Dynamics Business Central (NAV)
Experts:
Allocation Accounts – distribution vs breakdown
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Allocation Accounts – distribution vs breakdown
We are currently moving from GP to BC. In GP, we rely heavily on variable allocations. We are NFP and have a lot of reporting compliance and complex cost centers/dimensions. From what we have seen, BC can not accommodate how we set up our variables accounts. I am hoping someone can show me it can be done!
Within our GL account, we have a department segment & a location segment. We have FTE unit accounts set up based on an employees physical location and these serve as the breakdown accounts. The distribution dimensions can often be different than the breakdown dimensions depending on the program they work under. ie an employee can physically be at location 123 but they work under a specific program where all expense goes to 1 central location 999.
For illustration, Utility Expense at Location 123:
breakdown accounts FTE-111-123, FTE-222-123, FTE-333-123
distribution accounts UTILITY-111-999, UTILITY-222-123, UTILITY-333-123From what I have learned so far, the breakdown dimensions in BC determine the distribution as well – which isn’t going to work for us. Does anyone have suggestions on how we can make this work in BC?
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5 Replies
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Hi Valerie, I am with Dynamic Budgets. We are an ISV that helps NFP with their complex budgeting needs that BC does not handle well. Have you spoken with your partner regarding your current situation? They should be able to assist you. If you need additional help, I would love to take this offline to assist you.
Please feel free to take a look at our website http://www.dynamicbudgets.com or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
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Hi Valerie,
We moved from GP to BC about 10 months ago. I’m more on the technical side of things, and I’m sometimes told my credits don’t always match my debits, but we had several discussions around this.
In our scenario, we have several companies and locations, so our GP G/L accounts were similar to yours: <natural>-<company>-<location>.
A couple of concepts that we struggled with was that the concept of distributions from GP really goes away in BC and is more or less replaced with dimensions. In BC, our chart of accounts was greatly simplified as we now only have the natural account. Each transaction line gets assigned a company dimension and an area dimension. Hopefully your partner has some experience with GP – ours did not, so explaining a few things we did in GP was sometimes challenging.
We also took the opportunity to rebuild the chart of accounts, which was really worth it to simplify and standardize accounts that had evolved over the last 20 years of changes in business practices.
To illustrate what the GL entries look like in BC, here a quick look at how they look for us with the dimensions replacing the 2 segments of the GP GL account numbers:
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Thanks for your explanation Jeff! I do think that we have approached our natural accounts and dimensions in a similar way to your screen shot. We have 1 utility account and the dimensions are the department and location. I think the way I illustrated it made it look like we had a segmented account. The utility account is the natural account and then we have dimensions set up for dept and location. I hope that clarifies it.
My issue is the way some of our departments work, the department & location for the distribution account can not match the breakdown/statistical account department & location.
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Hi Jeff,
This lines up with what we’ve seen as well. The shift from GP distributions to BC’s dimension-first approach is usually the biggest mindset change, especially during finance review when things don’t “look” the way they did in GP.
We’ve helped teams recently moving from GP to BC, where the system was technically fine, but the challenge was aligning the original GP intent with how BC handles postings, allocations, and audits. We also have a bench of GP-experienced resources who work alongside BC environments to keep things aligned, so the setup holds up cleanly as things evolve.
Appreciate you sharing your experience, it’s a helpful context for anyone going through this transition.
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This comes up a lot for NFPs moving from GP to BC, especially with heavy use of GP variable allocations. We’ve actually helped someone recently through a GP-to-BC migration with a similar challenge, where the key was upgrading the allocation approach and aligning the right data using dimension filters.
BC does handle dimensions differently, but it’s usually more about design and how the allocations are reviewed than a hard limitation. Once the physical vs reporting dimensions and audit trail are clear, it tends to fall into place. Happy to walk through an example if helpful.
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