Business Central: How will default Dimensions help the business ?

Introduction:

What are Dimensions and Dimension values in Business Central?

Dimensions are used to analyse data and categorise entries in NAV and Dimension values are the tags or labels to classify the record.

For e.g: Suppose a Manufacturing firm has three different sites – New York, London, Paris. Here Site is a Dimension and New York, London and Paris are Dimension values.

It extensively helps the Financial report as we can filter Invoice, Payment and ledger entries by filtering by dimension. Dimensions provide more flexibility for financial reports. e.g The shipments sent to Paris can be easily distinguished by adding filter as Site=Paris

Pre-requisites:

D365 Business Central

Procedure:

Wouldn’t it be time consuming to enter dimensions for each and every document ? Yes, you are right but we’ve got default dimensions as our time saviour

Use of Default dimensions:

We can setup default dimensions for Customers, Vendors, Items. The same will be copied to the journals or documents.

Navigate to Customers and open a Customer card and click on Dimensions on your top ribbon.

Here, I’m attaching the dimension as Site=London to our Customer.

Value Posting – We’ve got 4 options here- Blank, Code mandatory, Same code and No code.

• Code Mandatory – This means the dimension code is mandatory dimension. The system will suggest Site as London but we can change the dimension if required.
• Same code – This means the dimension code and Dimension value code London is mandatory. It will throw an error while posting the document if value is changed.
• No code– If we want to block a dimension to be used in this example with a customer then we can use No code.

Let’s create a Sales order using our Customer and check for dimensions in the below gif. We notice here that the Sales order is automatically assigned Site as London. This is because of the default dimension assigned to the Customer.

If we post our Sales order and check for dimensions in our General ledger entries, we find our global dimensions site as London

Dimensions in Financial Reporting

• To check the progress of the company we use Account schedules and Analysis views. In account schedule we can use dimension filter to check for Revenue, cash flows etc.
• Account schedules analyze figures in G/L accounts, and compare general ledger entries with general ledger budget entries.
• Analyzing data by dimensions gives you greater insight into your business, so you can evaluate information, such as how well your business is operating, where it is thriving and where it is not, and where more resources should be allocated.
• Using more than two dimensions when creating an entry, you can carry out a more complex analysis, such as sales per sales campaign per customer group per area.
• As a quick way to analyze transactional data by dimensions, you can filter totals in the chart of accounts and entries in all Entries pages by dimensions
• An analysis by dimensions displays a selected combination of dimensions. You can store and retrieve each analysis you have set up. 

In the below example, we have set the Dimension Department by Sales on our Accounts schedule.

We can also analyse our view for revenue, cash flows by adding dimension as Site, department, Project etc.

Conclusion:

Dimensions are attributes and values that categorize entries so you can track and analyze them. Dimensions help to simply the chart of accounts, journal entries and documents.