Inventory reconciliation (Inventory value report) – Part 1/3

11 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by Ludwig Reinhard in General Ledger, Inventory

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Dynamcis AX, Inventory reconciliation, Inventory value report

If you ever tried to reconcile your inventory balances with your ledger balances, you might have come across the inventory value report. This report and its setup is described in many blog posts and white papers. Yet, despite all the available information, the setup of this report often remains unclear for many finance users due to the numerous setup options and missing “best practice” guidelines.

This posts aims to close this gap by focusing on the different setup parts of the report and by providing you with some specific finance backgrounds on the selection of the one or the other report parameter. For this purpose, I divided the report setup into the following five blocks:
(Please note that this blog post will be split into three separate blog posts for reasons of readability and due to its length).

Block 1:

Date interval:
Setup the default date interval that is pre-populated when opening the inventory value report

Range:
Select “posting date” or “transaction date”. Note that the transaction date option was introduced with the moving average inventory valuation model. For additional details, see this website.

Dimension set:
The dimension set allows you – in combination with the column setup of the inventory value report (see further below) – a direct comparison of the inventory and the ledger balances. This is realized by showing a financial section at the end of the report. See the following screenshot for an example.

Best practice:
Running the inventory value report with the main account financial dimension set is fine as long as no difference between the inventory values and ledger balances exist. Yet, once the report shows a discrepancy, running the report with a dimension set consisting of the main account and item ID can help you identifying the discrepancy faster. Example:

Please note that running the inventory value report with the main account and item ID financial dimension set requires that the General Ledger account structures include the item ID as a financial dimension and that all items are setup with their item IDs as illustrated in the next screenshots.

Block 2:
The parameters that you define in the inventory dimensions block influence the inventory dimensions, items, item groups and subtotals shown in the inventory value report.

Example:

Please note that this setup needs to be in line with the setup of the storage dimension groups. As an example, selecting the “Palled ID” dimension does not make much sense if financial inventory values are not tracked at this level.

From a “best practice” perspective, the setup of different inventory value reports with different levels of details can help you identifying discrepancies faster and easier by successively running the different report versions.

…to be continued in the next post.

How to enter vouchers quickly?

05 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by Ludwig Reinhard in Accounts Payable, General Ledger

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Accont alias, Default ledger accounts, Dynamics AX 2012, Voucher templates

If you have to enter accounting vouchers manually in Dynamics AX you might have noticed that manual entries can consume a lot of time especially if you need to record cost centers, departments and other financial dimensions. Fortunately, Dynamics AX incorporates some standard features that alleviate the manual entrance of accounting vouchers. In the following, I will explain some of those features in more detail.

Ledger account alias
The first option to enter vouchers quickly is the use of ledger account alias. Ledger account alias are setup in the General Ledger module but can be used also in the Accounts Payable and Project module. Setting up ledger account alias is straightforward; simply define a shortcut for your main account – financial dimension combination and Dynamics AX replaces the shortcut with the main account and financial dimension at the time you enter your voucher.

In the example illustrated in the following screen-prints, Dynamics AX replaces my shortcut “hotel” by the main account “601506” and business unit “001”. As I could not predefine the department in my ledger account alias, I still need to enter it manually in the journal.

Default ledger accounts
A second option for entering vouchers quickly is the setup of default ledger accounts in Accounts Payable. Please note that default ledger accounts can either be setup at the vendor group level or vendor level as illustrated in the next screenshots.

Similar to ledger account alias, default ledger accounts are automatically applied once the corresponding vendor group / vendor account is selected. See the following screenshots for an example.

Excel add-in
A third option for entering vouchers quickly is the use of the Dynamics AX Excel add-in that allows you preparing your transactions in Excel and uploading them to Dynamics AX where you can validate and post them. For details how to use this functionality, please see my previous posts on the Dynamics AX Excel Add-in.

Voucher templates
A final option that I want to introduce here is the use of voucher templates. Voucher templates can be setup in General Ledger or the Accounts Payable module and allow reusing a previously saved vouchers. The next screenshots show you a simplified example where a voucher is first saved as a template …

… and later on reused by selecting the saved template.

To sum up, Dynamics AX offers various different features that can help you saving a lot of time especially if you consider that the main account – financial dimension combinations suggested by Dynamics AX can be changed any time before posting.