Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 – Performance Improvements for Transfer of Opening Balances to a New Fiscal Year in Multiple Legal Entities Simultaneously
The Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 release has some performance improvements built in for transferring opening balances to the new fiscal year for multiple legal entities simultaneously.
Before R3 release, transferring of opening balances for multiple companies, one at a time caused performance issues. The transfer of opening balances deletes the balances from all legal entities and rebuilds them. When there are multiple legal entities, this process takes some time and during the process the dimension balances table is locked. If another user wants to open a form that uses the dimension balances, for example the main accounts list page, the user will experience a non-responding form, thinking their session is dead.
The good news in R3 is that the rebuilding is done on a subset of the balances; only for the current legal entity. In R3, the company criteria is changed when the primary ledger ID is retrieved from the current legal entity:
A table Dimension set balance (DimensionFocusBalance) is a global table and stores all balances for all Dimension sets in all legal entities. A field Ledger has the reference for the legal entity. The Ledger Rec ID is used to initialize balances. If one cannot be located the ledgerRecId = 0 is used instead:
The improvement changes the way the records are retrieved and now the transfer for opening balances for balance sheet accounts to a new fiscal year can be run in multiple companies at the same time.
The process for the transfer of opening balances in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is described below.
Transfer Opening Balances
When a fiscal year comes to conclusion and has a closing balance – the last balance in the accounts, the following process is run to carry forward the ending balance to the new financial year for their balance sheet accounts and then the ending balance becomes the opening balance – the first entry in the new fiscal year.
Follow these steps to transfer opening balances:
1. Navigate to General ledger > Periodic > Fiscal year close > Opening balances
2. NOTE: The General ledger parameters section is unavailable. These settings can only be changed using the General ledger parameters form (General ledger > Setup).
Enter the End date of the fiscal year
4. The transfer method for the balance sheet accounts must be specified. In the Balance accounts field, designate how opening balances for balance sheet accounts are transferred by selecting one of the following two options:
- Select Reset to reset the balance accounts, and enter the opening balances for the balance sheet accounts manually
- Select Closing → Opening to continue with the balance sheet accounts, and have the opening transactions created automatically by the system
5. Enter the Account for transfer of year-end result: the main account for the annual profit and loss activity net amount. The value is retrieved from the Accounts for automatic transactions form but it can be edited. This field must be populated.
6. Enter the Voucher number for the opening transactions that are going to be created. This is mandatory if the Voucher number field that must be filled in is selected in General ledger parameters.
7. Click OK when all the fields are filled out. This process may take several minutes depending on the amount of data. When the process is done, check the balance accounts through the Chart of Accounts or print a financial statement on the opening transactions.
In this process Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 creates:
- A line for the opening transaction. This line makes up the opening balance for the new fiscal year.
- A transaction for each currency and dimension. If using dimensions, decide to either create opening transactions per dimension or as totals only: select the default financial dimension values on the ‘Financial dimensions’ tab. It is important and necessary to retain this to keep statistics and financial reporting available to the user. Balances can be transferred as often as needed during the year-end close process.
- The parameter Delete close-of-year transactions during transfer controls if year-end transactions are deleted if Opening transaction is run multiple times for the same fiscal year (in case when changes are made). If this parameter is on, the rebuild of balances is run. If it is off, only new appending opening transactions are created and the rebuilding is not executed.