Dynamics 365 Business Central: Item Charge Out of Bounds

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Item Charge Out of Bounds

Hey everyone, we're going to respond to questions on the YouTube channel today. We got a question from Sandra regarding approvers and I will take in to that Sandra, I’m just not sure how BC has evolved with that I just got to revisit it. But the question was regarding on How do you have a different approver for purchasing and different approver for sales?  and how do the approval groups work? We're going to check on that and have a video on that.  

I had another question from Chip on item charges, and I had promised myself I was done with item charges but of course there was something more to dig in there, it's a deep topic, it's good, so I'm actually going to do a video on that question.  The question was, what happens if you have closed the period which you affected with an item charts? so let's say if we have a timeline here so this is January and that's February and then you have a the purchase here in January and you have maybe the sale as well in January and then you have the item charge in February that effects the purchase and cost a good sold on this one in January.  

This is between periods and you have maybe closed out January, you reported January, closed it out and you don't want January to change.  That would be bad. How does business central handle that? the only thing that business central requires you to do is to close the year so let's say this is 2019, so when 2019 is done or let's say 18 since that is past, you have to close it in order to post retained earnings all that, clear out the income statements, etc. that's the only requirement. However, if you like to close out months you can. I'm going to show you that in the screen share.  

What you could do, is inventory closeout January. If your inventory closeout January so that's closed and you're open in February and there's an item chart that comes and hits the purchase in January and it's happening in February, where do those adjustments go? Where do they get booked? They will actually get booked on the first open day in February, so they bunch up there. However, when you report, on the item ledger entries you can of course sum up there and report the actual numbers if you have the open filter, etc. But just from a GLS perspective, it will post on the first day in February, so that's important.   

I recommend, if people are doing a whole lot of item charges and making sure things jive, just close out the inventory periods regularly when you're actually closing out the month.  The way people in business central close out months other than from an inventory perspective, it's just by a date range, so they say allow posting from like 1/19 to 2/28 so, if I do that, I'm not allowed to post anywhere else. Now I'm open in February, I'm not open anymore in January so I've closed out the allow posting and I'm going to show you that in the screen share as well, however you can close out inventory periods meaning that it's closed closed. But you can still book everything else, so it has a flexibility there and you can also close out from all posting, the period but I don't recommend that, because you still want to be able to go back and maybe do fixes as superuser, so you know you don't want too hard close it. 

 That's how item choice works and I'm going to do a quick screen share on where those windows are and just show you like how to change them, hopefully that will take care of the item charts topic for a little bit.  

Let’s look at the system, basically I'm not going to go ahead and post the item charges again, that might be a little bit of an exercise. What I'll do is go into the accounting periods, inside business central just to show you how this works. 

You set up accounting periods here and it's usually the months of the year, which are the accounting periods and you have a new fiscal year here defined. You can define this any way you want, your accounting periods could be weeks, could be however long. The standard is by month, and you can close them out whenever you want, you don't have to close them out individually every month, if you do close them, you cannot post instant into them. It's a little bit of a negative to close anything less than a year. 

However, you can close an inventory period. If I go in here, into inventory period, I get a whole list to create inventory periods and you know, I could just go ahead and create a year in here and I can then close that, so I can create each month or a quarter or however I want to close the inventory periods and close the inventory period. The way that works, is that if an inventory period is closed, any changes to the inventory like an item charge hitting into that period, will go into the first day of that period. 

If I say here the ending date is 1/30 1/19, then if I close this, any adjustments that will be made, will be posted on the 1st of February, so you can manage the inventory that way and this is very powerful. You can both manage the general postings over here and in my mind, you should just close them at the end of the year and manage the inventory separately and you close that every month.  

So, how do you avoid people posting willy-nilly into any month in the past if you keep the year open? you manage that with a user setup, inside the user setup you have allow posting from person to and you can basically specify there who can post. You can in general restrict that for the entire company and then allow people to post back to specifically. It's a high flexibility of how you allow people to post in the system, giving you both the opportunity of posting into a closed period if you have the rights to do it and then avoiding any inventory changes to go into that period. 

I hope that explained it, I know it's a pretty heavy topic, we're definitely deep into the engine here but very vital at the same time when you're setting up.