How to check financial journals in Business Central

Microsoft has released a powerful new feature in Business Central that will help streamline the posting process for financial journals, such as the General Journal and Payment Journal. In the past, the most common way to identify error messages on a journal was to post that journal. When posting, if there were any errors the entire posting process would stop as soon as the first error was identified and only that first error would be displayed. For long journals, this process could be repeated multiple times until all errors were identified. This process could be especially time-consuming for organizations with the separation of duties where different individuals created journal entries and posted the entries.

With the 2020 wave 2 release of Business Central there is now a much easier way to identify error messages before the journal is posted. Based on telemetry information that Microsoft collected from thousands of users, Business Central can now predict where users are most likely to experience posting issues and can help prevent those issues before they happen.  When this new functionality is enabled, there is a new Journal Check FactBox that displays next to the journal lines which will display any issues.

To enable this feature, search for Feature Management within Business Central (note if you are not an administrator you will need an administrator to complete this step). Find the line that says Check financial journals in background and enable the feature for All Users. If you do not see this option in the list, that means the feature is already enabled for your instance of Business Central.

The new journal check feature can be turned on or off by batch.

1. Open the batch that you would like to add this feature to
2. Click the ellipses (…) next to the Batch Name

3. This will open a list of General Journal Batches. Click Edit List

4. Find the column called Background Error Check and check it for all relevant batches

Now that the feature is enabled and the batch set up you will see a new FactBox called Journal Check. This FactBox includes three boxes which provides information on the batch as a total: Lines checked, Lines with issues, and Issues Total.

You can drill down on the Issues Total box to see the details of the issues and click on Open Related Record for the system to take you to the line with the issue.

Once a line is selected that has an issue, the FactBox will display a list of issues for that current line.

If you need help setting up or using this new feature or want help streamlining other business processes, our team of accounting and Business Central experts can help. Contact us today to find out how you can use Business Central to make your processes more efficient.