Working with dimensions in Business Central

Keeping financial records accurate and up to date is imperative to the structure and operational wellbeing of any business or organization. Analysis and reporting are vital to efficient business functions—proper and consistent bookkeeping and knowing how to leverage the information found in reports can accelerate growth and help businesses take control of their financial health for the years to come.

Dynamics 365 Business Central hosts a fleet of business intelligence tools that can manage, track, and analyze company data more easily. Users can generate reports and easily share critical documents and data with others, and Business Central users can maximize the power of their data by utilizing dimensions when tracking data entries in accounts or documents.

What are dimensions?

Dimensions are values attached to entries that categorize them for better tracking and analysis. They can be used as filters on reports, batch jobs, ledger entry pages, budgets, and analysis views. Strategic usage of dimensions can allow users to better analyze business transactions—dimensions can track sales revenue by geographical area and customer segment, and they can also track expenses and sales per department within an organization.

They play an especially significant role in ensuring that financial reports are accurate and make it easier to analyze elements in documents, as they can group and categorize data. Essentially, dimensions act as a tag on certain elements that can be sorted and filtered as necessary. Dimensions can also be “tagged” with an unlimited number of Dimension Values, or codes, used to differentiate entries under the same overall dimension. For example:

Dimension: Area, Dimension Values: US, Canada, Mexico, Ireland

Dimension: Product, Dimension Values: Fresh vegetables, Frozen vegetables, Fresh fruits, Frozen fruits

Types of dimensions

There are two types of dimensions that users can attach to entries: global dimensions and shortcut dimensions. Global dimensions are available as fields on journal and document lines, account schedules, batch jobs, reports, and G/L entries. They can also be used as additional fields on purchase and sales document headers, look-ups in G/L, and applied to account fields to indicate different projects, department, areas, salespeople, etc. It’s important to note that only two global dimensions can be set, so they should be values that will be used the most frequently across the organization. Shortcut dimensions are available as fields on journal, sales, and purchase lines, as well as master data- for example, to add values to a certain customer, vendor, or item).

Dimensions are important, but unless users know how to leverage them correctly, they may be missing out on key features for maximum output.

Here’s what users can expect when working with dimensions:

In addition to the two global dimensions that can be used in G/L entries, users can also specify up to six additional shortcut dimensions in the general ledger setup and navigating into ledger entry pages. Dimensions are also available when using the “Edit in Excel” feature for analysis.

The ability to use six shortcut dimensions on top of two global dimensions is incredibly useful because the more dimensions that are used, the more thorough the details that can be added to reports. Users can ultimately gain a deeper knowledge of company financial records—a crucial tool for making informed business decisions.

Administrators, managers, and other users with defined security access can now have more control over the dimension values that are used in the “allowed values filter field” by creating predefined lists of allowed dimension values that are considered valid for certain sets of data. When inputting dimension values, selecting “code mandatory” will require that a dimension be specified for each entry, and the dimensions available will be from the predefined list so the right dimensions are used every time to keep track of necessary data in each entry.

If entries have been posted with incorrect dimensions, corrections can be made from the G/L Register and G/L entries pages. Dimensions on posted entries can be changed by editing the dimension value, and new dimensions can be added or removed altogether, as well.

What updates have been made?

Updates were first made to dimension functionality with 2021 Release Wave 1 for Business Central, which are now generally available for users. These no-nonsense features are straightforward and will ease the sometimes-tedious task of tagging and tracking data values.

The newest updates with 2022 Release Wave 2 will include new reporting capabilities with Power BI that will allow users to create reports and visualizations using dimension values. This new feature will be rolled out October 2022.