Are you facing a situation that so many other users are facing? The challenge of not having enough time in your day, week, or month to change your business processes?
You hear discussions, read articles and understand there are some great old and new features in Business Central designed to make you more efficient. The problem is, you just don’t have time to spend on learning, training, and implementing.
Let’s review some of Business Central’s features that can save you time.
Bank Reconciliation with Copilot
Bank Reconciliation with Copilot can reduce the time you spend reconciling your bank account each month, as it does a better job of matching bank transactions to your Business Central transactions. You can also define mapping to general ledger accounts for expenses such as service charges or other automatic debits, saving you the time to process those transactions manually.
What time does it take to learn this new process? It is very, very minimal because you are still using the same bank reconciliation pages that you are used to using. To use the Copilot option, you choose “Reconcile with Copilot” versus “Auto Matching,” so that takes no extra time. If you need or want to map charges to general ledger accounts, you only map once and Business Central will use the mapping for those same charges every reconciliation going forward. You could skip the mapping and process manually through the “Transfer to General Journal” option as you’ve done in the past. Hopefully, you’ve been using that transfer versus manually entering a journal for the charges – if not, try that feature to save you time today.
Recurring Purchase Lines
Recurring Purchase Lines is not a new feature but it’s one that many users don’t utilize. Business Central has never had a default general ledger account for a vendor. This is exactly what Recurring Purchase Lines provide, except it’s a default account feature on steroids. You set up Recurring Purchase Codes like Utilities, Insurance, or Professional Services. For each of these, you define the general ledger account(s), dimension(s), and even quantity. Then, you assign purchase codes to the vendors to which they apply. Vendors can have more than one purchase code assigned. When you assign the purchase code(s) to the vendor, you can choose to automatically insert the lines on the purchase documents, manually insert or be asked each time to insert. This is an easy setup to save you time on data entry each and every day and it comes with a bonus of accuracy.
Did I mention that there are Recurring Sales Lines also? The Recurring Sales Line feature works just like Recurring Purchase Lines but for Sales documents!
Deferrals
Do you have a list of recurring journals to post each month? Do several of them involve amortizing prepaid expenses or deferred revenue over several months? If so, you should be using Deferrals!
Deferrals allow you to record all the amortizations required for the months the expense covers at the time you post the vendor or customer document. You create the deferral, which requires about four fields, enter that deferral code on the vendor invoice, and post. To be clear, the system does post into the future for all the months needed to complete the amortization and there are those that do not like this. But for the time savings, I think it’s a win.
A couple more things. First, you can use deferrals on general journal entries, such as writing off obsolete inventory. Second, to report the balance of each deferral there are Deferral Summary reports for Sales, Purchases, and GL. You can use these to verify the balances of your prepaid and deferral accounts at the end of the month. Finally, there are different allowed posting date ranges for deferral postings so that you do not open your regular posting date ranges way into the future. These are both at the general ledger setup and user setup levels.
Exchange Rate Service
If you have the need for multiple currencies, please be sure that you are using an Exchange Rate Service to keep your exchange rates up to date daily. These services are generally free of charge and just run in the background through a job queue. Your time savings is in not needing to update your exchange rates manually and they are current on a day-to-day basis.
User Tasks
Do you have a month-end checklist? Maybe it’s in Excel, where you track each step that you need to do before closing your financials for the month. You should try using User Tasks in Business Central. You define the task with a description, and assign it to a user with start and due dates. You can link the task to a report or page. Users can update with the percent complete and completion date. Now all this data is in the system. So how does this save time? You can set the tasks to reoccur and you store traceability.
Financial Reports
Please tell me that you have loaded your Financial Budgets into Business Central and that you have Financial reports setup to compare actual to budget and calculate a variance. Did you know that you can copy a budget from actual, and apply a multiplier to create a new budget? If you do 6-6, 7-5, or 9-3 budgets, two quick steps later and you have these budgets generated by Business Central. Hopefully, you are using the Excel Layouts feature to create and update Financial Reports for management.
Additional Resources
Here’s a few simple time savers. First, learn filters and sorting on pages. Second, learn how to Save Views and how to use them without opening the Filter Pane. Third, personalize your pages so that you don’t spend time scrolling left-to-right-left all the time. Fourth, learn to use the Analyze View (if you don’t have this option on your list pages, get your partner to enable it). Fifth, learn to use Excel Layouts, this is a reporting tool that you can format and save back into Business Central for future use.
Statistical Accounts, GL Review, Allocation Accounts, Recurring Balance Journal Entries and Standard Journals are just a few more time saving features in Business Central, though this is not the full list! Reach out to your partner and explain where you are spending time daily, weekly, monthly and they can help show you already available features in Business Central to make your work life easier.
For more information on several of the “timesavers” discussed in this post, check out kimdandnavbc.com for more.
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