How to get started with GL Account Schedule Reporting in Dynamics NAV 2013

For financial professionals tasked with reporting on data written to the general ledger in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, Account Schedules have become an invaluable tool that every customer should explore. With Account Schedules, NAV users can create customised and powerful reports on their GL and dimensions from directly in the system - without the help of a developer - and extend them into Microsoft Excel for producing good looking, graphical reports. And as corporate controller and Dynamics NAV user Kerry Rosvold told MSDynamicsWorld.com audiences in a recent webcast, using Account Schedules means your organization gets more business intelligence out of the software it already owns.

NAV 2013 writes a huge amount of information into the general ledger by dimension, and Account Schedules are designed to make this information accessible for analysis. Beyond the general ledger, Account Schedules can incorporate GL Budgets, Cost Accounting, Cost Accounting Budgets and Cash Flow Forecast information into reports. They even go so far as to allow you to produce reports that contain all sources of information on a single report.

Reports like Profit and Loss, Overheads, and Cost Analysis by Branch, Department or Cost Centre are easy to produce, and perhaps more non-traditional reports like Customer and Vendor, or Inventory reports by various dimensions can be more easily produced from the GL and incorporated onto other financial reports.

Account Schedules in Microsoft Dynamics NAV are built around the concept of reuse. You will create a set of rows containing the accounts to analyse and then apply different sets of columns to them to view the information in different ways. So, taking a Profit and Loss statement with columns for Balance and Year to Date, then swapping out the columns ...