Period Closing Procedure – Dynamics 365 Finance

One of the workspace is exclusively provided to manage period end activity.

Let’s explore.

Workspace Overview:

Financial period close

Path :

1. Home Page
2. General Leger > Period Close > Financial period close workspace

This workspace is addon functionality over and above closing financial period.

Using this workspace we can assign month end / period end activities to each responsible person. We can also define dependency of one activity on following activity. We can also set due date to complete this activity.

Finance manager can use this workspace as Dashboard of Task & Status to manage and control the all activities assign to his / her team members. FM can have a holistic view of status of task before closing financial period.

Following status is available in this workspace:

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What we have seen is final output. Let’s understand how can we configure this workspace.

Configuration of Financial period closing workspace

Path : General Leger > Period Close > Financial period close configuration

In this configuration we have start configuring things from bottom to up, so let’s get started.

Closing Roles:

In this form we have to create / update multiple closing role to assign different responsible person.

Following are the example of closing roles:

Resources / Responsible Employees:

In this form we have to add responsible employees with proper closing roles for responsible legal entities. For example Mr. Arnie Mondloch is responsible for AR invoicing & AP Payment for GBSI,RUMF,RURT,USMF,USRT and He should only able to see his task in workspace. In this case following will be the solution.

So here we have assigned Mr. Aenie to two different closing roles and each role can be linked to one or more legal entities.

Task Area:

Task area is the area of work. It normally group of work related to one area. For example, Free text Invoice, sending Customer Statement, Collection Latter, Update or Validate Credit Limit etc. are the work related to Accounts Receivable area. So we can create multiple Task area as per our requirement.

Calendars for task scheduling:

In this form we need to define calendar for Task Scheduling. This will help us to make sure task should be due on working days and not on holidays. In normal scenario we have 5 days a working in a week. Following is the example of Calendar.

Templates:

We can schedule multiple Task template for multiple requirement. For example we need two different template as one for Month End Procedure and second for year end procedure. In this template we need to link Task Area to Closing Role (Which is already Assigned to Responsible Employee) for Specific Legal Entities. We can also set some dependency as Complete AR / AP Forex Revaluation before generation of Financial or Closing of period.

1. Add New Template
2. Copy Existing Template
3. Assign Closing Roles, Task Link, Due time and Legal entity in which this Task needs to be done.
4. Add Attachment (Instruction for completing Task / SOP) and Dependency with other Task

Closing schedule:

Finally the last step is to create Closing schedule where we have to assign template for specific legal entity with calendar. We can create multiple schedule as per requirement such as different schedule for legal entity having different calendar or Template.

Concussion

Once we complete the configuration user can use this schedule on Financial period close workspace.

This exercise will help Finance Managers to closed the period with accuracy and efficiency. using this workspace every responsible person will have a knowledge of his / her responsibility and they will be able to focus on work and able complete on provided time limit.

This will also help Finance Manager to allocate the skilled resource for appropriate functions. From this Finance Manager can check how much work has been completed and which work is pending in which company in which area and by who.

I hope you guys will enjoy this functionality of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operation.

Please feel free to provide your feedback in comments or in personal message.