Period Consolidation- Avoiding BF entries

Hi Everyone-

We have seen a few more customers asking what is the “BF” entry in the GL tables that I am seeing? Another question is why I am not seeing any detailed GL transaction information for an entire fiscal period? Well, both answers are typically a result of running the Period Consolidation Utility in Microsoft Dynamics GP. What is that you ask? 

This is a Routine in the Financial Series that will take your transaction detail for the period of your choice, and will summarize it per account. There is a warning message that will appear to let you know these details will be removed also at the time that you run this routine. The detailed information stored in the GL20000 (open) or GL30000(history) table is removed for the period(s) selected for the GL account (or range of accounts). When the consolidation is complete, the detailed transactions will no longer be available for reporting or inquiry purposes. You can no longer post transactions to this period either, and a single total will appear on the Detailed Trial Balance for each consolidated account.

You will then notice a BF source document for the entry created from this process.  The process will consolidate those individual GL entries into one net BF entry for that entire period.  This has also been confused with the "BBF" entry that is created during the Year-End close process for balance sheet accounts.  The Year-End close process does not delete any detailed transactions, but just moves them to history (from the GL20000 over to the GL30000) and creates a BBF entry, whereas the Period Consolidation Routine completely removes the detailed transactions.

There was a time where this may have been useful when memory capacity was very limited, but I would not suggest using this utility unless you are in a dire need for space and are ok with the changes described above. Another option to consider is creating a historical company if you have multiple years of data (that you very seldom or never need to access) before a certain year. For customers with data all the way back to the 1990's, shifting any data before 2000 or even 2010 to a historical company may be something to consider before running the consolidation routine.

Until next time...Have a great Summer!  

Adam G.

Microsoft Dynamics GP