Use general journals for advanced accounting

Applies To: Project Operations Integrated with ERP

General journals are the all-purpose accounting feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. Use general journals to record various financial transactions directly into the general ledger (GL). Common uses include daily accounting entries, adjustments, and integrations from external systems.

10.0.46 Feature Enhancements

This feature is now generally available (GA) starting with the 10.0.46 release. Enhancements in the GA include:

• Increased journal line limit to 200 lines from 50 lines. Journals larger than 200 lines return an error on posting that "A maximum of 200 project-based lines are supported" and ask the user to reduce the number of lines.
• Introduced asynchronous processing in transferring the journals to Dataverse.
  • A new process automation named Project Operations create and confirm Dataverse journals is configured with a 5-minute interval to transfer the journal lines to Dataverse, and to send the confirmation in Dataverse when the journal is transferred and ready to confirm.
• The Project Operations Integration workspace is used for tracking any transient communication errors with Dataverse after the first attempt to confirm in Dataverse fails. A new tab for General journal Dataverse sync has been added.
  • After five attempts, any further retries require manual intervention from the user to select Sync to resume retrying the sync and confirmation.
• The Dataverse journal is read-only to users during processing and prevents users from changing or confirming the integrated journal.

10.0.45 Preview

In the 10.0.45 release, a new preview feature is available that enables the ability to create general journals against a project originating in Dataverse. Enable this feature from the Feature management workspace. It's named Enable general journal entries for modern projects. This feature lets you specify the ledger offset account on the journal. Manual control of the offset enables you to have complete control of the accounting behind the expense. In addition, the journal framework provides many advanced capabilities such as workflow and approvals.

Enter transactions

When you enter journals, enter a single line transaction with the project on the left side for the account type, and the ledger on the right side as the offset account type. Entering the project details before the offset creates a new expense against the project. Reversing the order creates a credit for the project.

An alternate way of entering journals is to create a project line with the debit but no offset, and create a second line for the same voucher with a ledger credit.

When you specify a project for the journal, a new Project tab becomes available.

Enter an amount into the debit or credit column to determine the cost price for the journal. A Description is optional and flows through to Dataverse onto the customer invoice. You can modify the currency for cost from the defaulted company currency. Once you enter the account, offset, and price, select the Project tab to complete the remaining required details.

On the Project tab, consider the following fields when creating an entry:

• Contract line ID maps to the Dataverse contract line that allows expense entries or was selected based on task-based billing for the activity number. If the combination of project, category, and task aren't valid for any contract line, the "There's no contract that exists for this project" message displays.
• Activity number maps to task name for project tasks and is optional.
• Category determines which posting account to use for the expense, and defaults the line property value. The category defaults based on the Project management and accounting parameter for the expense category within project category defaults.
• Quantity can be defined.
• Cost price defaults to what you entered on the general tab earlier.
• Sales price always defaults to zero. You always need to define a sales price if necessary.
• Sales currency is locked to the contract currency.

General journals aren't aware of Dataverse pricing. The journals allow manual entry of costs and sales. You might see the warning "Sales price not specified for time and material projects."

When you post the transaction, cost commits immediately to general ledger and the project subledger. This process doesn't use the expense integration account and instead, unlike expense reports, posts immediately. A connection is made to Dataverse by using the IOrganization service, and creates a journal header and journal lines for each cost and sales amount in general journal.

For example, there might be one project expense journal line for 100 cost and 200 sales. This single journal line with cost and sales ends up in Dataverse as two journal lines, with one line being 100 cost and one line being 200 sales. For time and material contract lines, a corresponding cost and sales line is always created even when sales price is zero. For time and material contract lines or projects without contracts, only a cost line is created. The journal is automatically posted in Dataverse.

The general journal has a journal batch number to uniquely identify it. For example, USPM-000095. This same voucher number carries through to the Dataverse journal header Description.

Actuals are created in Dataverse, but only unbilled sales lines are generated in the integration journal. Cost lines were already posted in Finance and were synced to Dataverse, but they don't come back through the integration journal. Once the import from staging completes, the sales line is imported and posted to complete the transaction in Finance.

OneVoucher transactions for allocations

An alternate method to entering journals is possible by enabling One voucher. These transactions can negatively affect reporting and you should thoroughly test them before enabling. These types of transactions allow for allocations or apportionment. For example, Contoso might want to purchase a piece of equipment for use for their organization. They have an expense for the equipment but want to charge back 10% of it to each of 10 individual projects. Entering transactions in this way with several lines with different projects allows for a single voucher entry to be posted against multiple projects at the same time.

Limitations

• Using a cost currency that's different from the project currency requires the UR60 release of Project Operations. Without this update installed, the currency might be posted differently in the Dataverse journal from what was posted in the PMA journal.
• The client limits journals to 200 project-related lines. Previously, this limitation was at 50 lines as of 10.0.45. For optimal performance of synchronization and availability in Dataverse, like during period end close, use smaller journals to post if possible.
• Contract lines with multiple customers aren't considered. These sales lines might not generate unbilled sales correctly without the contract customer defined on the Dataverse journal line.
• You can't use both modern projects and Project Management and Accounting (PMA) projects in the same journal when customers have previous projects and are transitioning to using the modern architecture.
• If you post multiple journals concurrently, avoid using the same projects in multiple journals when possible. Limit journal size to avoid table locking on Dataverse entities where the same project updates cause aggregate totals to be updated and cause locks. The retry logic eventually handles this scenario, but it can introduce delay in confirming the journal and generating Dataverse actuals.
• The process automation slightly lags in knowing if the journal is confirmed in Dataverse or not. Check for a confirmed journal or the existence of the actuals from the journal in Dataverse to know if the transaction is fully synced or not. The integration tracking in Dynamics 365 Finance only checks for updates on posted status at the start of every process automation recurrence.