If you have been using Business Central, you are probably acquainted with Recurring Journals. But wow, the new options for BD Balance by Dimension and RBD Reverse Balance by Dimension have so many uses!
Need to allocate an amount posted to one dimension to many dimensions? Maybe you record professional fees to a Corporate department during the month and then based on some metric you allocate all or part of the expense to various departments. You might say ‘yes, I use recurring journals and allocations’ to make the entry. My rebuttal is, ‘you have to manually figure out the amount that you are going to allocate’ and then make your entry.
With Balance by Dimension, simply enter the account number and the dimension value (Corporate for example), provide the allocation (if you change monthly you have to change your percentage but you’re already doing this and post. This saves you a big step in your prior process.
Now think about wanting to get the balance from an account with one, two or three dimension combinations and allocate that balance to other dimension combinations. See the amazing things that can be done!
To use the BD Balance by Dimension, is really fairly straightforward. You will define a line in the recurring journal and apply the desired dimension(s) and values. The using the standard allocations feature in recurring journals, you apply other dimensions and values as needed.
First, set your line up with Recurring Method equal to BD Balance by Dimension, Frequency, Posting Date, Document Number, GL account and Amount. Then define your dimension set filter, using Line>>Set Dimension Filter. Here the dimension filter can be one dimension and value or multiple dimensions and values.
Note: don’t forget that you can you affect the description with each posting through setup in your recurring journal. I’ve provided some notes later in this blog.
And if you need this for an accrual and want to reverse it the next month, simple change you Recurring Method to RBD Reversing Balance by Dimension.
Notes for changing description, the posting date is used and will return into the description:
%1 Day Number of the Month (1, 2, 3….31)
%2 Week of the Year
%3 Month Number of the Year (1, 2, 3….12)
%4 Month Name
So %4 Dimension Allocation for Rent, with a posting date of July 20, 2022 will post a description of ‘July Dimension Allocation for Rent’.
There still more things that you can do with Recurring Journals that you may not be using….stay tuned.