GYDE365-Design : General Ledger Overview

Dynamics 365 Finance empowers business users to control finances and manage funds with accurate information, at any time, for financial planning and forecasting and staying up-to-date with analytics.

The GYDE365 survey takes you through a series of questions to assist with the configuration and design of your Dynamics 365 solution. The General Ledger survey is split into 7 sections;

Chart of Accounts
Currencies
Transactions
Period Close
Parameters
Reporting
Default Values

The General Ledger defines and manages your business’ financial records. The General Ledger is a register of debit and credit entries. These entries are classified using the accounts that are listed in a Chart of Accounts.

The General Ledger module is at the centre of Dynamics 365 Finance and records all financial transactions from any other modules.

The following are examples of features in the General Ledger module:

Chart of Accounts structure, creating building blocks using Financial Dimensions to allow detailed reporting analysis across your organisation.
Accruals are used in accrual accounting to track revenue that is recognized in the period that it is earned in, not when payment is received, and to track expenses (costs) that are recognized when they occur, not when payment is made.
You can allocate or distribute monetary amounts to one or more accounts, or to account and dimension combinations based on allocation rules. The two types of allocations are fixed and variable. You can also settle transactions between ledger accounts and revalue currency amounts.
At the end of a fiscal year, you must generate closing transactions and prepare your accounts for the next fiscal year. You can use the consolidation functionality to combine the financial results for several subsidiary legal entities into results for a single, consolidated organisation. The subsidiaries can be in the same Finance database or in separate databases.
Financial reporting can consolidate multiple companies during report generation. The financial reports that are available out-of-the-box in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (formerly Operations) can be run at any time. These reports provide many additional benefits, such as the ability to drill down to all companies and dimensions.

The following figure illustrates the typical processes of the General Ledger module in a company:

GYDE365-Design Survey

GYDE365-Design is built to empower users with an easy to navigate survey structure that identifies key requirements to influence a gold standard Dynamics 365 implementation.

The application is built using a hierarchical structure whereby each template consists of chapters, sections and questions. Prior to answering the questions, investing the time to review the help content available is invaluable to gaining the most out of the application.

Question Structure

The questions present within each section are displayed systematically. Answers to a question may trigger additional questions to appear in the survey. This provides a unique structure based upon the requirements of the end user.

Questions adopt an answer type of Grid, Numerical, String, Date or List. Each must be answered in accordance with the relative format.

The typical features found within the question format are detailed below.

Best Practice

When navigating through a survey template, chapter, section or question within GYDE365-Design, following each recommendation detailed below will ensure the experience is optimised for the end-user and the output value is maximised.

Assign ownership to a user or group of users for completing each Chapter.
Read each question carefully and hover over the small blue question mark to receive a short informative overview.
Review the help URL linked to each question to establish a comfortable level of understanding prior to answering.
Where video links are present, follow the link to view the content, again, this will benefit users in answering each question.
Communicate and track correspondence using the comments functionality.
Highlight any gaps or functionality concerns using the additional comments text box at the end of each section.

Navigating the Help File

Each question is presented with a help file that details the context and content required to answer the question.

The help file can be found by clicking a link found on the question as demonstrated below.

Each help file is structured into a series of titled accordions to help users navigate to the type of help they require. Each accordion can be opened and closed by selecting the arrow on the right hand side.