Block Users from Posting Dates in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016                   

Today what I want to go over was sort of a follow up of the 30^th Coffee Mug Tutorial regarding Bank Reconciliations. Actually, during that tutorial I was booking or posting a bank account reconciliation and I put in an adjustment entry and I put it on the wrong date.

It was a typical user mistake which can happen in any system and so what I wanted to go over in this tutorial which is really important, is how to lock the user out of posting incorrect dates. So NAV has a number of ways to do that.

Looking at the mistake
Now just to go over the mistake that happened. In the Chase Manhattan Bank. 

If I go into the Ledger Entries.

I booked a transaction here in 2007; it was supposed to be 2017. But I’m sure people that have pretty particular eyes noticed that I forgot to put ‘17’ instead of ‘7’.

Which I put and I actually booked it, and I could – I could book it into 2007 which is of course fatal for any accounting.

So how do we set up the system so that a user cannot make this mistake?

General Ledger Setup
There’s a couple of ways in NAV to manage this and I’m going to show you both. Now first way is if I go into the General Ledger Setup here.

I have two fields: Allow Posting From and Allow Posting To.

Right now they are not set which means that people can post potentially anywhere on whatever date they want to in the system. Now they are not allowed to post into a closed year. However, if there is no year defined for what the date is, like 2007, I don’t even have a year for that, it allows it to post.

So this is really important for NAV. NAV is very flexible but at the same time you have to set up all the right guards.

So here I’m going to put in 01-01-17 to 12-31-17.

Actually I’m going to do a little bit better than that. I will actually only allow people to post into the current month that I’m in, which is March 2017, so 03-01-17 and 03-31-17.

Now I’ve locked out that month. Now some people, especially the account managers should be allowed to post anywhere in the year 17 but everybody else should only be only able to post into March 2017.

User Setup
So how do I set that up? Well if I leave this and I go into the User Setup right here. 

I see the two users I have in the system Demo and Demo 2 are also allowed to post wherever they want.

Now if nothing is specified here then the General Ledger Setup prevails, however if anything is set up here then that supersedes the General Ledger Setup.

So if I leave this empty, the General Ledger Setup works.

If I put anything in here than that overrides the General Ledger Setup. So that’s important to know.

In this case Demo 2 is a normal user so I’m not going to put anything here because I want that to be governed by the General Ledger Setup.

However, the Demo user is a Super User – an accounting user – and I’m going to allow the Demo user to post anywhere in 2017. Now this could be a quarter; it’s a little radical to give all year but since I’m demoing I want to be able to post anywhere as Demo. And this one is locked into just March because I put nothing in.

Now be really really careful and I’ve seen mistakes like this – if I put in just one date, like this, I’ll allow him to post until 12-31-2017, that means that I’m overriding the General Ledger Setup and I’m allowing Demo 2 to post all the way down to the beginning of time until 2017.

I’ve seen these issues happen when improperly set up, so definitely don’t put anything if you want it governed by the GL Setup otherwise restrict it straight here - both periods. Ok so we’ll leave it like this. 

Testing it Out
And now for example if I try to post anything into 2007 like I just did, right now I’m going to go ahead and try that with a simple General Ledger transaction.

So I just go into General Journals.

And I’m going to put the posting date on 01-01-2007 and I’m going to just move reclass between cash and let’s say I’m putting 1000 dollars into another account, a balancing account, something that allows direct posting, let’s say the bonds.

Notice I want this posting to fail because it’s outside my range, 01-01-2007.

Post
So I go ahead and post.

And now I get this error and this is exactly what we want. So this is really really important when you are setting up users in NAV and as seen in previous video I was able to make a mistake that you don’t want anyone of your users to make.

I hope that was very instructive and definitely set that up in your system if you don’t have it right now.