

In this scenario you may come to an agreement that instead of you paying the outstanding purchase invoice, and them paying you the outstanding sales invoice, its more efficient to “contra” the entries off. In other words, raise a Sales Credit document to apply to the Sales Invoice they owe you, and raise a Purchase Credit document to apply to the Purchase Invoice you owe them.

With Dynamics 365 Business Central there’s a way to raise both of these entries in one single journal rather than creating separate Sales and Purchase Documents.

The Scenario

Here I have an outstanding Customer Ledger Entry for £100.00 owed to me by a customer who is also my supplier.

And here I have an outstanding Vendor Ledger Entry for (£100.00) that I owe to the same company.

We have agreed that rather than pay each other we’ll “contra” the entries off.

The “Contra” Journal

To create the contra I’m going to use the “General Journal” shown below:

In this one journal entry I’ve left the “Bal. Account No” blank (see highlighted above) as I’m balancing a Customer entry (first line) to a Vendor Entry (second line).

In the first line I’ve selected “Customer” as the “Account Type” and an “Amount” of -100.00. This will create a negative customer ledger entry I can apply to the outstanding invoice. I can apply this to the outstanding invoice from within the journal by selecting the line and clicking “Process > Apply Entries”

I can then apply in the usual way:

For the second line in the journal I’ve selected an “Account Type” of “Vendor” and entered an amount of 100.00 which balances the first line. This will create a positive “Vendor Ledger Entry”. I can also apply this line to the outstanding Invoice by selecting “Process > Apply Entries” in the same manner I applied the first entry.

Now if I click preview postings I can see exactly what is going to post:

As shown above when I post this journal I’m going to get one Customer Ledger Entry and one Vendor Ledger Entry. I also get additional Detailed Customer and Vendor Ledger entries as I applied the transactions as well.

If we drill down to the “G/L Entries” we can see a Credit to the Debtors account and a Debit to the Payables account.

Conclusion

I’ve found Journals can be a very powerful tool in Dynamics 365 Business Central enabling users to post all manner of transactions.

Thanks for reading!