Dynamics 365 Business Central: Journals

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Journals

Hey everyone, we're going to talk about journals a little bit today.

We're actually talking about the resource journal. That's another question that came through the pipes.

Right now we're just kind of fielding off the questions, which is nice. but journals in Business Central are tricky, in a sense. You have to sort of understand what's going on behind the journal, when it's posting.

General Journal

I'm going to just name a couple of journals. We have, of course, the mother of all journals, which is the general journal. 

The general journal can post into chart of accounts, of course. Here we have that with the balance sheet and income statement.

Whatever you put in the general journal, when it posts, it posts onto the chart of accounts. 

But in the general journal you can sort of do everything. Let's say for example you're posting a sales invoice with a customer going to a GL account, as the offset, some revenue account.

You name the customer here, ABC Coffee. It's going to be 41,000; so that GL account, which is the revenue account.

What's going to happen is that, in this case it's going to hit AR and revenue. This is a typical posting in a journal. If you do it just with GL, there would be an AR account here, which would be something like fifteen thousand.

Then $41,000 would be the revenue. If you do it with a customer, it hits the chart of accounts, but it also hits the customer card subledger.

That would be the customer ledger entries. If I specify here, customer ABC Coffee, and the offset account for this being 41,000, which is the revenue account, it's going to hit account 15,000, which is tied to the customer through the posting groups. Offset by the GL account of 41,000.

I know it gets tricky and I'm not going do this in five minutes. This is probably like a 2 hour topic.

But the important part about this is, you have the general journal, where you can do everything, such as customer, you can do vendor, you can do geo to geo, you can go anywhere you want.

Then you have all these sub journals. One of them being the purchase journal, payment journal, you have the sales journal, and you have another one called cash receipt journal.

What do all of these journals have to do with the general journal?

They are all a subset of the general journal. They're basically the same thing. You can do all of this in here, actually, a lot of it, except when you're doing the payment journal, for example.

They restrict you to work with vendors, pretty much. You can do customer but if you're doing customer, then you're doing a refund and you're issuing that refund to the customer, paying out.

With purchase, you're also buying stuff from vendors.

With sales, you're working with customers.

These are just journals, the purchase journal, payment journal, your sales journal, your cash receipt journal.

They're all journals that are subsets of the general journal.

You also have other journals, this is what's the point that was brought up in the comments.

You have a journal called the resource journal.

The resource journal is not a subset of the general journal. The resource journal is not connected to pretty much anything, except resources.

It only books transactions on the resource, that's it. It's just hanging out there no purpose at all except keeping the ledgers of the resources in check.

That's a useful journal if you don't want to mess up your chart of accounts. You can do all kinds of transactions in here and then just reconcile later to the chart of accounts, if you want to. 

That's a funky one.

Job journal

Another one is the job journal. What about the job Journal?

The job journal actually posts to the chart of accounts, but also possibly posts to an item, or to a customer or to a vendor, depending on what's going on. 

You have to select a job in the job Journal, so it does post also to the job ledger entries. Which can reconcile into a work in progress. 

This is a complicated journal. It's more complicated than these guys. This one can do a lot and it maintains the job system inside Business Central. 

What I'm going to do in this screen share, I'm going to show you the resource journal, because that's the simplest one, and then show you the job journal. Just post there and see how that goes in. To give you the idea of the difference. 

This stuff here, on journals, all of these subjournals to the general journal, would be a nice one for our next video.

Let's take a look.

Screenshare

Okay let's take a look at the system. I'm going to go here, into the resource journal, and just pop in here.

I've actually created two lines for Mark. One for usage. Usage is cost, basically. One for sale, which is the revenue.

You've booked eight hours into the time journal and then we bill that back out. I'm going to go ahead and post this. They were posted.

Now I'm going to take a look at the resource card, or just resource, and get into Mark here.

Okay, so we should be able to take a look at the ledger entries and here they are. We have 8 hours consulting for total cost, and then usage for total price.

We have a cost and price for this, so we should be able to see various things, such as statistics.

You can see here, this year, how much has been invoiced versus last year, etcetera. This is pretty handy.

Let's get back here one more time and see ledger entries. I’m just going to navigate on this, and it shows me that these actually do not touch pretty much anything, anywhere else in the system.

Let's see if that brings that up, to prove my point correctly. Correct!

I navigated on these entries. What navigate does (and I should actually cover that in a separate video) is it goes and looks up all the entries posted, when this was posted.

If it would have posted into the GL we would have seen GL entries here. But I'm only seeing resource ledger entries.

There are two basically, the one with the sale, and one with the cost. Nothing else. That kind of proves my point.

Now there's another journal, if you actually want to tie this into something a little bit more with GL posting successor.

It's called the job journal. That has to do with jobs.

In jobs, so here we have an example, we can have resources, we can have items, etcetera.

When I post the resource here, it'll create ledger entries for the resource, but it also creates ledger entries for the job.

And possibly ledger entries for the GL for WIP (work in progress). So maybe we'll take a look at that next.