When speaking with Business Central users, we find that one of the underused tools in the software are sales and purchase journals. These are a way to create quick purchase or sales documents without having to go through the field-by-field process you follow when creating them manually. Let’s explore a couple examples of when this can be useful.

In the first example, let’s say that a customer has just walked into your office, received an item or service, and paid cash for it. There is no reason to create an invoice, as the customer has already paid and therefore you will not be emailing it to them. However, you do need an invoice to exist in Business Central so that you can apply the payment. In this case, a simple line item will do.

A customer ledger entry has now been recorded and you can make the cash entry. The customer ledger entry is below.

As you can see, when viewing the customer ledger entry, it is indistinguishable from an invoice created manually via the sales invoice screen or created from a sales order. However, there are differences when creating an invoice this way, and this is where you want to be careful. For instance, you cannot select an item when creating an invoice from a sales journal. Therefore, if you need this sale to hit your inventory, a sales journal is not a good method to generate the invoice. Sales journals should only be used for quick and easy account adjustments. Also, you cannot view a posted sales invoice or a posted sales credit memo when it is created this way, so if the customer needs a copy of the document, it is better to use the traditional method.

Another good use of a sales journal is to quickly write off a small balance. In this example, let’s say that a customer owes $5. The $5 just exceeded the payment tolerance, so it was not automatically written off when applying the payment. We’re not sending a credit memo to the customer – we just need a ledger entry to appear on the customer’s account. We can create the credit memo and also apply it to the invoice in question all within the same line item. That entry would look like the following:

The flip side of the sales journal is the purchase journal. These are very similar, so we won’t dive into them with the same depth as sales journals. Suffice to say that a good use of a purchase journal is when someone at the company puts a large purchase on a credit card. There is no purchase order or invoice document for this, so you are only looking to quickly record the expense.

An easy way to think about using sales and purchase journals is to ask yourself “do I need a document created for this sales/purchase entry?” With most AP or AR entries, that answer is a resounding “yes.” However, when you are just looking to make an account adjustment or quickly record a transaction where no document is needed, sales and purchase journals can save you quite a bit of time.

Look for addition blogposts on Dynamics 365 Business Central in the coming weeks.