NAV Concept: Closing Date vs Normal Date

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV, every Date has a corresponding “Closing Date”. What are they and what are they used for? Let’s take a look.

You may see entries in your system like this:

Notice the peculiar Posting Date? C12/31/2009? That’s a Closing Date. NAV handles them as a special date that is after 12/31/2009 but before 1/1/2010.

Why?

Simple: By having Closing Entries be on a special date, you can run reports on a whole year, such as 1/1/2009..12/31/2009, and automatically exclude Closing Entries. This makes it very simple to re-create reports for prior periods after a Closing Process has been completed.

Technical Note

Since NAV runs (primarily) on SQL Server, and SQL Server obviously doesn’t support virtual dates snuck in between normal dates, how does that data look on the SQL side?

Easy answer again: Dates in NAV are stored as DateTime fields in SQL, but typically with a time portion of 0:00:00.000. Closing Dates are set instead to 23:59:59.999.