Hello Everyone,
Hope everyone participated in the virtual launch of the New Dynamics AX on 9th March and got to learn more about the new fully cloud based ERP.
In today’s post, I will explain the top 5 enhancements that I witnessed and tested under the General Ledger area in the New Dynamics AX.
- Financial Dimension Activation
- Global General Journals
- Global Fiscal calendar management
- Dedicated Process driven Workspace for Financial Period Close
- Account structure related enhancements
Let’s get straight into it and see some additional details.
1. Financial Dimension Activation: Starting with the new Dynamics AX, new financials dimensions will now need to be activated by a specific role, which has the privilege assigned for dimension activation or by System administrators. The intention here is to simplify the database schema for financial dimensions so that the reporting and data extraction becomes easier.
- When a new Dimension is created under GL > Dimensions > Financial Dimensions is created, it will be in “Inactive” status by default.
- Before users can start using this new dimension, it needs to be activated, which can be only done by either a System Administrator or by a role which has the privilege for dimension activation.
- When the activation is run, system will add the new dimension across all applicable tables in the database and the database schema will change. See screenshot below for reference.
2. Global General Journals: This new feature will allow accounting team members to create and manage general journals in multiple legal entities staying in one entity, without having to change the legal entity each time when they create or edit the journals.
- The new global general journal is located under General Ledger > Journal Entries > Global general journals.
- When you create a new New journal, you can select the Legal entity and the journal name of that entity for which you want to create the journal entry.
- You can then continue to create the journal lines inside the current entity and you can directly Open the journal in the other entity if you wish to, or you can complete the entire journal entity, validate and post in the current entity and the unmoral entry will be created and posted in the destination entity.
3. Global Fiscal Calendar Management: This feature will enable finance controllers and other related users of the accounting team to manage the the fiscal period status and Module level accesses for multiple entities which share the same Fiscal Calendar.
- Navigate to General Ledger > Ledger Setup > Ledger Calendars.
- Select the Fiscal calendar and the Fiscal year to see all the Periods under them.
- Notice that you will now see all the Legal entities listed in separate rows , which share the same fiscal calendar.
- You can change the Period status and Module level access for the required modules for one or more or all legal entities at once.
4. Dedicated Workspace for Financial Period Close: The new Dynamics AX brings in a a new dedicated workspace for the financial period close tasks. You all must be very familiar with what workspaces in the new AX are. The purpose of this workspace is primarily to help the corporate accounting team and Controllers to manage their fiscal period closing more effectively and make the process more transparent, get real time insights with the status of closing and get more timely insight into your business.
- Controllers can create Period Closing schedules and templates.
- Under each template and schedule, they can create breakdown of the tasks for the period close.
- Tasks can be assigned to to different team members with required due date and times.
- Can be done for multiple legal entities.
- This workspace helps the corporate accounting team to collaborate and update the status of tasks assigned to them and enables controllers to view the status of closing is real time and take required actions.
- Explaining this topic will become a separate blog in itself. I will try to explain sometimes later in future with a new post on this. Screenshots below shows a quick snapshot of how this workspace looks like.
5. Account Structures related enhancements: In the new Dynamics AX, the over all view and arrangement of data fields and tabs on the account structure form makes it more intuitive and easy to use. You can see which entities are using the selected account structure staying in the same form. Most importantly you can now export Account structures to Excel. This allows you to make edits easily in bulk and push it back to AX from Excel.
There are a few other minor enhancements under the GL area too, which I will leave up to you all to explore :)
That is it for this post !! Keep DAXing..
Regards,
Sandeep
Tagged: AX 7, AX on Cloud, General Ledger, GL, New Dynamics AX, New Features
