How Many Dimensions can I use in Business Central?

Dynamics 365 – Business Central using dimensions instead of additional segments for General Ledger analysis and reporting.

In settings up a new instance of #Dyn365BC, settings up dimensions is a critical piece to the puzzle.  How do you want to measure profitability?  What type of non GL information would you like to track?

Some examples of dimensions are Department, Territory, Region, Sales Campaign, Project, Asset ID, etc.

With dimensions, because of the way they are presented in the system, there is a misconception about how many dimensions an organization can use in their system.

Global Dimensions

When setting up your company, a good practice is to identify two of you dimensions as Global Dimensions.  These are required to facilitate automation of dimensions for transactions (dimension rules, basically).  In my example, I set Department and Customer Group.

What is a global dimension?  From the manual:  Global Dimensions are used as filters, for example, on reports and batch jobs. You can use only two global dimensions, so choose dimensions you will use often.

By settings these, it will rename Global Dimension 1 Code and Global Dimension 2 code throughout the system.

Shortcut Dimension Codes

Hmmmm… Take a look at that dimensions area again… it also is asking us to setup Shortcut Dimension Codes.  Shortcut Dimension 1 & 2 match the Global Dimension 1 & 2 codes.  There are 8 Shortcut Dimension codes available.

What is a shortcut dimension code?  From the manual: Shortcut Dimension Codes are available as fields on journal and document lines. You can create up to six of these.

So how many Dimensions can I have in my system?

So… our limit of Global Dimensions is 2… and our limit of shortcut dimensions is 6… so that total dimensions we can use is 8?  Right?  No.  The answer is simple, you can use an unlimited amount of dimensions.  The limitation is for the two specified types of dimensions… but over all, you can use as many as you’d like (or need… let’s go with ‘need’).

Thanks for reading!

Shawn Dorward