Stop working so hard: Let Dynamics 365 Business Central do it for you

Imagine a world where month-end closes are completed consistently, painlessly, and in a timely manner. Maybe this frees up a little more time to do actual analysis on finished financials, so you are prepared when management asks questions. Sounds great, right? 

But where do you start?  You can't eliminate any of the tasks needed to complete the month-end process, but you can take advantage of existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central functionality that can make these tasks go a lot faster. Most of these features require minimal or no setup and can be implemented before next month-end.

As someone who has experienced countless closings, I am excited to share with you the work I have handed over to Business Central. As mentioned, these are things that can be implemented immediately without the help of a developer or programmer, which is exciting for those of us without a ton of technical skills.

Here are three functions around the standard month-end processes of bank reconciliation, journal entries, and account reconciliation that I have found especially helpful. I know that I save several hours of work each month with these three functions, and we have very few transactions.

1. Bank reconciliation automatic match

Gone are the days of exporting all the bank ledger entry lines to one Excel spreadsheet while manually comparing them to an excel download of bank activity from the month. I remember spending painstaking hours each month trying every possible combination of deposit lines from the system to find something that matched to a large summary transaction on the bank statement. It takes a little bit of setup to import bank statements, but this can save a lot of time in the long-run and make the process of bank reconciliations a lot less painful.

On the General Ledger Setup page, there is an option to select Bank Recon. With Auto. Match. This setting divides the bank reconciliation screen into two panes.

1. Bank Statement Lines - populated either from imported bank transactions or ledger entries with outstanding payments (i.e. an uncleared check).
2. Bank Account Ledger Entries - all transactions posted to the bank account ledger within Business Central.

Replacing the ‘Mark Lines’ process, the Match Automatically function allows the user to specify criteria the system uses to search for and match the ledger entries, including number of days variance. There is also the option to Match Manually, which allows a user to select match lines that the system might not have recognized automatically. Any unmatched values will appear with an amount in the Remaining Amount column on the bank rec. This allows visibility into transactions that might need to be researched or are not yet posted in Business Central so that you can make sure you have all the data to complete your bank rec.

2. Copy and paste journal entries