Account Categories & Subcategories in Dynamics NAV 2018

We are gonna dive a little bit into reporting, especially accounts categories or subcategories. I should have basically talked about this when we did the reporting deep dive, but I didn't really go into the account categories. Let me just run into this right away.

Accounts sub-category
We have something called Accounts sub-category on the chart of accounts. This appeared about. I think 2016 or something like that. Maybe 2017. I was kind of nice to take a look at this, you can know filter by accounts receivable, prepaid expenses, inventory, all of that.

These are predefined, so actually, if I go into the account itself you can see we have account category and account subcategory, so you can only specify a predefined list here, this is not something you can create like with the account schedules. This is already fixed, so within the assets, we have accounts receivables, etc. Actually the account category here underneath the asses you can generate yourself, the subcategory you can create yourself but the account category is fixed.

GL account categories
Let's go ahead and take a look at what is the use of this, I mean, this is, of course, great to categorize, I was thinking in power BI, we can now take this out in a report and kind of put things in the right places, etc. But what else can we do?, if I actually go into finance here, I can find a page called GL account categories. So If I get into those, here I get a list of the categories that have been set up, and if I wanted to take a look at the assets, now I get subcategory and I get into subcategory, so this is kind of a tree representation of your chart of accounts which I think it's pretty cool, I like this.

Now one thing that's really cool as well as, I can see which accounts fall into this category here, of course there is a filter here but the filter only says so much, here actually it's it out and I can also see which accounts do not have a category, if I forgot to categorize something than that would show up here. I think that is tremendously valuable.

So, as long as I categorize everything, there shouldn't be anything here, but if I miss something it shows up here, so why is that so important?, that we have everything with a category?, and I think this is really the kicker of account categories, if I go here into general ledger setup and go into reporting I can see that there is some standard account schedule set up for balance, income cash flow, retained earning etc. So what does that mean?, I'm gonna show you, if I actually go out of this and go in here, so just go ahead and I hit edit list.

Generate account schedules
I’m, gonna change the way the categories work, I have something here called generate account schedules. So when I click on that and go into account schedules there are some new account schedules and I’m sure you noticed this if you play around with Cronus that starts with M in here, those are this account schedules that are set up in the general ledger or general ledger setup, which tie to these GL account categories, so if I go into the M income statement and take a look at that, this is coming from the account category list. It's auto-Generated basically, or I can generate it by going into that edit on the previous set, so I’m gonna show you how that works.

If I actually go in here, go back and I’m gonna create a new category, I’m gonna call it coffee sales;No one would put coffee sales like that on the account schedules except me, because I’m actually an official demo; generate account schedules , what happened?, no message no nothing, but something did happen. If I go into the accounts schedules, go into my income statement, go into overview you can see that the coffee sales come up here. Automatically generated, so what's good about this? let's trace back, first of all, we get an automatic income statement, right here, that's pretty cool.

Secondly, one of the problems with accounts schedules is that if you forget to put an account in there, the account schedule doesn't balance out. Especially for income statement, balance sheet and stuff like that, the reason for that is that they are so flexible you don't really need to use them for only income statements, balance sheet, you can use them for anything but at the same time they don't tell you if you’re missing an account. So if you are actually doing it this way, and I make sure that they are no GL accounts without categories, right here, I have made sure I don't have any, then all of the GL accounts are included in your automatic statements there, which mean that you are always gonna have perfect account schedules as far as income statement, balance sheet etc.

So this is kind of dummy proof to make financial statements as long as you put everything into categories, subcategories and set everything up here you have nothing missing in the missing category, you generate the account schedules, you have your income statement balance sheet. So I think that's a kicker for GL account categories, that is the good part.

Of course, I’m gonna shoot at Microsoft a little bit, it would be nice to be able to drill into the balance, can't do that in here, so maybe an update would be nice on that one. But in any case I think I really like this, it's a good addition and probably one of those that are not advertised enough when people are selling out the system.