Journals and Approval Workflows in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (SaaS)

Learn how to use journals and workflow approvals in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (SaaS) to streamline finance processes. This guide explains journals and approvals, daily finance operations tips, and automation examples in retail, services, and distribution.

Journals and Approval Workflows in Business Central

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (SaaS) provides powerful tools for finance teams, notably financial journals and workflow approvals to automate tasks and enforce controls.

In this guide, we’ll explain what journals and approvals are in Business Central, how they are used in day-to-day finance operations, and how to leverage them (with task automation) to save time.

We’ll also explore practical examples – including scenarios for retail, services, and distribution businesses – to help you apply these features effectively. Let’s dive in!

What Are Journals in Business Central?

In Business Central, journals are electronic registers for recording financial transactions. They function much like traditional accounting journals, but with the added efficiency and structure of an ERP system.

Journals are used to enter various types of financial data into the system’s general ledger and subledgers (like customer, vendor, or bank accounts). Each journal is essentially a batch of financial entries that can be reviewed and posted as a group.

This ensures accuracy and gives users a chance to verify entries before they affect the company’s books.

Types of Financial Journals in Business Central

Business Central offers several types of journals, each tailored to specific finance tasks. In fact, Business Central has eight unique financial journal types, and each type provides certain automation or convenience features for common accounting tasks:

1. General Journal – a versatile journal for all-purpose entries (adjustments, corrections, accruals, etc.). You can post to G/L accounts as well as customer, vendor, bank, or other accounts from here.
2. Recurring General Journal – for entries that repeat periodically (e.g. monthly rent, depreciation). These journals allow you to set up recurring entries with formulas for frequency and even automatic reversals or allocations.
3. Sales Journal – specialized for recording sales-related transactions (e.g. sales without using a sales invoice document).
4. Purchase Journal – specialized for purchase-related transactions (e.g. recording vendor bills without a purchase invoice document).
5. Cash Receipt Journal – used to record incoming payments from customers (cash or bank receipts) into the system, often applying them to open invoices.
6. Payment Journal – used to process outgoing payments to vendors, employees, etc., and apply those payments to open payables.
7. Fixed Asset G/L Journal – used for posting fixed asset transactions (like depreciation or disposals) to ensure proper integration with the fixed asset subledger.
8. Project G/L Journal – (formerly called Job G/L Journal) used to post costs or revenues to projects/jobs and the general ledger simultaneously, useful in project accounting scenarios.

These journals are widely used to record all sorts of transactions – from daily sales and expenses to month-end adjustments.

Interestingly, all the financial journals in Business Central share the same underlying table and posting engine. In other words, under the hood, they function similarly. Each journal page writes to the Gen. Journal Line table and uses the same posting routines. The difference is mainly in the user interface (the “worksheet” page) and additional functions available on each journal page that make specific tasks easier.

For example, the Payment Journal page has an action to “Suggest Vendor Payments”, which automatically generates payment lines for due invoices – a feature relevant to paying suppliers. By contrast, the General Journal page is a generic canvas without those specific shortcuts, but it can be used for any type of entry if needed.

Using Journals in Day-to-Day Finance Operations

In day-to-day finance operations, journals are the workhorses for recording transactions that aren’t entered through documents (like invoices or orders). Here are some common ways finance teams use journals daily:

Recording Adjustments and Accruals: At period-end, accountants use the General Journal to post adjusting entries (such as accruals for expenses, corrections to mispostings, or reallocations).

For example, if an expense was paid from the wrong department’s account, a general journal entry can reclassify it to the correct account and department (using dimensions). Journals give flexibility to directly adjust ledger balances with proper authorisation.

Posting Routine Transactions: Many routine transactions can be entered via journals. For instance, payroll costs from an external system might be aggregated and posted through a General Journal entry each month.

Likewise, a retail business might use a Sales Journal or General Journal to record daily store sales totals (if not integrated through point-of-sale) as a single lump sum entry per day.

