Ledger Accounts and Financial Dimensions

Ledger Accounts and Financial Dimensions: 

The concept of Ledger accounts and Financial Dimensions has been completely overhauled in Ax 2012. There is no more LedgerTable and LedgerTrans or Dimensions table.

MS has now introduced a concept of Segmented controls which is an integral part of Ledger accounts and dimensions now.

Ledger accounts in Ax 2012 have become Main accounts.

Now you will not be having  a ledger account alone, it will always be a combination of Main account and financial dimensions.

So for have your company books of accounts, you need to setup following:

• Main accounts (base accounts that will hold all the books of accounts that can be applicable across the entire application (Table: MainAccounts that is company independent)

• After creating Main accounts go ahead and create Financial Dimensions from GL –> Setup –> Financial dimensions –> Financial dimensions. The beauty here is that you can create as many financial dimensions that you need. No hassles of running the wizard and stuff. But technically handling these is a challenge at least in the beginning is what I feel. There has been introduction of whole lot of tables to handle dimensions. You can check the tables with names DimensionAttribute*. I will try and explain some of the tables as and when we come across them

• After creating Financial dimensions, go ahead and create account structures. These account structures contain the rules and combinations for Main accounts and dimensions. These account structures are then later used to define Chart of Accounts. You can create them from GL –> Setup –> Chart of accounts –> Configure account structures. An example account structure is shown below: Note that each account structure here defines the accounts applicable, and the dimensions applicable to them

• After the basic setup is done, you then need to go ahead and create Chart of Accounts. The chart of accounts includes the main accounts that are used for a particular chart of account, and the structure of combinations of main accounts and dimension values. The main accounts contain the financial data about the activity of the legal entity. You can set this up from GL –> Setup –> Chart of Accounts –> Chart of Accounts. These chart of accounts define the main accounts and dimensions applicable to a particular book of ledger for a company

• Then go ahead and create a Ledger from GL –> Setup –> Ledger. A ledger is attached to one legal entity (Company in Ax 2009).

Now if you want to find out all the main accounts in a company (Legal entity in Ax 2012 parlance), then a developer needs to do following:

1. Find the Ledger record attached to a legal entity (Table: Ledger)

2. Then go ahead and find the Chart Of Account attached to a Ledger (Table: LedgerChartOfAccounts)

3. After that we need to traverse through main accounts using LedgerChartOfAccounts record (Table: MainAccounts)

That’s a bit of a work for developers.

Note: I have noticed that you will not be able to see the balances on chart of accounts after you post some transactions (at least I was not able to see). Then I did following and was able to see the transactions.

1. Go to GL –> Setup –> Financial dimensions –> Financial dimension sets.

2. Select the set with only Main account as the active dimension

3. Click on Rebuild balances / Update balances as applicable.