NEW Dimension Correction tool in Business Central 2021 Wave 1

To be honest I’m thrilled to write about this topic. The thing is, that I started my NAV developer career from developing the Dimension Correction tool for NAV 3.7 and then supported and upgraded it till NAV2016. “Trust me” I know what I’m talking about 

So, what’s you are talking about?

This is the definition from the Business Central 2021 release wave 1 plan release notes

You can now correct dimensions for general ledger (G/L) entries to ensure your financial reporting gives you accurate insights without having to make notes of temporary data entry mistakes. For one or more G/L entries, you can change the dimension values, add dimensions, or remove them.

In short: you can change dimensions on posted general ledger entries.

I was surprised that some people thought of this as “you can change dimension values”, thinking about dimension values list, so they didn’t understand what’s new here. No, it’s about changing dimensions on posted entries… g/l entries to be more specific … and it’s one of the problems, but I will talk about this later.

Why do we need that?

Once again, the description from the release notes

When a data entry mistake happens, either in journal entries, document posting, or data added through APIs, it distorts the picture of the business you get from financial analyses. Often, the data is used only for financial reporting, and doesn't necessarily need to be corrected on the source document.

In short: users make mistakes and posting credit memos or corrective journals is not always possible and easy.  

Just to give you an example from the real-life experience. When I managed the NAV support department at my NAVDesign company, the 25% from the 1000 incoming support cases per month were about changing the dimensions on the posted ledger entries. We built all possible dimension checks before postings, to minimize the amount of such errors, but they still happened.

We built a Dimension Correction tool but didn’t give it to the users. We thought that if a user makes mistake and have to ask the support team to fix it, he will try to avoid mistakes in the future. I was wrong. Users still made mistakes.

At the same time, “With great power comes great responsibility” like Peter Parker told, and we though that users are not ready to take it. Changing dimensions, even with a good tool, is not so as technical problem (it is for sure), but more a business problem. There are so many reports working on so many different data sources and on different date periods. Keeping the integrity between all of them is the key thing here.  

It was 6 years ago. Did things change now? Let’s try to figure out.

Continue to the full blog here and you will find

• What different people think about this tool
• How to use Dimension Correction
• What is happening behind the scenes
• What's the influence on 3-rd party systems
• What should be improved 

So, relax and have happy reading... and leave your thoughts in the comments