Dynamics 365 Business Central: How do Resources Work

Dynamics 365 Business Central: How do resources work

Hey everyone, we're going to talk about a question that came over, it's nice to have this back and forth on the comment section.

What we're going to discuss today is resources and how that kind of functions in Business Central. As you know we have an item, which is something we talked about a lot. It's actually the first video we created.

Resources

Then we also have something called resources. Resources are similar to items, as they can be put on a sales order and sold. They have prices, etc., but different from items in that there’s no inventory you don't keep track of quantity on hand or anything like that.

Resource Ledger Entries

They do have sub ledgers and those are called resource ledger entries. If you put them on a sales order as a line item, it could be sold out and then a resource ledger entry for a sale will come in. 

Resource Journal

There’s also a resource journal where you can book cost and sale and changes to the resources.

What really is a resource?

Why would we use a resource and what's a good example of a use of resource?

One example is labor, or people. Let's say we have John and he is a resource and he's going to book eight hours on a sales invoice.

Let's say $200 per hour or something like that. Whenever we book this on a sales order there's a sale that gets booked on the resource card.

It comes actually in the resource general as a sale. Obviously, there's also a sale that hits chart of accounts, revenue, etcetera.

There is no need for the resource journal or ledger entries to actually balance out. You don't have to buy eight hours in order to sell eight hours, you can just sell eight hours and lock that here and that's it. You can also book cost towards this.

Timesheets

Resource can also be used on jobs. Let's just go ahead and take a quick look in the system and I'm actually going to book a sales order for resource and create a new one.

One interesting aspect of this is that the resource cart can connect to an employee cart. It can also connect to timesheet. A resource can fill out a timesheet, which can then be forwarded on to a sales invoice and then billed out. 

That's kind of how it works together.

Other uses of resources could be a machine you rent out by time or you could use it for freight. There's various use cases, so let's check it out in the system.

Demo on Business Central

Alright let's take a look at resources.

I'm going to just go over here, resources, and we get into the list of resources. This is set up in the demo system. 

As you can see everybody is set up us people. If I go into, for example, Timothy here, there is a type in here. I could either pick a person or a machine.

Now this is just a type, I don't think it really has any functional difference in the system. A resource can have of course a cost, price, and there can even be a price table.

If I go in here for example, we have multiple prices and costs for the resource, which connects to jobs and to service. It could be on a service order or it could be on a job. It also be sold by the hour or utilized in any situation where you think you might have a person that you're selling hours for, or a machine that you're renting out. 

You could even set up a charge that's going be a resource and it's something you just put on a sales order and you want to track the ledger separately.

For example, we go ahead and take a look at the sales order, or I could just go here to sales order. What we want to do is create a new sales order and see how the resource actually fits in there.

I'm just going to go ahead and sell to the Datum Corporation like usual. Here in type we can actually pick “resource” and I can go ahead and say I want to sell Timothy's time.

This could be consulting, the quantity is going to be 10 hours, the price is $154.

I can just go ahead and post this. It now shows shipping and invoicing, but obviously we're not shipping anything because it's not a product. It's just labor per se.

It gets posted.

What I want to do is go back into the resource and take a look at the ledger. 

I go back into resources, go into Timothy's cart and navigate to ledger entries. I can see that now we have a transaction for 10 hours, where the cost is $847.

The cost came automatically because that's the cost we stated on there.

You don't buy resources, actually you can, but you don't have to.

There is nothing that's matching out the quantities here. If you're just selling out and you want to just have a cost posted here arbitrarily, you can do that. 

This cost does not get posted anywhere. It's not linked to the GL. It's more for your reference.

It's a kind of a nice thing, very loosely attached to the GL. It can be used as a subledger, for data mining and controlling transactions.

For example, what would be the alternative to using resources?

If we used for example, a GL, then you wouldn't have a subledger. Maybe everything would be going into the same GL for labor prices. 

You couldn't have a specific price card or anything like that. Now, resources are pushed to the next level because they are connected to timesheets. You can actually have timesheets in the system (I may go through that in the next video), and collect time and build that out.

They're also connected to jobs, as I said before, and to service orders. They are kind of an intricate piece in the whole puzzle and they have their own subledger.

But again, they don't directly post to the general ledger.

So I hope that sort of explained the higher level of resources. Maybe we’ll go a little bit deeper and demonstrate where resources show up. I think that would be a good one.

Until next time, thanks!