In our previous training video, we looked at Dimensions in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and how they can help streamline your chart of accounts. This training video focuses on the GL account categories in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and demonstrates how you can easily and quickly generate financial reports in an efficient way without the knowledge of a complex report writer.
The following is a partial transcription of the video above.
“The other thing to look at on the finance set up side are my GL categories. GL categories are important for classifying your trial balance since it’s how you write your financial reports. It’s a very easy way to take your trial balance and display it on balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements the way you would like see it. So, if I look at our finance menu, again we are going to see GL account categories. And when we take a look at that, we’re going to see really a structure of a balance sheet and an income statement. We can see kind of a where we have some assets listed, what are our current assets, current liabilities. And we can see over in our categories what account numbers we are putting into those categories. So, when we do run our balance sheet and income statement, these accounts then group and get categorized it’s what we want to see on that statement.
To give an example of that, let’s go ahead and run a quick balance sheet. As the accountant, I can get to that balance sheet right from my role center page. I can also run this report directly into Excel. So if I have something and I have to distribute this report to people who like to make changes, maybe add a columns, colors, do some analysis on the information when I send, Excel is the way those people are going to want it. We can run these reports right to Excel and right from my role center page.
If I go ahead and select reports, we’ll select an Excel report and we’ll have a list here and we’re going to take a look at the balance sheet. So, if we keep in mind that those GL account categories that we just took a look at. That’s what’s going to be driving this form. So what we also get when we implement this system is a list of default categories. So, as we are adding accounts, if we’re not sure, we can put it into one of our default categories that the system comes with out of the box that will drive a default financial statement. And as we start using the system and people request more and more information or different ways of looking at that information, we can adjust our GL account categories and push those to our financial statements. Or the system does have something report writing tool in it where we can write custom financials in addition to these. So as a more advance feature, the system has account schedules where we can write our own financials.
So, what we are looking at here is a balance sheet coming back to me in Excel. Today’s date, September 7th and what the system is doing is authenticating me, so it’s not just any user. I do need to be a user in Business Central to be able to pull this data out, take a look at it. Now I may distribute it and those users, when they get the Excel sheet, do not need to be Business Central users but that initial user who runs the report, maybe checks it, saves it out to OneDrive or SharePoint. Obviously, I’m coming into this report from the system, I need to be a user.
If we look at what we have here, we’re looking at balance sheet categories, driven by those GL account categories. Now if I look down the list here, I may see something where I’ve a number that I want to change a little bit. Maybe the current liabilities is great but I need some more details here. I like to see maybe my accounts payable as it’s own line and then group the rest of my current liabilities.
So, let me show you how easy that would be to just change the default financial report in our system….”
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