What happens when you hit the max Journal Entry Number

This falls under the category of “who knew?”!

There is a long story to why I even tested this in the first place, but it’s not very interesting so I will spare you the details!  Suffice it to say I’m evaluating some requirements for a client who is planning to add a significant volume of transactions to Dynamics GP (potential volume in the millions of transactions per year).

The Question

In a discussion, someone asked me “how big is the Journal Entry number field?”.

Great question!  I can’t say I ever really looked at it, it is sufficiently large I never have needed to look.

The Answer

The answer?  It’s an 8 digit field, and the highest allowed number is 99,999,998 (oddly enough, 99,999,999 is not allowed, go figure!).

So like any other geek out there, my mind wandered to “what happens if you get to that number?".  I thought oh my, this conceivably could be an issue some day far down the road if this volume in fact translates to individual journal entries.

What Happens Next?

In almost any other area of GP, this usually means you may be, well, snookered.  We’re trained to leave leading zeros in front of all sorts of “next number” fields for future growth.

Well with the Journal Entry number, after you post/save the document with JE# 99,999,998, it automatically reverts back to 1 or the lowest unused journal entry number not used in an open year.

Huh?

That last “or” is an interesting one.  If you test this in Fabrikam, assuming you haven’t manually closed any years, you will find this out.

The JE# cycle will start again at 1, in most cases, assuming you are a normal operation and have closed your years and are not running this many transactions through in the course of an open business year.

However, with Fabrikam (and it could happen anywhere), it so happens that in my sample data JE#1 to 4 were posted but in an open year.  For those that don’t use Fabrikam much, it has a gazillion open fiscal years which usually people ignore (or fix) for their testing purposes.

So I closed the year 2014 and once JE#1 to 4 etc. was in history, I could use it again.  Before closing the year it jumped to JE#5, and then after that to some number in the 60’s, and it would keep jumping to the lowest JE# not already used in the YTD open table.

If you try to re-use a JE# in an open year, it says this JE# has already been used.

I love learning something new, no matter how trivial is may seem!  I doubt I will use this morsel of information often in my consulting but you never know!