There are many different ways to post the cash receipts you receive from customers in Business Central.
In this post we’ll explore three methods for posting Cash Receipts, the first two being the most common ways to post Cash Receipts, and finally a method that can be used in combination with the Bank Reconciliation to help streamline the process. When demonstrating this method, we’ll not only post the Cash Receipt, but reconcile it at the same time.
Please note, there are other methods for posting cash such as Payment Reconciliation Journals however that is outside the scope of this post.
Method 1 – Cash Receipt Journal
The first method is using the Cash Receipt Journal. I find this is the most common method, and has been a part of Business Central / Dynamics NAV for as long as I can remember.
To do this you search and then open the “Cash Receipt Journal” page.
You then select the relevant batch you wish to create and post the Cash Receipts in. (I’ve chosen a batched called “CASH”, which I’m balancing to my Bank Account)
Now I’ll enter the Cash Receipt using the following Remittance Advice that the Customer has sent:
Using the information detailed in the Remittance above, I’ll enter the Cash Receipt as per below, entering the Customers Reference, the Amount (as a negative) and ensuring the journal line is balanced to the Bank Account:
Note that entering the Amount on the journal line as I’ve done above, isn’t required at this stage. You can leave the Amount as 0.00 and when you apply the Cash Receipt the amount is updated automatically for you.
I choose to enter the Amount on the journal line because I find it serves as a control when I apply the invoices, allowing me to confirm that when the Balance is zero on the Apply screen, I know I’ve applied everything correctly.
After entering the Amount I’ll click “Apply Entries” and apply the cash to the invoices
Once finished I’ll post the Cash Receipt Journal.
There is one important note to this process. If you want to use the “Bank Reconciliation” feature of Business Central you must balance to the “Bank Account” rather than balancing directly to your Bank General Ledger code. This is because by balancing to the Bank Account the system will create “Bank Account Ledger Entries” that you can reconcile in the Bank Reconciliation.
Method 2 – Register Customer Payments
The next method is “Register Customer Payments”. I’ve seen this used by clients who are used to ticking the invoices when they are applying them. If this is the case, then this method is found to be much more intuitive.
This feature requires a little setup, therefore prior to posting the cash, you must open the “Payment Registration Setup” page and complete the setup.
Therefore I’ll for search for “Payment Registration Setup” and enter the setup as per below:
I’ll now go to the “Register Customer Payments” page and post the payment assuming the same Customer Remittance as earlier.
Note, when you open the page the system will initially list all outstanding transactions. I therefore filter to the Customer and then using the remittance tick the invoices that are being paid before selecting “Post as Lump Payment” to record the cash in Business Central.
You can click into “Amount Received” and alter the amount received if a transaction is part paid
As I mentioned previously, some users love this approach, as it seems quicker and more intuitive.
Method 3 – Post Cash Receipts as part of the Bank Reconciliation
The final method I’ll go through is posting the Cash Receipts as part of the Bank Reconciliation process.
I personally like this method as most customers will pay via bank transfer, therefore you can combine the process of reconciling the bank with posting Customer cash. (and any other cash transaction such as direct debits and standing orders or bank charges as I’ll demonstrate below) .
This method assumes you can import your bank statement into Business Central.
The first stage is to open the “Bank Account Reconciliation” page, and click “New” to create a new Bank Reconciliation, and import the bank statement
After importing the bank statement, we now have our Cash Receipt showing on the bank statement side (the left hand side) however this hasn’t yet been posted in Business Central, so there’s no corresponding “Bank Account Ledger Entry” on the right hand side.
As the cash hasn’t been posted we now have two options.
Option 1: We can exit the bank reconciliation, and use one of the methods we have mentioned previously to post the cash receipt and apply it to the Invoices.
Option 2: Alternatively we can post the Cash Receipt straight from the Bank Reconciliation page by selecting the cash receipt and choosing the “Transfer to General Journal” option.
For this example we’ll choose option 2, and post straight from the Bank Reconciliation. In fact we have two other cash transactions on the bank statement we need to post as well, so we’ll post all three entries on our bank statement.
To do this we’ll select all three entries on the Bank Statement and select “Transfer to General Journal”
After clicking “Transfer to General Journal” the system will ask which batch you wish to transfer the selected transactions into for posting. In this case I’m choosing “General” as the template, as I want to use the “General Journal” page, and “BANKREC” as my batch.
