GP 2015 R2 Feature List - Analytical Accounting Smartlist Reporting Enhancement

With the release of Dynamics GP 2015 R2, too many significant features are introduced to meet the demanding requirements of the community and fulfill their needs. In this series, we are going to shed a light upon these features in a closer look.

The first article in this series is the enhancement made to the Analytical Accounting smart list reporting, which is considered as a simple yet essential improvement.

We will consider the following case in which there are two dimensions in the AA module; which are project and cost center, as shown below:

Analytical Accounting - Transaction Dimensions Sample

To understand the enhancement made, we will configure the dimensions above in two different environment; GP 2015 R2 and GP 2015. 

GP 2015 R2 versus GP 2015 | AA Open Transaction Smart List

As I have seen, the enhancement made to the AA smart list is related to the design of the data (how data is presented within both AA Open Transactions and AA Historical Transactions) and the performance (which is quite faster)

Data Presentation in GP 2015 and Prior versions

As shown above, the transaction dimension column is redesigned to be separated into multiple columns, which are the AA dimensions configured in your company. In our case, there are Project and Cost Center.

Now the question is, what would such design provide ? Here is the answer, 

• In previous versions, the data could be misinterpreted: The dimension is not provided on the same "row". For instance, if you have one line of distribution with multiple analytical details, such as marketing for Cost Center Dimension one and Project A for Project dimension two. The smart list will retrieve two lines with the same amount for project A and Marketing.This means, filtering by a specific Dimension such as (Project A) in our example, will exclude any sub dimensions (marketing). Therefore, analysis reports can be misleading
• Debit or Credit Values are duplicated: As shown in the example above, 350 debit is analytically distributed among Project A and Marketing, the value is duplicated two times which prevents smooth calculations
• Manipulating data in Excel Pivot Table is meaningless, since values are duplicated and not properly linked as dimension and sub dimension: If we simply get the exported data set into pivot table, the data can never provide comprehensive and analytical meaning. The following graph will illustrate accordingly:

In the example above, I have the same dimensions proposed (Project and Cost Center), I recorded a journal entry on an expense account and distributed it according to the proceeding details in two different environment (GP 2015 and GP 2015 R2) to see how AA Smart list reporting can be completely different.

Expense Account 500                         

                          350          Project  (Project A) and Cost Center (Marketing)

                          100          Project  (Project A) and Cost Center (Operation)

                          50            Project  (Project B) and Cost Center (Operation)

 

Pivot Table Manipulation - AA Smart List

The one retrieved from GP 2015 and prior versions can be completely misleading, data are not categorized according to the original relation (dimension and sub dimension), as all dimensions are listed. Additionally, the values are duplicated (500 are reported as 1000) since the values are listed two times for each distribution line.

The other enhancement made to the AA smart list reporting is the speed of retrieving data, as the performance has dramatically changed in terms of the time.

Best Regards, 

Mahmoud M. AlSaadi