General Journal Templates and Batches – Tips and Tricks
Validating General Journal Batches
To help prevent delays when posting, you can turn on a background check that will notify you when there is a mistake in the financial journal you're working on that will prevent you from posting the journal. On the General Journal Batch page, you can choose Background Error Check to have Business Central validate finance journals, such as general or payment journals, while you're working on them.
When you enable the validation the Journal Check FactBox displays next to the journal lines and will show issues in the current line and the whole batch. Validation happens when you load a finance journal batch, and when you choose another journal line. The Issues total tile in the FactBox shows the total number of issues that Business Central found, and you can choose it to open an overview the issues.
You can use the Show Lines with Issues and Show All Lines actions to toggle between journal lines that have or don't have issues. The new Journal Line Details FactBox provides quick overview and access to data from journal lines, such as the G/L account, customer, or vendor, as well as to the posting setup for specific accounts.
Reversing Journals to Correct Mistakes
When working with journals that have many lines and something goes wrong, it's important to have an easy way to correct mistakes. The Posted General Journal page offers a couple of actions that can help.
- Copy Selected Lines to Journal - Copy only the lines that you select.
- Copy G/L Register to Journal - Copy all lines that belong to the same G/L register.
These actions let you create a copy of a general journal line or a batch, and then specify the following:
- The journal to copy the lines to
- Whether with opposite signs (a reversing journal)
- A different posting date or document number
To allow journals to be copied to posted general journals, on the General Journal Templates page, choose the Copy to Posted Jnl. Lines check box. After you allow people to copy posted general journals, if needed you can turn off copying for specific batches.
Understanding Main Accounts and Balancing Accounts
If you have set up default balancing accounts for the journal batches on the General Journals page, the balancing account will be filled in automatically when you fill in the Account No. field. Otherwise, fill in both the Account No. field and the Bal. Account No. field manually. A positive amount in the Amount field is debited to the main account and credited to the balancing account. A negative amount is credited to the main account and debited to the balancing account.