79 - Posting Groups in Dynamics NAV 2017 - Part 2 

Today what I want to get into is posting groups and explaining that, the complicated topic to explain has to do with how to connect the transactions or posting of transactions to the chart of accounts and today I want to go into a three entities in particular which are the Vendor, customer, and Item so I’m going to actually through a slide here, first time for everything.

Here I have a little diagram which is talking about how things post into the chart of accounts, and we call these entities so the customers, vendors, and items actually there are more entities like fixed assets, resources and stuff like that can be grouped under entities but these are sort of the main ones, and they all behave in a similar way so one great way to understand NAV is to try to understand how the overall picture works.

You find that many places in the system behave similarly even though they are talking about different things, it's sort of symmetrical and unified, the whole concepts. So here, for example, we have the customers and vendors and Items and all of them have posting groups that behave similarly and start with the name of the entities so you have, customer posting group, vendor posting group and inventory posting, group.

They are meant to direct the posting of the particular entity to the balance sheet. So there are other reasons for this posting groups but the main reason for the posting group is to post the balance sheet entry, this has to do with assets and liabilities.

For example when we post on a customer and we use the customer forcing group obviously, that is going to be tied to the accounts receivable balance sheet account and the vendor is going to be tied to the accounts payable balance sheet account and the inventory accounts is going to be tied to an inventory which is an asset account. So let me go a little bit into this. If I go out of here and go into NAV.

If I take a look at vendors and I open up one vendor, you can see that we have, this is usually underneath, sometimes you have to dig a little bit to find this because they are hidden because normally the user is not interacting with this. So if I go into invoicing and show more fields, I will see the vendor posting group right here, you can see that that has been set. I'm going to put this on the side and take a look at the customers, look at the cannon group and here you can see something called customer posting group under-invoicing again.

I have four vendors, I have the vendor posting group for customer a customer posting group and then to drive the point home. We have items, get into my Colombian coffee beans here and I'll have inventory posting group.

The entities named first followed by posting group is the balance sheet posting for that, so if I drill for example into the inventory posting group, and here into the setup, you are going to see that we are listing the inventory account right here. Now actually in the inventory posting group, a combination of locations in the inventory posting group will split up inventory account, but as you can see the asset account is here being listed out 14100.

If I go into the customer posting group and take a look at that, then I have the receivables here. There are other accounts here which are not balance sheet accounts but they are sort of tied to the customer posting group because they don't have any other home that makes sense. So interests and roundings and payment and other stuff like that and minor accounts.
The receivable account is the main account that your thinking about when it comes to this.

And then of course for vendors, we have, and you probably guessed it already, we have the payable account right here, so these posting groups the main purpose of those is to tie the postings to the balance sheet. And so just to give an example of this and I think I posted this in an earlier video, but I’m just going to do it again. If I actually post and type in a particular account type like, here, let's say we are posting on the revenue account.

So sale for a customer and I’m going to use the same account that I had before. Its this one -50,000, so I put the balancing account right here as a customer. As we saw before, this will post on the accounts receivable and sale. So here we are going to get a credit to this particular sales account.

And then we are going to get a debit to the accounts receivable account. Same way if I actually would have done, and now I would actually have to pick purchases which are in the 50,000 so this makes sense. I’m just going to go ahead and do that, so purchase retail. Let's say we are buying something and then, of course, it's turned around so debit and if I go to vendor here, now I’m actually buying from the London postmaster. So that would be debit purchases which is cost and then it would be credit vendor which is a liability, and you can't do the inventory here, because you need the inventory journal for that. But it would behave similarly.

I hope that explains how the balance sheet postings work.