Insights from the world of ERP
Retrofitting a Broken Chart of Accounts
This is the part of the series for the organizations that did not get to start clean. Maybe the implementation happened before anyone read an article like this. Maybe the chart was inherited from a predecessor system and no one had the time or the political capital to challenge it. Maybe the design conversations happened,…
How the Chart of Accounts Impacts Budgets, Forecasts, and Analytics
Picture the scene. An organization has just completed a Business Central implementation. The go-live went reasonably well. Transactions are posting. The close is running. Leadership is excited about the analytics possibilities, and the IT team has stood up a Power BI environment connected to the Business Central data. Six months later, the Power BI dashboards…
Reporting Requirements You Must Capture Before Finalizing the Chart of Accounts
Most implementations ask what reports they need on Day 1. Almost none ask what reports they will need in Year 3. Both questions should be answered before a single account is created. There is a step that belongs at the very beginning of every Business Central implementation. It happens before the Chart of Accounts design…
Dimensions vs Natural Accounts: How to Decide What Goes Where
The most powerful reporting lever in Business Central is not the Chart of Accounts. Most organizations never fully use it. There is a question that does not get asked often enough during Business Central design sessions, and it is the one that separates charts that age well from charts that become anchors. The question is:…
Designing a Chart of Accounts for Business Central (Not Your Last ERP)
Accountant-friendly and report-friendly are not the same. In Business Central, that distinction matters more than most teams realize. In almost every Business Central implementation, a familiar conversation happens between discovery workshops and the first design review. It almost always starts the same way. The controller presents a clean, organized draft Chart of Accounts. The groupings…
Your Chart of Accounts Is Already Determining Your Financial Reports
And you probably made those decisions before anyone asked a single reporting question. Most organizations treat the Chart of Accounts as an accounting task. It gets handed to a controller or a senior accountant early in the implementation, they build what they know, and by the time the project team asks how financial reports will…