Using journals in this way ensures daily transactions are captured in the finance system even if they originate outside Business Central.

Cash Receipts and Payments: Journals handle the flow of cash in and out. A Cash Receipt Journal is often used to record daily bank deposits or cash receipts from customers. For example, a distribution company receiving dozens of customer payments daily could import or manually enter these into a Cash Receipt Journal to update customer balances and cash accounts.

Conversely, the Payment Journal helps manage outgoing payments – you can list all vendor invoices you intend to pay this week and then post the payments, which will credit the bank and debit the vendor liabilities. Business Central can automate part of this process using the Suggest Vendor Payments function, which identifies due or discounted invoices and creates payment journal lines for you. This automation saves time compared to manually selecting invoices to pay.

Intercompany Transactions: If your organisation has multiple entities, Business Central journals (especially General Journal or Intercompany Journal) can record transactions between companies. For instance, a services company might allocate shared expenses (like rent or admin costs) to subsidiaries each month using an intercompany general journal. This ensures each entity’s books reflect their share of common costs. (Notably, Business Central even supports approvals for intercompany general journals to reduce errors – more on approvals soon.)

Tip: Organise your work with journal batches. Within each journal type, you can have multiple batches (like folders) to separate different purposes or users. For example, you might have a “PAYROLL” batch for payroll-related entries, a “DAILYSALES” batch for daily retail sales entries, etc. This keeps things organised and can enforce separation of duties (one person works in one batch while another batch is for different entries).

Standard Journals and Recurring Journals – Automating Repetitive Entries

Two special features of Business Central journals that greatly aid day-to-day operations are Standard Journals and Recurring Journals:

Standard Journals

A Standard Journal is essentially a template of journal lines that you can save and reuse. If you have entries that recur in a similar pattern (even if not on a fixed schedule), you can store them as a standard journal.

For example, consider a monthly payroll allocation that involves the same accounts and dimensions – you can enter the lines once, then save that set as a standard journal (with or without the amounts). Later, whenever you need to post that payroll allocation, simply retrieve the standard journal into your General Journal and update any amounts or dates as needed.

This saves time and reduces errors from re-keying entries. Common use cases for standard journals include payroll expenses, recurring bank fees, reclassification entries, or any journal entry you find yourself doing frequently in the same format.

Recurring Journals

For truly recurring transactions on a set schedule, Recurring General Journals are ideal. A recurring journal lets you set up entries with a recurring frequency (such as daily, monthly, quarterly) and a recurring method (fixed amount, variable, reversing, etc.).

Once set up, the journal can be posted every period as needed. Business Central will automatically compute the next posting date, and handle the amount per your method (e.g. fixed stays the same each time, variable clears out after posting so you can enter a new amount each period, reversing creates an automatic reversal entry the day after posting, etc.).

You can even use recurring journals to allocate costs across departments or projects using percentage or amount splits (via allocation keys).

Example: A services company might have monthly accruals for software subscriptions. Using a recurring journal, the company can set an accrual entry for the expense (say £5,000 to an accrued expenses account) every month on the last day, with an automatic reversal on the first day of the next month.

This means the system will accrue the expense at month-end and then reverse it next month, saving the accountants from manually remembering to post and reverse the entry each time.

Another example – a company allocates rent expense to multiple departments based on headcount. A recurring journal can automatically split the rent amount across department expense accounts by percentage, all in one go. These features eliminate repetitive manual entries and ensure consistency each period (no missed accruals!).

Using recurring journals has a big productivity impact. One Business Central user noted that by automating over 30 recurring entries (for things like rent, depreciation, and accruals), their finance team saved more than 12 hours each month and improved accuracy (fewer missed entries and typos).

In short, “set it and forget it” – Business Central remembers the schedule and amounts, so you can focus on analysis instead of data entry.

What Are Workflow Approvals in Business Central?