For clarity, you can click on the ellipse button next to “Gen. Journal Batch” and create a new batch. This is how I’ve configured my “BANKREC” batch
After clicking OK on the “Trans. Bank Rec. to Gen. Jnl.” page the system opens the “General Journal” page automatically and its prepopulated with the three transactions we highlighted.
Therefore all we have to do enter the relevant codes for the three transactions 😊.
I’ll therefore enter the relevant details for each line as per below:
As you can see I’m posting my cash receipt from Relecloud by selecting the first line in the journal, choosing “Customer” as the Account Type and then picking up my Customer “Relecloud”. I can even apply to the invoices by clicking “Apply Entries”
What’s amazing about this is I can also enter the GL codes for the other two bank statement entries. I simply pickup the relevant GL codes 😊. (in this example I choose “Banking Fees” for the Bank Charge and “Other Income” for the Rent)
Finally, I can click “Post” to post the journal, and when I exit the “General Journal” page it takes me back to the Bank Reconciliation with both lines reconciled.
I can now continue with my Bank Reconciliation and complete this task as well.
In my opinion this is not only an amazing way to post the Cash Receipts, but its a great way to post all bank related transactions.
Now, rather than splitting the processes of entering Cash and Direct Debits etc, and the bank reconciliation you can combine them. This can potentially save time and errors 😊.
Conclusion
This post shows three ways to enter cash receipts in Business Central. The first two are more conventional ways for posting cash, and are methods I recommend when users are first starting out with Business Central. This is because it gives users a good feel for how the Business Central is working, which is crucial when starting with a new system.
The last method shows how the process can be combined with the bank reconciliation for greater efficiency and I find users do start to use this method once they are comfortable with posting processes in Business Central.
At the month end, you might have Purchase Invoices that are unposted for a variety of reasons. For example, some invoices might be awaiting approval, while others could be in query due to price discrepancies. You could also have Purchase Orders with lines of “G/L Account” that have been received but no invoice has been received from the Vendor. If this is the case you may want to accrue for these so the expense is recorded in the correct period.
In this post, we’ll walk through how you can use the Purchase Lines page to create the foundation for a journal to post these accruals.
I’ll also show how the “Recurring General Journal” can be used as a reversing journal for the posting.
The first report we’ll tackle is the Unposted Purchase Invoice Lines 😊
Please note this post focuses on line items of type “G/L Account”. If you use “Items” you can switch on “Expected Costing” in “Inventory Setup” to have the system automatically post the accrual when you receive the Inventory.
Report for Unposted Purchase Invoice G/L Account Lines
The basis of the report will be the “Purchase Lines” page.
The Purchase Lines page lists the line items on any unposted Purchase document. Therefore its on this page you can see the unposted lines of Purchase Quotes, Purchase Orders, Purchase Invoices and Purchase Credit Memos.
I’ll therefore open the Purchase Lines page and then click to enter the “Analysis Mode“.
I tend to use “Analysis Mode” much more since the feature “Add fields in Analysis Mode” was added. I blogged about this here)
Once in analysis mode we can add our filters. To ensure I capture the Purchase Invoices I want to accrue for, I’ll use the following filters:
Document Type = Invoice
Type = G/L Account
Receipt No = Blank (this is so I don’t pickup Invoices that are matched with Purchase Orders. (I’m going to deal with Purchase Orders in another report)
You may also want to add a date filter to exclude current period Purchase Invoices. For example if we are accruing for August 2025 Purchase Invoices and we have added September 2025 invoices we’d need to add a filter to exclude September 2025 Purchase Invoices
I’ll add the filters and click the “Save” button to save this as a filtered view
With the data ready, the next step is to make sure the right columns are visible for building the journal. I’ll select Document No., Type, No., Description, and Line Amount.
If i had lots of Purchase Invoice lines to accrue, I could use the “Pivot Function” and summarise by “No.” to get a sum per GL code. (I love analysis mode 😊)
Now I have the information I need, I can “Rename” the Analysis view, and can click “Open in Excel” to take the data out into Excel.
Now its just a case of going to “Recurring General Journal” and populating the data. (I could use a preconfigured Configuration Package or copy and paste to bring some automation to this process)
I’ve populated the journal below
Report for Received Not Invoiced Purchase Order G/L Account Lines
Now we have the method for the Unposted Purchase Invoices we can do the same for Purchase Orders that have been received and not invoiced. We just need to change the filter.
