Part 3. Mistakes Were Made: The Definitive Guide to Corrections and Reversal in Dynamics 365 Business Central

It’s easy to make mistakes. Correcting them should be, too.  Over the years, Business Central has continually improved the ways you can fix these business boo-boos. In this series we’ll go over all the different ways you can undo or fix these slip-ups. To err is human – to correct, divine!

This series covers the following areas:

• Documents and Payments
• General Ledger and Bank Reconciliations
• Dimensions and Budgets
• Orders
• Inventory

Dimensions have historically been a challenge to correct, given the pervasive nature of Dimensions (from documents to subledgers to general ledger). To read up on the Dimension correction functionality in Business Central, you can find the relevant section of this blog post of ours.

Eisenhower once famously said that plans are useless but planning is indispensable. While I generally agree with that sentiment, my accounting background has proven to me that the plans themselves are pretty useful, too, even when they’re wildly off from what actually happens.

Looking into deviation or variance between budgets and actuals can tell us a lot about the assumptions and information we relied on to make those plans in the first place. They are also very beneficial to unearth learnings about what you’re doing right that can be adopted across your organization, as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.

In the context of Business Central, budgets have a variety of forms: G/L Budgets, Item Budgets, and Cost Budgets. Each of them have their own idiosyncrasies, however this section will focus on G/L Budgets, as those generally trickle into Analysis Views, where many a client will find themselves pulling their reports from.

But budget entry is finnicky – whether you’re doing direct entry or importing from Excel, something invariably always goes wrong the first few times you do it. Thankfully there’s always a way to correct a budget.

Correcting using ‘direct entry’ is super straight-forward. It is, as its name implies, about directly changing the numbers in the budget.

The way to do it is to first navigate to your G/L Budgets:

Then hit the Edit Budget button in the ribbon:

Then pick the values for your correction vis-à-vis the “Filters” section of the worksheet – in the case below I’m using two Dimensions:

Then just directly overwrite the number in the corresponding period you want to adjust. In this example I’m adjusting the February numbers from 2,100 to 4,200:

When I click off of the cell, the new value will display. Drilling down into the underlying entries you’ll see the correcting entry of $ was made to adjust that revenue up:

If the idea of manually adjusting each of these values is very unappealing or if you have far too many adjustments to make you can simply import the changes or updated budget.

If you want to import your corrections, on the Budget page you can simply export to Excel:

Put in your export options:

And click OK, after which you’ll be prompted to download an Excel file. Save that and open it in Excel, making your changes.

Once you’ve done that, save and close your file and, again on the Budget page, click Import from Excel in the ribbon:

If you’re uploading an entirely new budget you’ll want to select “Replace Entries” in the import options:

If you’re only importing net change adjustment lines, you can select “Add Entries” in the import options:

Then click OK, select your Excel file, and confirm – when prompted – the action to take with the imported lines.

There’s a good chance after doing the above your Analysis Views may need to be updated. To do so, simply search for the “Update Analysis Views” routine:

Leaving the Code filter blank will update them all, otherwise you can pick just one and then click OK.

And just. Like. That. Your budget and Analysis Views are updated!