What's New: Financial Management - Consolidation Improvements (2024 release wave 1)
Consolidation improvements in Business Central 2024 release wave 1: a consolidation status list, exchange rate lookup and editing during a run, validation against re-consolidating a period, and reuse of rates from earlier runs to recover from mistakes and revalue balance sheet items.
- Introduction and consolidation improvements overview
- Consolidation status list and setup demonstration
- Currency exchange rate configuration and consolidation run
- Results review and recovery scenario introduction
- Balance sheet revaluation and mistake recovery process
- Selecting and reusing previous exchange rates
- Results and future improvements
Overview
The video demonstrates changes to consolidation in Financial Management for 2024 release wave 1. It starts with the consolidation status list, which shows earlier consolidation runs, then goes through setting up currency exchange rates and running a consolidation across companies.
It then covers a recovery scenario. Balance sheet items need the previous period’s balance revalued, so users can look up the last closing rate and select exchange rates from previous consolidation runs, all of them or only some. The presenter says a few more improvements are planned over the next one or two releases.
Key points
- A consolidation status list shows the history of consolidation runs, including which periods and companies were consolidated and any errors.
- Exchange rates can be looked up and modified while a consolidation is being run.
- A new last consolidation ending date field shows when each company was last consolidated.
- Validation helps prevent accidentally consolidating a period again. Companies already consolidated for the period are not selected by default and a warning is shown, but you can still choose to rerun.
- Balance sheet consolidation requires revaluing the balance from the previous period; the last closing rate can be looked up from earlier runs to support this.
- When recovering from mistakes, users can select exchange rates from a previous consolidation run and reuse all or some of them. Only rates actually used in that period are shown.
- Closing currency factor applies to balance sheet items and average currency factor to income statement items. The last closing factor is set automatically by the last run.
Features
Every feature below: status not stated, demoed.
| Feature | At |
|---|---|
| Consolidation status list | 0:49 |
| Exchange rate lookup and modification during consolidation | 0:49 |
| Last closing rate lookup | 1:07 |
| Consolidation validation | 1:20 |
| Previous consolidation exchange rate selection | 6:52 |
| Closing and average currency factors configuration | 2:51 |
AL objects mentioned
As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.
- table “consolidation company” at 1:33
- page “consolidation status” at 2:01
- table “business unit card” at 3:03
- page “financial report” at 3:58
- page “exchange rates” at 3:35
Not found in BC28-30: table “consolidation company”, page “consolidation status”, table “business unit card”, page “financial report”, page “exchange rates”.
Quotes
- 0:49 “while you’re in the process of uh executing consolidation, you will be able to look up currency exchange rate and maybe modify them.”
- 2:01 “we have now this consolidation runs status and we have we can see now that we have run this twice before.”
- 4:40 “we put in some validation, so you don’t accidentally uh start running a consolidation for something you have already done consolidation for.”
- 5:23 “when you’re doing consolidation on balance sheet items, you need to revalue the balance from the previous period.”
- 6:38 “it will by default, if you notice, not select this because it detects that you have already consolidated these companies.”
- 7:08 “you can select from previous consolidations the currency exchange rates that you have used.”
- 8:54 “We will make a few more improvements over the next one or two releases to make it an even smoother process, giving you more”
Disclaimers in the video
- 8:54 coming-later: We will make a few more improvements over the next one or two releases to make it an even smoother process, giving you more overview.
Presenters (as heard): Brian Nielsen, Joshua.