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,…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
Most revolutions announce themselves with a loud bang. This one happened quietly, in lines of code. When Microsoft introduced the extension model in Business Central, it didn’t reach me with much fanfare. I shrugged; it sounded like another overpromised solution—maybe even one that would make life harder. (I’m looking at you, RDLC report layouts.) Despite…
For many writers, the debate between pantsing (writing by the seat of your pants) and outlining is deeply personal. Both approaches have their merits, but after four years of working on my “FTL” project, I decided it was time for a change. Here’s why I stopped pantsing and started outlining my fiction works. The Struggle…
I suppose I have been a “writer” for as long as I have been able to read. I learned to read at an early age, and I could read before I started Pre-K. I can thank my parents, who emphasized the importance of reading and the benefit of having an older sibling who loved to…
If you’re in accounting, you already know that closing the books isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s like finishing a marathon, and just when you finally exhale, someone walks in and says: “Wait! We found another expense from last year.” If that line makes your stomach drop, you’re not alone. But here’s the good…
