Author: Ian Grieve

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Financial), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

in the last article in this series, I took a look at creating the fiscal year using the Create Year process, which works very well if your accounting periods are evenly split into calendar months, but not so good if you use a different structure, such as a 5-4-4 cycle for thirteen week quarters.

In this case, you will need to create the accounting periods manually (or potentially use the create year process and edit the dates afterwards).

To create a calendar manually, open the Accounting Periods (100) page; enter the Starting Date, the Name will default to the month name, but can be overtyped, and, for the first period of the year, mark the New Fiscal Year checkbox:

Repeat entering each required period; you only need to set the starting date of the period as the ending date is automatically calculated by the system when required. I’d recommend following the period creation of the bulk job by also entering the first period of the subsequent year.

In future, to create new fiscal years, you can follow the same process as outlines above. I generally recommend that clients have the current and next financial years created, which ensures there are no problems when the next year starts and that deferrals can be entered spreading across the financial years.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Financial), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Fiscal years and their accounting periods are created via the Accounting Periods (100) list page. When you open the page, you will see all of the existing accounting periods, the New Fiscal Year checkbox is marked on the first period of each year (this is useful when creating reports in Jet Reports as you can select from the Accounting Period (50) table to get the first date of the financial year).

The easiest way, as long as your calendar is evenly divided (such as into 12 periods/months) is to use the Create Year process by clicking the Home » Create Year… action:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Financial), how do I… Create a New Fiscal Year”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Financial), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Business Central is a very flexible system, and allows you to create fiscal years and the accounting periods to meet your business requirements.

Whether your financial year starts on 1^st January, the first Monday of April, or any other date in the year, Business Central allows you to define the fiscal year. You can also choose how long the year is (usually 365 day, but in case a year needs to be longer or shorter, Business Central support this) and you can also specify how long the periods are.

For the majority of the clients I have worked with, their accounting periods are a calendar month in length, but a significant minority have configured periods using a 5-4-4 grouping of weeks, which splits the year into four quarters of 13 weeks. Both of these are possible to configure, although a calendar month is easier and quicker to configure.

As well as being used to control posting in Business Central, accounting periods can also be used as an option in reporting.

As an aside, from a technical point of view, Business Central does not require accounting periods to be used; they are only necessary if you need to close the income statement or run data compression tasks. I don’t know a single client using Business Central who does not require accounting periods, and I’m not sure what the use case for this is.

Over the next few articles in this series, I will step through creating fiscal calendars, closing periods and years.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Depending on the device on which you’re working there are choices for how you can access Business Central.

The main way users access Business Central is via the website where you can sign in. The website is fully responsive and will size itself according to the size of device that you are using.

The website is currently the one client which guarantees all functionality is available:

If you’re on a Windows PC, laptop/notebook or tablet, then you can also find the Business Central app in the Microsoft Store:

There is an app in the Google Play store:

There is an app in the Apple App Store:

As said at the start of this article, only the website is guaranteed to have access to all functionality; the apps are sometimes a little more limited, but will have the bulk of the functionality available to them, and Microsoft are constantly making improvements to the apps.

As a consultant, I find that only the website allows me to access all of the systems I need, as I connect to multiple client tenants and most of the apps limit you to your own organisations tenants/environments, but for end users this will usually be sufficient.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In the previous article in this series, I explained that relationships between number series could be defined, and in this article I will show how this is done.

If we take an example of projects, then we might want to have one number series for UK-based projects and one for EU-based ones.

In the No. Series (456) page, create an additional number series for JOB-EU:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… Create Relationships Between Number Series”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

One feature of Number Series I forgot to mention when introducing them the other week, is the ability to create relationships between different number series.

The reason for this is to allow for different numbering ranges for the same type of record. For example, if we were working with job, we might want to use different number series depending on the type of job, or for vendors we might be paying employee expenses through the purchase ledger and want to give them different numbers to the vendors.

There is no limit to the amount of number series which can be linked with relationships, but, as always, the recommended approach would be to keep it simple, in order to avoid problems in future.

When a relationship has been defined, you can click the ellipsis button next to the record number and select from the list of related number series for the one which should be used for the record.

In the next article of this series, I will explain how to define the relationship between number series.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Administration), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

When Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 was announced, one of the included features was Set Up And Sync Master Data Across Companies I said it sounded interesting, but I needed to get hands on with it.

Well, I’ve recently had the opportunity to do this on a client project.

It is reasonably easy to configure and the data flow from parent to child companies is quite quick, although I’m not sure I would say it is immediate which was the Microsoft claim.

I was also surprised to discover that, despite the name, it allows you to not only synchronise master data, but also setup data, which means that as well as allowing item, vendor or customers to be synced, you can also sync the Inventory, Purchasing and Payables and Sales and Receivables Setup as well.

Fortunately, it is very flexible, allowing you to not only select the tables to sync, but also which fields within the table should be synced and also apply filters to limit the data which is to be synced. So, for example, I might want to limit items to a particular set of inventory posting groups or only customers from a specific region to be synchronised.

With master data management comes great capabilities for synchronising data, but also great risks; a lot of records in Business Central use an id field as the key, but this isn’t generally exposed to users and must never be synchronised, as synchronised records will be assigned a unique key in the child company, meaning another record being synchronised with the original id field will be looking at the wrong record.

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Sales), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

I explained Number Series in a recent article; creating the number series is a required step, but all that does is create the umber series; it doesn’t tell Business Central what to do with it.

Each module has a required step of configuring the number series which will be used for the master record and each type of transaction. In Sales this is maintained in the Sales & Receivables Setup (459) page, on the Number Series fasttab:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Sales), how do I… Assign Number Series in Sales”

This article is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Purchasing), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

I explained Number Series in a recent article; creating the number series is a required step, but all that does is create the umber series; it doesn’t tell Business Central what to do with it.

Each module has a required step of configuring the number series which will be used for the master record and each type of transaction. In Purchasing this is maintained in the Purchases & Payables Setup (460) page, on the Number Series fasttab:

Continue reading “In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Purchasing), how do I… Assign Number Series in Purchasing”