Steve Endow
Dynamics GP users often experience difficulties with the “Posting Date” function. Many haven’t even utilized the extra transaction date window in GP.
For example, a customer might call and ask, “Why was my April invoice, dated April 5th, recorded in the General Ledger in March?”
Adding to the Document Date/Posting Date confusion is the potential mix-up between Transaction Posting Date and Batch Posting Date.
Automated integrations with Dynamics GP further complicate these date-related challenges, especially at month’s end. Posting an April 15th invoice to April 16th usually goes unnoticed. However, posting a March 31st invoice on April 1st creates problems.
Humans entering transactions in GP can review and determine the correct posting period. Automated integrations, lacking this judgment, depend on a source data field to dictate the posting date.
While seemingly straightforward, this presents difficulties.
For instance, this integration data displays a single invoice date in the DOCDATE column and a Batch ID of 2022-08-13T09:10:30Z, suggesting April transactions. One might assume these should post to the 2018-04 fiscal period.
However, consider this data set:
A frustrated customer questioned why their April invoices, indicated by the batch ID “20180401,” posted in March. Dynamics GP prioritizes the Posting Date over the batch ID.
The customer’s source data only included DOCDATE, and their SmartConnect map solely imported the Invoice Document Date.
Why did the 20180401 batch post on March 31st?
When using eConnect or SmartConnect for imports, if the Batch ID doesn’t exist, eConnect automatically creates it without requiring further input.
Crucially, when Dynamics GP is set to use the Batch Posting Date, eConnect defaults to the Document Date for this field.
Therefore, the first imported invoice, dated March 31st, prompted eConnect to generate a batch with that Posting Date. Subsequently, all batch invoices, even those dated April 1st, were posted on March 31st.
While a simple date correction might seem sufficient, complications arise with invoices dated on the cusp of a month but related to a different period. For example, a vendor invoice dated April 2nd for a March service wouldn’t be automatically recognized as a March expense without a separate Posting Date or Fiscal Period field.
Few source systems possess this fiscal period information; most only have a single transaction date.
Therefore, when designing a Dynamics GP transaction import, consider scenarios involving transactions dated at the beginning or end of a month and the possibility of transactions from a previous fiscal period. This seemingly simple task can quickly become complex.
Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP in Los Angeles. He is the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.
You can also find him on Twitter, YouTube, and Google+
http://www.precipioservices.com
