Financial Period Closing in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

This article walks you through the steps involved in the financial period closing process in dynamics 365 for finance and operations.

The financial period close workspace in Dynamics 365 for finance and operations generates and assigns the list of period end tasks list to assists you with a fully transparent, drill-down functional, and task-dependent area to quickly and efficiently close your financial periods. Firstly, let’s walk through the setup to show how this workspace is configured.

To navigate to the Financial period close configuration, General Ledger→Period Close→Financial period close configuration

We’ll take the bottom-up approach to complete the configuration here on this form starting from the closing roles.

Closing Roles

This is where you need to define all the different roles or job titles involved in your closing process. These roles are not linked to the security roles, and you can define the closing roles based on your organizational closing process. Closing roles are also used to filter your tasks inside the Financial period close workspace.

Resources

This is where we map the employee record to the closing roles (defined in the step above) and define their access to the tasks list.

1. Click New to create a new record in the resources tab.
2. Select the Employee from the employee drop down list involved in the Financial period close process.
3. Select the access for view that you would like to assign to the resource.
   1. If you select all tasks, the selected employee will be able to view all the tasks in the workspace.
   2. If you select “Only assigned tasks”, the specific user will only be able to see the tasks related to the companies that have been linked to the closing roles assigned to them.
4. Select the closing role that you would like to assign to the selected employee by hitting the add button.
5. Select the company that you would like to assign to the selected resource for the closing process.

Task Areas

Tasks areas are basically the logical grouping of the tasks that belong to a specific closing process. Define task areas based on the closing roles you are creating. For example, if one of the tasks involved in your closing process is to post the pending vendor invoices, you can create a task area named Accounts Payable.

Calendars

The Calendars tab is where you setup the Calendars for task scheduling. define the days during each week you and your staff are working.

Calendars for task scheduling are also important for deadlines. Let’s say you create a Calendar for task scheduling for your financial period close that is based on a 5 day week (Monday through Friday). When we start setting deadlines for our closing tasks and that deadline would fall on a Sunday, the due date will be moved to the next working day.

To demonstrate how to create a calendar for task scheduling, let’s create a calendar based on a 5 day work week:

1. Click New
2. In the Calendar, give a short form description, such as “5 Day”.
3. In the name box, give a long form description, such as “5 Working Days”.
4. Select the start date that dictates when the calendar can start being used.
5. Select the end date that dictates when the calendar can no longer be used.
6. Select the days of each week that staff will generally work during your financial close process.
7. Click on Create button at the bottom of the window.
8. You can highlight a specific calendar for task scheduling created and click edit in case you would like to enter holidays or non-working days for employees.

Templates

Templates are going to be the main tab that ties together most of the configuration components we’ve reviewed so far. Templates is where you add all of your tasks involved in the period close, their due dates, add links, as well as other details defined in other areas of the financial close. When we get to the closing schedules tab where we define our closing periods, we must attach a template to each closing period we create. To get familiar, let’s go step by step in creating a new template along with at least one task:

1. Start by clicking the plus button to create a new blank template.
2. In the new dialog box, type a name for your template and then hit create. We’ve now created a new blank template.
3. Let’s create a new task line by clicking on new button in the triple dot area.
4. Starting from the “Area” column on the left, click the drop down and select one of the options that you created in the task area tab.
5. In the task column, type a task that is related to the task area.
6. In the “Due date relative to period end date (+ / – days)” column, you can leave it as zero. Leaving the field as zero tells the system that you want the tasks to be due on the closing date of a period. So, if you were closing the period of January 2019 and you set your closing date as 01/31/2019, leaving this column as zero will have that task due on 01/31/2019. If you wanted to have a due date that is before the close of the closing date, you would input a negative number.
7. In the Due Time column, type in a time you want the task to be due on its due date.
8. In the Closing Role column, assign one of the roles you created from the Closing Role tab.
9. In the company column, select the drop down menu. Click under the checkbox column to select companies that will be involved with the specific task line. Please note, if you select a company that was not assigned to the Closing Role via the Resources tab, D365FO will give you an error when you try to create a new closing period via the Closing Schedule tab.
10. Under the task link column, you can create a link that will take you to any form required to complete the task. If you click the drop down menu, you’re given the option to chose a form from any module available in D365FO.
11. If a task has a dependency, another tasks that were set as the dependency, must be completed. You can set a dependency onto a task by clicking on the three dots under the template drop down selection and clicking set dependency (see the figure below). When you click “Set dependency”, you’ll see all the other tasks that are currently setup in your list, organized by the task area assigned to each task.

Set Dependency

1. Under the “Attachments” column, a paperclip icon will indicate something has been attached. Attachments can include a:
   1. File
   2. Image
   3. Note
   4. URL

Good to note is that you can also attach links to financial reporting reports by opening any specific report. You can copy the URL of the generated report, and attach it as a URL.

Closing Schedules

Here you can define various closing schedules according to your organizational needs. The possible closing schedules could be a closing schedule for a month end, quarter end and a year end schedule.

Here’s what it looks like..

After you successfully create a Closing Schedule, you should now be able to open the workspace by heading to General Ledger→Period Close→Financial period close and checking to see if the workspace populated by selecting the financial period close schedule.

That’s all for today!