08 August 2011

Weekly Dynamic: Wash Transaction Behavior

I learned something this week. That happens a lot but I don’t always highlight my ignorance.

From time to time, clients need to make wash entries where the debit and credit hit the same account for the same amount to only update a subledger. We had a client that has a regular cash receipts process that does this to accommodate integrations from other systems. Dynamics GP is setup to create one Journal Entry per Transaction and the system actually posts the debit and the credit to the GL for these cash receipts.

Suddenly, at month end, this changed. The debit and credit transaction didn’t post to the GL even though the subledger was fine. You and I both know that the end result is the same but why the change?

We determined that at some point recently, while trying to resolve an issue, the posting setting had been changed to create one journal entry per Batch. In this high volume environment this could make tracing transactions cumbersome for the average user. They are a very GL centric organization. In addition, this actually changed the way that wash transactions behave. They were no longer posting to the GL.

After a short meeting, the decision was made to change the setting back. I don’t recall ever seeing this as one of the effects of changing this setting so now you know.