Dynamics AX 2012 General Ledger Journal Setup

In Microsoft Dynamics AX, journals play a very important role and without their creation you will not be able to use most of the features in the software.

So what are journals and why are they very this important? A very easy way to understand journals is to imagine how accountants work. They usually record financial transactions in a book which will be transferred at a later time to the general ledger. The same principle applies in Dynamics AX.

Dynamics AX journals are worksheets which can be used to enter transactions before they are manually posted to the system. You must setup journals in Dynamics AX before you can use the financial module.

Dynamics AX has both system generated journals and manual journals. Elimination and Allocation journals are good examples of a system generated journal .There are manually generated journals and system generated journals. They are automatically created and cannot be manually created.

Manual journals entries are generated by postings entered into the system such as a general journal entry.

When you use a manual journal entry the transactions are not posted immediately. Before you can post a manual entry, they can be the following states:

• Changed
• Reviewed
• Approved
• Deleted

I have compiled the list of the mandatory journals that must be setup before you can use Microsoft Dynamics AX into an excel sheet below, this must be configured in the General ledger setup. There are other journals used in Dynamics AX but they are not setup in General ledger but are setup in the individual modules and are not as complicated as the general ledger journals. These item journal, Hour journal and expense journal used in the project management and accounting module.

This post will focus on the general ledger journals shown below:

There are mandatory fields that must be filled before a journal can be setup successfully. These fields are shown in the table above.

You can choose a custom name and description that suits your organization to identify the journals and what it is used for. I have just used these as illustrations.

The journal type determines the type of journal created and consequently the module where it will be used.

In my next post, I will give a comprehensive explanation of journal types.

The voucher series provide unique identification for each journal transaction carried out  so that similar transactions can easily be traced in Dynamics AX. Please take note that you must setup the corresponding number sequences for the voucher series before you can use them. To this you will need to open

Organization administration > Common> Number sequences.

Number sequences will be covered in a different post.