New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2: Sync Document and Posting Dates for Sales and Purchases

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2.

The tenth of the new functionality in the Application section is sync document and posting dates for sales and purchases.

The option to synchronize or decouple document dates and posting dates on sales and purchase documents improves financial accuracy and operational flexibility.

Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Public Preview: Sep 2023
General Availability: Oct 2023

Feature Details

To help you comply with accounting standards and ensure accurate financial calculations, sales and purchase documents have date fields that serve different purposes.

• The Document Date must align with the date on the sales invoice that you sent to the customer, or with the date on the purchase invoice that you received from your vendor, so that Business Central can correctly calculate finance charges and the amount due.
• The Posting Date shows when a document was registered in Business Central. Many accounting standards and regulations require businesses to accurately record and report financial transactions based on the date they occurred.

Depending on your business processes, these dates might not be the same. To give you the flexibility you need, the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date setting on the Sales & Receivables Setup and Purchases & Payables Setup pages lets you configure your sales and purchase processes accordingly.

In previous versions, changing the posting date always updated the document date. To avoid that, you had to create an extension and subscribe to the event. Now, you can just turn off the new setting. For new environments, the toggle is off by default. If you update a posting date it won’t affect the document date.

To make sure that processes for existing customers aren’t affected, the Link Doc. Date to Posting Date toggle is turned on during upgrade. The extension will continue to work because the event is still there for more advanced scenarios.

My Opinion

I hadn’t noticed that Business Central was changing the Document Date to match the Posting Date if it was changed and now that I am aware, I am very surprised. This setting makes sense to allow you to stop this behaviour; I’ll need to speak to a client or two (or a colleague or two) and see what they make of this functionality.