General Journal

Dynamics 365 Business Central- How to Reverse a Journal on a different date using the Posted General Journal Page

Gavin WhittakerLeave a comment

Introduction

When you reverse a journal entry using the standard “Reverse” feature there’s no option to change the posting date. By default the journal will automatically reverse on the same date as the original journal postings. This isn’t ideal if you have closed the period and want the reversal to post into a different period.

In this post I’ll show how you can reverse a journal and change the date using the “Posted General Journal” feature. I’m a big fan of this feature as it not only gives the ability to reverse a journal with a different date but you can also reverse multiple journals.

The Issue

As discussed, when reversing a journal using the standard functionality there’s no way to change the “Posting Date”. The field highlighted below isn’t editable.

If the financial period is closed, posting the reversal into a different period becomes necessary, which prevents the ability to use the standard feature.

Configuring Posted General Journal Functionality

Before we can use the Posted General Journal functionality we first have to ensure its enabled on the various General Journal Templates.

Therefore search “General Journal Templates” and tick the option “Copy to Posted Jnl” as per below:

When the option has been selected on the General Journal Template, it can then be toggled off and on at a Journal Batch level as well:

With this option enabled any journal that’s subsequently posted creates “Posted Gen. Journal Lines” in addition to the usual General Ledger Entries.

For example I clicked “Find Entries” on a General Ledger Entry and I can see additional “Posted Gen. Journal Lines”

I find this really useful as if you drill down on the “Posted Gen. Journal Line” it opens the Posted General Journal page which provides a snapshot of the journal that was posted.

This is very similar to how a snapshot of a Sales Invoice is taken and saved as a “Posted Sales Invoice” which you can refer back to.

Reversing a Journal using the Posted General Journal Page

Now we have the option switched on we can walk through how to reverse a journal.

First open the “Posted General Journal” page. You can either search this directly or drill down from the “Find Entries” page.

Once in the “Posted General Journal” page locate the entry you wish to reverse. In my example I’m going to reverse document number G00033.

I therefore filter on this document number and select both lines and choose “Copy Selected Lines to General Journal” as per below:

** Please note you can also select “Copy G/L Register to General Journal Lines” **

Next I’ll choose to replace posting date with an April date and also to reverse the sign:

Now when I open the ACCRUALS batch its the reversing journal is ready to post.

You can also use this functionality to reverse more than one journal at once and I’ve also used it to find out the G/L Register number of a journal postings 🙂

Conclusion

As you can probably tell I’m a big fan of this functionality. I think this is because of my background using Dynamics GP which creates similar snapshots of posted journals.

Thanks for reading!

Dynamics 365 Business Central – A closer look at Journals and Documents

Gavin Whittaker2 Comments

Introduction

Ever wondered why you have options to post to Vendors in a Sales Journal and Customers in a Purchase Journal? What do Documents and Journals have in common? How are Ledger entries and GL register created?

In this post I’ll explain more about Financial Journals and Documents and hopefully unlock some of their secrets along the way.

**Please note there are other journals such as Item Journals for inventory management which I wont cover in this post)

Journals

Journals are scattered throughout Dynamics 365 Business Central and can be used to record a whole manner of transactions. The most commonly used financial journals would be General Journals, Sales Journals, Purchase Journals, Cash Receipt Journals and Payment Journals.

Interestingly, under the hood all the journals are pretty much the same. All the journal pages are based on the Gen. Journal Line (81) table and all journals use the same Gen. Journal posting routine (codeunit) to create the relevant Ledger Entries and G/L Register.

As you can see from the image below although the General Journal and Sales Journal use different pages they are based on the same table.

The difference between the journals only really exists on their Pages and the actions and options available on those Pages.

For example the Payment Journal page has an action to run the “Suggested Payment Routine”, which is relevant to paying suppliers, and the other journals also have different actions. However, as they are all technically the same, nothing stops me creating a Payables Payment transaction in a Sales Journal and getting the correct Ledger Entries.

For instance, as you can see below although I’m in a Sales Journal I can still choose an Account Type of “Vendor”.

When you post the journal the relevant Ledger Entries and G/L Register are created and the journal lines are removed. (some exceptions exist like for recurring journals).

Therefore, taking all this into consideration, we could technically just use the “General Journal” page to record all of our financial transactions in Business Central, whether they be Sales or Purchase entries. We can also use one journal to record a whole host of different types of transaction. (as I show in this post)

Documents – Overview

When we refer to documents in Dynamics 365 Business Central we are referring to things like Sales Invoices and Purchase Invoices. (there are of course others such as Sales Orders, Sales Shipments, Purchase Orders, and Purchase Receipts)

They will have a Header and Lines, with the Header typically containing information on the Customer or Supplier and various dates, and the lines containing information or what you are selling or buying, for example items or GL codes.

When you post an Invoice, postings routines are ran to create the Ledger Entries and G/L Registers and new Posted Documents are created and the unposted document is removed. (you can archive Sales Orders using the archiving options in Setup)

For example if I were to Post a Sales Order via the “Ship and Invoice” option a Posted Sales Shipment and Posted Sales Invoice would be created along with financial Ledger Entries such as General Ledger and Customer Ledger Entries.

Documents – Posting

So what do Documents and Journals have in common? What makes them technically the same when it comes to the creation of the Ledger Entries and GL Registers?

As mentioned above when you post a Document the system runs posting routines to create the relevant ledger entries and it turns out these are the exact same posting routines that run when you are posting a journal (whether that be a General Journal, Payment Journal etc).

The posting routine responsible for this is “Codeunit 12, Gen. Jnl.-Post Line”. This is responsible for creating all the Financial Ledger Entries and G/L Register regardless of whether you are posting a journal or a document.

Therefore when you post a document its converted into journal lines, the lines then validated, and finally its posted in the same way as a journal.

Conclusion

The Gen. Journal Line table and Gen. Jnl.-Post Line codeunit do feel like the heart of Dynamics 365 Business Central. (certainly the financial heart)

I hope this article helped explain some of the concepts around journals that I found confusing when I started out with Business Central.

Thanks for reading!

Dynamics 365 Business Central – How to post a contra to a Customer and Vendor using one General Journal

Gavin Whittaker1 Comment

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!