Dynamics 365 Business Central AS 101 Lesson 12: Drilling Down
I don’t know what kind of questions you need to answer as a part of your job, but here are a few of the questions I need to answer in my job every day:
Why is that sales number so low?
Why is that sales number so high?
Where did the expense for “x” end up?
What exactly did that team spend all that money on?
Did we get invoiced for that thing yet?
Did that journal entry get done?
Where did that number come from?
I use account schedules to answer those questions and, in most cases, I use the drill down feature to get the answers. It’s a very intuitive feature to use and I will show you how below.
Click on the value that you want to drill down on, and a window will open with additional detail of what this number consists of.
Click on the value that you want to drill down on
This window shows each account along with the balance since many accounts are being pulled into this original value. To drill down further, click on a value and a window will appear with the journal entries that this value consists of.
Click on a value and you will be shown the journal entries this value consists of
Here are the journal entries that make up this net change value:
Journal entries for value we just clicked on
If you want to see additional detail on journal entries, go to Entry and Navigate on the Ribbon to get more detail.
Finding additional details on journal entry
The mantra you need to learn when using the drill down feature is “drill down to navigate”. In order to get through all the layers of a posting starting with the highly summarized number you see in your account schedule you need to drill down at least a couple of times until you can see the numbers you are looking for. Sometimes you can tell what your answer is by seeing what account or set of accounts the number came from, but other times, you are looking for the entry point of the number – generally either an invoice (sales or purchase) or a journal entry. You can get to all of those juicy answers by drilling down starting from the account schedule, and once you get to the screen that shows you the Navigate function, you can navigate directly to the journal entries that were made and see them in detail or even call up a copy of the invoice you are looking for.
Update: Microsoft has finally made a simple but VERY effective change regarding the Navigate button. Up until the Fall of 2020, the Navigate button, while critical for the need for accounting teams to research transactions, became extremely difficult to locate because there were two menu options labeled as Navigate as well as the action for Navigate itself. This has now been changed to “Find Entries” which was a GREAT move and has imbued some clarity into the available menu choices.
This posting is part of the Dynamics 365 Business Central Account Schedules 101 series. Find the entire list of lessons here.