Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. Dynamics GP
* Account formats *

Hello and welcome to this video series, “Dynamics 365 Business Central for GP Users”. We’ll explore what a GP user can expect to find if they’re moving to BC.

In this video we’ll compare GP’s account format to the account format in Business Central. My name is John Hoyt I’m the Solutions Architect of TMC. Let’s get started.

As the old saying goes “All roads lead to Rome” and it was true Rome was the center of the world and your path to success would lead you to Rome. Today the path that everyone wants to follow is to the cloud and that road leads to Business Central and the Microsoft Cloud.

Side note: Dynamics GP is not going away full stop. Check the link for more details in this video. We’ll look at how GP’s budgets, compare to Business Central. Off we go.

Now in the GP system of course when I talk about my account structure I can look at the account card. We’ll pull up one of those real quickly and I’ll pull up my first account and you can see in my sample company my account format is comprised of three segments – three characters, four characters, and two characters in this case. The second segment is my natural account or my main account number and these will tie to the major divisions or groupings inside my financial statements. Segment one and segment three are sub segments. These allow me to have greater detail in my transactions and I might use department codes for segment number one and maybe regions or territories or something like that in my segment number three. Now of course in the GP world to use those different values and have all the possible combinations, I have to create all of those combinations in advance. In the Business Central world when we build out our chart of accounts we do things a little bit differently.

First when I define the accounts themselves, I’ll define my posting accounts and they’ll hold balances and I can drill back and see the details of the journal entries that have been posted and impact those balances but you’ll notice that my account number is just a single segment law. There is no provision here for additional segments and I’ll show you how we’re going to create those additional details in just a moment but I also want to point out that with the chart of accounts in business central I’m also creating the structure of my financial statements, so account 10000 is simply a heading row and it begins my assets. Account 1001 is a begin total row and account 109.90 is my end total row any accounts added within that range defined for my n total row will automatically be included in my total assets a little bit different than we do things in GP just kind of unique to the Business Central system.

Now to get to those additional details to become more specific I want to talk about dimensions. Dimensions in the Business Central world allow us to add that additional level of detail to be more specific about how a transaction should be processed or how a transaction should be reported. An example that might be something like internal structure. I can define a dimension as I can define any of the dimensions in Business Central. In this one I’m going to look at my internal departments. I define the dimension and then I create a list of values that represent the different departments inside my organization. I can do the same thing with regions and territories.I can define customer groups. I can build internal projects and then as I’m processing transactions anywhere inside the Business Central. I may be prompted to enter in those dimension level values so I can be more specific. I’m doing an AP transaction entry for example and the invoice needs to be associated with a specific department that incurred that expense when I create my dimensions in the Business Central system.

I can also create relationships between them. I can have different project types, uh internal projects, capital projects, development projects and then project numbers within each one of those. And again as I’m coding my transaction I’ll need to specify what project type what project number. All those values that I’m creating become part of the overall database and are associated with my transactions but because dimensions are not actually part of the chart of accounts itself there’s a couple unique things that that allows me to do. One of those is the ability to add or correct dimension values to posted transactions.

I think about that for a second in the GP world if you coded an AP transaction in GP and you hit the wrong general ledger account you have two options to correct it. You can either enter an adjusting journal entry and an explanation for why you’re making the adjustment. A re-class from one department to another or I need to go back to the underlying source transaction in the GP system and void and recreate that transaction and anything associated with it so that it does impact the appropriate GL account down to the segment values in Business Central because dimensions function with but are not part of the chart we open up the ability to add or modify those dimension values on posted transactions so the process of correcting an issue within the business central system relevant uh relative rather to the dimension values themselves much simpler much smoother and then finally because I now have this additional level of detail that becomes available to me, when I’m doing any of my reporting or analytic tasks. if i just do something as basic as open up a financial statement I want to run my income statement within that I’m going to include the ability to add in filter values based upon those dimensions that we’ve created so I could run an income statement for a specific location or a region or a territory or if I’ve divided my customers into different customer groups etc. All of that is because we add in those dimension values and then layer on top of it that ability as i was saying to create relationships project type to project number dimensions can be mandatory dimensions can be optional there can be some if then logic built into them etc.

So to recap, a the segment values that I have inside the Business Central system are really represented by the dimensions. They are rigid as opposed to flexible they allow me to add in sorting and filtering capabilities. I can add in correction values after the fact and then finally I have that report and filter capability I’m adding in more data that means I’m going to have the ability to report against all of that data.

So in this video we’ve seen how the accounts and dimensions in business central compare to the account segment format used in the GP system look for the other videos in this series we’re going to do videos around smart lists around budgets and ledgers and journal entries and please hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. If you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please comment down below I’ll do my best to answer your comments if you need any immediate technical support I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com . Also don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel thanks for watching and please follow our social media accounts