Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. Dynamics GP
* Budgets *

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 budgets to the budget process 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 work with budgets I’m in my finance, I’m in my cards and I’m working with the budgets and here I’m going to have the option to pick which budget I want to work with. I can then go through and do the budgeting account by account or I can export out to Excel, create my budget in excel and then import that budget back into the GP system and in Business Central we’re going to do something very similar but we’re going to add in a couple of additional values for you.

Let’s switch over to Business Central and we’ll take a look at that. I want to go into my Finance module first and I want to talk just about the basic GL budgets and just like in the GP system with Business Central I can create as many budgets as I would like. I get to define the start date and the end date of my budgets and those budgets can correspond to a calendar year or to my company’s fiscal year or maybe I want to do an odd length calendar a six-month calendar because we’re converting from calendar year to fiscal year or an 18-month rolling planning budget anything of that nature you’re going to get to define the start and end date for all of your budgets. This also offers up the opportunity just like in the GP system to have multiple budgets covering the same periods of time. A best case scenario a worst case scenario maybe a budget that was based on last year’s actuals with a growth factor and that same functionality is going to be available here inside the Business Central system where we start to add in some additional value howeveris when it comes to how I view or how I present that budget so I can start to work with it in the most straightforward and most comparable way of looking at a budget compared to GP is to show my budget as GL accounts running along my lines and my periods running across as my columns. This is exactly the same way that we would do budgeting in GP or if I was using the Excel function in GP.

I have rows of accounts, I have columns of periods in the Business Central world. However what I’m really working with is a budget matrix and that allows me to shift my view around. For example if I want my lines to show the period and I want the columns to be displayed as the accounts I can do that um not exactly sure why I would but if that

was my preference I can show it that way so here’s account 4001 for all the different periods. If i keep scrolling up and down I’ll see my other accounts but I also have the ability to add in more discrete values.

If you haven’t seen our video yet about dimensions I encourage you to check that out it’s in the account format video but within Business Central I have the ability to be more specific around my chart and maybe what I want to do is I want to have my account number shown as the lines and I’m going to show the columns as my internal organizational structure by department values or by regions or by territories or by projects or cost categories or any ofthe different dimension values that I have set up because the BC budget is not just two-dimensional the way that the GP budget is. With just accounts and periods I’ve got a multi-dimensional budget here inside the Business Central system I also have the option inside the Business Central system of creating sub-ledger budgets by that I mean a payables budget or purchase budget or a sales budget I can look into the future and break down my anticipated revenue at a level of detail greater than just the account numbers.

I can look into my customers or my customer groups and start to become much more specific about where that revenue is going to come from. All of the information here in my sales budget would then roll up to one account line in my GL budget. This is the source of detail for that summarized view inside my GL budget i can do the same thing with my anticipated spend by going through a purchase budget and pulling up my different vendors and anticipating what I’m going to spend with those vendors over specific periods of time, sub ledger budgeting of course not really an option for us in the GP world.

Now the one thing I haven’t talked about and we should if I wanted to do my editing work or if i have a team of managers that are going to collaborate on the creation of my budget I want the ability to work with this in Excel so i can pull the budget up and I can say I want to now export this budget out to Excel. It will take the formatting that I’ve created and create a two-dimensional Excel spreadsheet of that budget. I can then export that to or send that to my department heads and managers, collect their feedback on the overall budgeting process and when that’s been completed I’ll simply import that back from Excel so your choice. I can edit this in excel or I can edit inside Business Central. I can use excel as the collaboration tool that would allow me to include or have the participation of department heads managers etc.

So in summary we’re going to offer the ability to have those sub-ledger budgets whether it’s on the revenue side or on the expense side. The budgets themselves can be viewed as a straightforward account in period view but I can be more specific and I can leverage the dimensions and start to become more granular in my budgeting process and finally I have that ability to either edit in excel or open in excel and work with that budget using my preferred tool making changes in mass and then save that and import those changes back into the Business Central system.

So as we’ve seen in this video the budgets in BC compare very well to the GP budgeting process but add on those additional values sub ledger budgeting multi-dimensional budgeting and of course we maintain that ability to work within Excel.

I hope you look for the other videos in this series. We’re going to talk about smart lists, account formats ledgers and journals.

Please hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That wraps up this video if you have any questions 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 and if you need any immediate technical support I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com. Thanks for watching!