Why?

Accountants expect to have running balances when they look at account history.Then they find out there is none in standard Business Central; yes running balance are available on some reports, but on screens. Why not?

Well, our guess that the reason it has never been done is that first that could slow down the system, second it is not that easy to do, third Business Central and its ancestor NAV have been designed without the need of an opening balance which is has great advantages but also a few cons.

Having a running balances showing up is a natural way for accountants to see if a balance is going at some points to 0, not having it is definitely a missing functionality.

So we did it

What ?

where it is mostly asked: GL, customer and vendor entries, and on the application entries (customers, vendors and GL), new button to display the running totals. We decided to display it with a click of a button instead of right away for performance consideration.

We also added a few parameters to mitigate slowing down the system, because yes running total do add calculations on the database, but also yes there can help an easier and more productive experience.

This is automated a time consuming task: when the balance is zero, apply the entries together, proceeding by packets.

running balances

by MatchBC