To capture the Purchase Orders we need, we’ll use the following filters:
Document Type = Order
Type = G/L Account
A. Rcd. Not Inv Ex. VAT <> 0
I’ll use the “A. Rcd Not Inv Ex. VAT field as this field shows the net value of goods or services received but not yet invoiced
These are shown below:
This can now be exported to Excel and input into a “Recurring General Journal” as we did previously.
Conclusion
This post shows how you can quickly and easily create views based off the Purchase Lines page to help with month end accruals.
It also showcases how you can use “Analysis Mode” for most reporting. Since the introduction of “Add columns in Analysis Mode” I’m finding I’m using this feature more and more.
Microsoft recently added a new feature to Business Central called “Add fields from related tables in Analysis mode”. This is one of the most talked features to arrive in Business Central in a long time, and is rightly receiving rave reviews in the community.
Coming from a Dynamics GP background myself, I couldn’t help but notice its similarity to the much loved “Smartlist” feature in Dynamics GP.
In this post, I’ll compare these two features highlighting their similarities, explore their capabilities, and share real world examples of how I’ve used Business Central’s new feature to solve some reporting challenges.
Smartlist in Dynamics GP
Smartlist is a much loved tool in Dynamics GP that offers a central location where you can report and search on all aspect of your company data.
I’ve captured an image of this tool below
As you can see, the various areas of the system such as “Sales”, “Purchasing” and “Financial” are listed in the left hand pane as yellow folders, and you can select them to view the data.
Crucially you can also add additional columns to the view and search and then export the data to Excel. You can also save “favourites” so you don’t have to recreate these views again.
Additionally, you can also use a feature called “Smartlist Designer” which enables a user to create their own Smartlist, joining tables together so they can view data from more than one related table.
This is a really powerful set of tools that you can use to generate reports, right in the standard product, without the need for any additional reporting tools.
Introducing “Add fields from related tables in analysis mode” in Business Central
I must admit as much as I loved Business Central when I first made the move, I did miss the reporting capabilities that Smartlist gave me.
Although I love the various analysis views in Business Central, and how I can export data so easily from pretty much any page, I’d often find myself struggling for some crucial fields to include on the list pages, that I could easily get using a Smartlist in Dynamics GP.
However it seems some of these challenges are over with the introduction of “Add fields from related tables in analysis mode” 😊.
To use this feature you must first activate it via the “Feature Management” page.
With this feature enabled, when you access a List Page in Business Central and click the “Analyse” button you can add additional columns 😊. (just like Smartlist)
For example, I recently needed to add the “Amt. Received Not Invoice Excl VAT” to the “Purchase Lines” page so I could create a “Goods Received Not Invoiced” report.
To achieve this I went to the “Purchase Lines” page, added my filter, and then clicked the “Analyse” button
Next click “Add columns from” and then selected “Purchase Line”
Then select my column and click “OK”
The column now appears with a reference to the table it was added from:
Finally I can save it as a “Favourite” so I don’t have to keep recreating it. (just like Smartlist)
Amazing!! I’ve managed to create my report without stepping outside of Business Central. No third party tool needed!
And there’s more…
However, in this instance, we’ve only just scratched the surface.
In the example above I added a column from the table the page is based off, which you could argue I could get using other more traditional ways, such as via “Personalisation” or “Customisation” on the role.
I blog about adding extra fields via Customisation here
The real power of this functionality comes when you want to include data from other related tables. (Much like Smartlist Designer. Do you see the similarity now 😊)
For example I recently had to add the “Bank Account” and “Sort Code” to a payment journal for a user.
To do this I went into the “Analyse Mode” on the Payment Journal and clicked “Add columns from” and selected the relevant table
Next I select the relevant columns
And click OK and the columns are displayed. (I could then save it like I did in the first example)
You can even create your own links by selecting “Other source…” and linking to tables that Business Central hasn’t suggested. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for reporting.
Conclusion
This is an amazing feature that has so much potential to make life easier for users of Business Central. Lots more reporting requirements can be fulfilled without the need for third party reporting tools.
Although its a little different to Smarlist in Dynamics GP, there are many similarities that I believe will make it a highly appreciated enhancement to Business Central for many users transitioning from GP to BC, as well as for those contemplating the move.
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