Moving Analytical Accounting Data to History in Dynamics GP

I recently joined Microsoft as a Partner Consultant for the Global Partner Services team. I have been associated for more than 8 years in the design, development and implementation of Microsoft Dynamics GP in India, Middle East and US. This is my first article on this blog and I hope to post more in the days to come.

I am sure many of us would have seen the error below, which pops up when running the year end close in Microsoft Dynamics GP (with Analytical Accounting (AA) activated and transaction dimensions included in the year end close).

You must consolidate transactions and transfer detail to history utility for the closed year.

In this article, I am going to discuss the cause for this error and how to prevent it from occurring. This article is applicable for users who are using Dynamics GP 10 SP2 and later.

Assuming you have activated AA in the fiscal year 2012 and the client have completed the GL Year End for 2011. In this scenario, the GL transaction detail would have been moved into the historical tables for 2011, but the AA records would not be in the historical tables. Further, there would not be any beginning balances for the transaction dimensions which have been included in the year end close, for 2012. The above error will pop up during the year end close of GL for 2012, if the AA transaction details for the previously closed historical years have not been moved into history and the opening balances have been brought forward into the subsequent year.

So in the above example, if we also had the fiscal year 2010 for which we have done year end close in GP, we would need to move the AA transaction detail to history for both 2010 and 2011 and bring the balances into 2011 and 2012 respectively, before running the year end close for 2012. This is done using the Transfer Transaction Data to History window displayed below, in the AA module.

The year field will display the oldest historical year which is closed in GP (for which AA transaction records are in the open table). You can choose the second option “Consolidate transactions and transfer detail to history” and click the OK button. This will consolidate the balances at transaction dimension code level and move the balances for dimension codes associated with balance sheet accounts into the next year and then move all the AA detail records from the open tables into the historical tables. This process needs to be completed for all the historical years starting from the oldest. This will ensure that any reports that you generate within the AA module is complete and accurate. 

Once this process has been run for all the historical years, we can then run the year end close for the current year without issues.

Note: You would need to ensure that the transaction dimensions have been marked to be included in the year end process in order for this process to bring forward the balances for dimension codes into the subsequent year. 

You can also take a look at the KB article which gives more information about the year end closing procedures in Analytical Accounting.

The year-end close procedures for Analytical Accounting in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 2 and in later versions (KB 960356)

Hope this article is helpful to all…

Until next post!

Siva