Understanding Default Posting Dates with Business Central
In a previous post, I discussed the difference between the various dates available on sales and purchase orders. In this post, we’ll discuss the posting date and how you can default that date on your sales and purchase orders in Business Central. While the functionality is the same on both sales and purchase orders, how you set the option may be different between sales and purchases.
Contained in the Sales & Receivables Setup and the Purchases & Payables Setup page is a setting labeled “Default Posting Date”. The only options for this field are either “Work Date” or “No Date.”
When entering a new sales or purchase order, the Posting Date on the order will either be the current Work Date or blank depending on the setting in this field. Seems simple enough, right? Well, you can run into issues if this is not set correctly and your users are not paying attention when posting shipments, receipts, or invoices. Let’s discuss these issues.
The default setting for this field is “Work Date”. What this means is that when you create the order, your current work date will be entered as the Posting Date on the order. You can manually change it if needed. The issue is that if you don’t change it when posting, the system will use that date to post the transaction. This could result in posting a transaction into the wrong accounting period if you don’t notice it and the period is open.
For example, you might create a sales order with a posting date of 9/30/25. The order does not ship until 10/2/25. If you don’t change the posting date on the order, then when you post the shipment and/or the invoice, the order will post back to 9/30/25 even though that’s not when it actually shipped. Therefore, your financials may not accurately reflect when the order should be classified. The same issue exists with purchase orders.
The alternative is to set the field as “No Date”. With this setting, the posting date field will be blank when first creating the order. You would then be required to enter a posting date prior to posting the order. You might think that this is what you should do, but it’s not always that easy.
Many third party extensions which deal with posting shipments and receipts have a process to update the posting date on the order when processing the shipment or receipt. This is a desirable feature. But that works only if using one of these packages.
If you leave the field blank, it can be annoying to always have to open the order to set the posting date prior to posting. Your company may also be one that ships or receives very quickly after creating the order, so defaulting the posting date to the work date may be desirable.
Since the setting can be different between sales and purchases, you could have a different setting for each depending on your process.
Whatever your process and need, review the setting for the default posting date within your own organization and your processes. This field can help or hinder depending on use, so discuss with your team how this should be set.
