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Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

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Posted on by 3,085

Lately, we have had several expense reports get posted with Accounting Distributions that don't account for the Project and Category.  This causes a problem as it doesn't create a Project Transaction like it should.

ER:

ERDA.jpg

Accounting Distribution:

DA.jpg

As you can see, the Accounting Distribution fields for Project ID and Category are blank.

Even more interesting, the other 'Hotel' lines and other category lines are just fine. It's only this one.

Any ideas on what might cause this?

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  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Olivia,

    This is the workflow condition we use. This is on the expense line sub workflow

    pastedimage1669812787592v1.png

    We discovered (for us) the cause of this issue is when someone approves a line level expense workflow from the work items assigned to me screen &mi=WorkflowWorkListAssignedToMe

    pastedimage1669813052003v2.png

    If the user opens the work item and approves inside the expense report then the distributions are fine. If they approve from the work items screen they are missing. 

    My team get any lines with missing distribution allocated as the last step in the line level workflow. They then open the work item and approve from within the expense report.

    There are two reasons we didn't use the MS feature 

    1. it only evaluated the first line on the expense report (will test to see if this is fixed)

    2. This generates an error for AP. Using the workflow we know AP will be able to post the expense without issue. 

    As I have said before this is a pretty serious bug as it means expenses don't use the proper posting profile and can end up in the P&L rather than in WIP to be billed to the client and the project transaction is missing completely!

    Thanks

    Dave   

  • Olivia C Profile Picture
    Olivia C 55 on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Dave,

    Thank you very much, you have been so helpful.

    It would be greatly appreciated if you could screenshot your workflow conditions for this as I'm not hopeful that there is a fix at the moment.

    I understand that at the moment you don't have the feature enabled because all this does is identify expense transactions which haven't posted to the project successfully as there's no accounting Distrubutions populated? I suppose this is why you have the workflow config in place?

    Please can I ask also, with the workflow in place, does your team then go into the expense report and select 'view distributions' so that it populates the accounting distributions and posts to the project? Just wondering as it may be a task which my team need to carry out in the future if no successful fix.

    Thank you for the quality fix mention too!

    Olivia

  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Olivia,

    I am afraid we never found a satisfactory fix for this issue.

    We have had to add a final check to the expense line workflow which evaluates for missing distributions. I can grab a screenshot of the workflow config if it would help you?

    Basically every line with missing distributions gets allocated to my team to fix by the workflow!

    That’s interesting to hear MS say they have fixed their “feature” for this issue so it checks all lines. We recently upgraded to 10.0.30 so I will give this a test.

    Please be aware if you are going to 10.0.30 make sure you get the version with the expense report quality fixes. We had two new issues with expense reports after the upgrade both of which needed the quality update applied.

    Thanks

    Dave

  • Olivia C Profile Picture
    Olivia C 55 on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Dave, we are currently facing this issue at the moment so this thread has been very helpful.

    I know that we can enable the feature to prevent expenses being posted when they dont have any accounting distributions. But my question is, why havent MS created an accounting distribution for the project in the first place?

    The feature seems more of a workaround as opposed to a fix, as it then means we have to click into the view distributions each time it fails for it to populate the accounting distributions.

    I can also see from later on in the thread that this only fixes it on the first line and if there are multiple expense line items then it won't fill out the other accounting distributions and therefore post to the project.

    MS have said that on version 10.0.30 by enabling the feature it will apply to each line level but again, this will just alert us of the issue sooner rather than fixing it completely.

    Are there any updates you are aware of on this one?

    Thank you

    Olivia

  • b_radlyjames Profile Picture
    b_radlyjames 3,085 on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    DaveC,

    Thank you for posting again.  This should be reported to MS as bug.

    Brad

  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Just a follow up we have found a bug with the feature "Restrict expense report posting when project details are missing in project accounting distribution"

    It only checks the first line on an expense report!!!! So if that is valid it still posts the others with no project accounting distributions :-(

    This is a really serious bug as transactions which should be charged back to the clients aren't hitting the project and are hitting our P&L

  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi,

    Just wanted to provide an update for anyone having this issue in D365 F&O if you enable the following feature this blocks expenses being posted without a project accounting distribution

    pastedimage1622797305803v2.png

    This gives the following error when posting

    pastedimage1622797411924v3.png

    of course the project does exist AX just hasn't created a  project accounting distribution

    You can see this by querying the PROJECTACCOUNTINGDISTIBUTION table

    pastedimage1622797505392v4.png

    You can fix this by clicking the "View distributions" button on the expense report which won't post

    pastedimage1622797571315v5.png

    This causes the project accounting distribution to be populated

    pastedimage1622797639578v6.png

    After which the expense report will post. 

    pastedimage1622797711317v7.png

    Thanks

    Dave

  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Brad,

    Let me know how you get on. It could be the same with the header level workflow.

    The issue occurs for us when the approval happens on the “work items assigned to me” screen without opening the item.

    Thanks

    Dave

  • b_radlyjames Profile Picture
    b_radlyjames 3,085 on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    DaveC,

    Interesting find.  We don't do line level approvals, however, I'm going to test and see if that causes it on my end as well. Thanks!

    Brad

  • Dave C Eng Profile Picture
    Dave C Eng on at
    RE: Expense Report Accounting Distribution missing Project and Category

    Hi Brad,

    We think we have found the issue in our case do you have workflow approvals on your expenses?

    The issue for us happens if someone approves an expense line without opening the expense report. In this case the distributions go wrong. If they approve from within the expense report everything is fine!

    Thanks

    Dave

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