Playing tag with your GL: Financial Tags in Dynamics 365

Let’s face it: you have piles of GL transactions.  You also have a swarm of different managers, directors, and financial officers all wanting deep dives into your ledger to see exactly where this product line or that customer group is from the finance point of view.  If only there was a way to label ledger transactions so you can easily inquire and report on them.  Well, you are in luck!  You can use Financial Tags in Dynamics 365 Finance to do just that.

But I already have Financial Dimensions. . .

Financial tags don’t replace your existing financial dimensions, as those are a part of your GL setup.  Financial tags instead are a way to add optional labels, if you will, to transactions as you enter them.  They enable you to categorize transactions without having to give your GL a root canal.  You can even disable tags if you need to without losing historical tag data.

Getting Ready to Play Tag

First, a little bit of setup is needed.  You’ll need to head over to General Ledger parameters and set your financial tag delimiter.  A few warnings regarding this bit of setup.  You can’t have a financial tag value that has the delimiter in it, so if you want tag values with a dash in them, don’t select the dash as your delimiter.  Also, once you set your delimiter, you won’t be able to change it, so make sure you really want “~” before you lock it in.

Next, you’ll need to create the tags themselves.  You can have up to 20 tags defined.  They are specific to each legal entity, but don’t worry if you want to set up financial tags in multiple legal entities.  There are available data entities you can use to export and then import your setup.  If you go to General Ledger under Chart of Accounts, you’ll find the Financial Tags setup.  In here, you can create three types of tags.  The first is List, and this allows you to select a type of drop-down when entering a tag value.  In our example here, we chose Purchase order number.  The second is Custom list, which allows you to create your own drop-down list.  The last is Text, and this is just an open text field.  Note that there is no validation for entered tag values, so even if you use List or Custom list, the user can still edit the value and put whatever they want, so make sure your users play fair and enter in good data.  Don’t forget to activate your tags when the setup is complete so they can be used in orders and journals.

Tag, you’re it!

Now you’ve done the setup work, you can find your new tags in the various forms and journals.  For a list of all the places where you can see your tags, check out Financial tags – Finance | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn.  This list is being updated as new versions are released.  In our example, we created a purchase order and processed it all the way through to posting the payment to the vendor.  Now when we go to Voucher transactions (or Transactions for Main account), we can see our tags as columns that we can sort or query.

Tagging your way to happiness

Now you have all you need to slice and dice your ledger data and get everyone the information they need.  Just play a game of Financial Tag, and you can get control of your GL data and save your sanity in the process.  Financial Tags are an easy way to label your GL transactions with minimal setup.  So don’t wait any longer – get tagging!

Want to learn more about Financial Tagging? Join our upcoming webinar! https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4419496233596935006