If your account schedules are not balancing, there’s one really great place to check and two best practices that will save you some long hours balancing any account schedule.
Great Place to Check
Dynamics 365 Business Central has a “canned” trial balance report that is always right. No matter what you’ve done to your account schedules, you can always check this trial balance and it will always balance to the general ledger. Why? Because it hasn’t been modified, filtered, or calculated against. This is the first place to check if you’ve got schedules that aren’t balancing. Use the ‘Tell Me’ function in Dynamics 365 Business Central to search for Trial Balance.
Using ‘Tell Me’ to search for Business Central’s trial balance report
The report is pretty simple and lists all your balances, account by account, and even includes an option to print to Excel which is handy because then you can easily compare to your account schedules to help you find the imbalance.
Select the options and filters you want your trial balance to show
Resulting trial balance report in printed view
Best Practice #1 – Include checking account schedules as part of your regular routine when adding new general ledger accounts
The number one cause of account schedules that don’t balance is because you have added a new general ledger account to Dynamics 365 Business Central and have neglected to also add the account to the reports you have designed with account schedules. In order to prevent this from happening, the moment after you finish adding an account to the general ledger, immediately proceed to account schedules to go insert the new account there. Do not wait. Don’t believe you’ll do it later. You will forget. Do it now. Really.
If you can’t figure out which account has caused the problem, run yourself a copy of the Dynamics 365 Business Central canned trial balance. The canned trial balance will automatically pick up new accounts which you’ve created, and you’ll be able to quickly see which account is missing from your account schedules.
Best Practice #2 – When building account schedules, use continuous account ranges
In order to avoid having to deal with the above, take the time to build your account schedules using continuous account ranges. The example below shows perfectly designed continuous account ranges. There is no room to insert a new general ledger account number in between these ranges. Account schedules, when designed this way, will automatically pick up newly created general ledger accounts every time.
Using continuous account ranges
This posting is part of the Dynamics 365 Business Central Account Schedules 101 series. Find the entire list of lessons here.