While journals help record transactions efficiently, workflow approvals in Business Central help ensure those transactions (and other actions) are properly reviewed and authorised. An approval workflow is essentially a sequence of steps (tasks) that is triggered by some event in the system, often requiring certain users to approve or reject something before it proceeds.

Business Central’s SaaS version comes with a built-in workflow engine that allows you to configure these approval processes for a variety of scenarios, without any coding.

In simple terms, workflow approvals let you enforce internal controls and business rules inside the system. Instead of relying on manual sign-offs or emails, you can have Business Central automatically route approval requests to the right people, record their responses, and take actions (like posting or blocking a transaction) based on those responses.

Why Use Approval Workflows?

Approval workflows are typically used to streamline processes while also enforcing compliance and best practices. Here are key reasons organisations use approvals:

• Separation of Duties: Workflows ensure that sensitive actions (like posting a large journal entry or releasing a purchase order) require a second pair of eyes. This separation of duties helps prevent errors or fraud by making sure no single user has full control over a critical process.
• Consistency and Control: Workflows unify processes across the organisation. For example, you can require that all purchase invoices over a certain amount go through the same approval chain, or that any new vendor addition is approved by Finance. This enforces company policy automatically, so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Audit Trail and Compliance: Every approval request and response is logged. You have a record of who approved what and when, which is great for audits. It also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements or internal policies (e.g. CFO must approve expenditures above £10k).
• Efficiency with Accountability: On the surface, adding an approval step might seem to slow things down, but in practice it can streamline workflows. Approvers get instant notifications (in Business Central, via email, or even Microsoft Teams) when something needs their attention. They can approve or reject with a click, even from a mobile device if needed. This is often faster and more trackable than chasing someone for a signature on paper or an email confirmation. The overall process becomes more transparent. Requesters can see the status of their approval requests at any time, and nobody has to wonder “whose desk is that request on now.”

What Can Be Approved?

Business Central allows approvals on a wide range of records and transactions. Out of the box, there are templates for common approval scenarios.

Workflows can be designed for approval of things like:

• new master data (G/L accounts, customers, vendors, items)
• changes to critical fields (e.g. a vendor’s bank account or a customer’s credit limit)
• sales and purchase documents
• incoming documents
• and even finance journals prior to posting.

In other words, you can require approval for nearly any important step: creating or posting documents (quotes, orders, invoices, credit memos), setting up new cards, or posting journals.

You decide the rules that trigger an approval. For example:

• Require a manager’s approval to create a new vendor (to ensure due diligence is done).
• Require approval for any customer credit limit increase (to control credit risk).
• Route purchase orders above £5,000 to the purchasing manager, and above £20,000 to the finance director.
• Have the financial controller approve any general journal entries over £10,000 or any journal entry in a certain batch (e.g. an “Adjustments” batch) before posting.

Each of these can be implemented with a Business Central workflow.

In fact, one frequently used scenario is having a controller or CFO approve manual journal entries before posting. This is common in companies where, for instance, junior accountants prepare journal entries but a senior person reviews and approves them for accuracy and appropriateness. Business Central supports this via the General Journal Batch Approval workflow template.

How Approval Workflows Work in Business Central

Business Central’s workflow engine uses a combination of events, conditions, and responses to define an approval process:

Event/Trigger

This is what starts the workflow. For example, a user clicking “Request Approval” on a journal, or a purchase order being released, etc. You can define triggers like “a record is created” or “a field is changed” or simply a manual request action.

Conditions

You can set criteria so that the workflow only runs in certain cases. For instance, you might only trigger a purchase order approval workflow if the order amount > £5,000, or only trigger a journal approval for specific journal batches or for particular account ranges. Conditions make the workflow logic flexible and targeted.

Response/Actions

These are the steps that occur when the workflow is triggered. Typically, the first response is to create an approval request and send it to an approver (or multiple approvers). Business Central has an Approval User Setup page where you define who approves for whom and under what circumstances (you can set up an approval hierarchy or specific approvers for specific users, amount limits, etc.).

Based on this setup, the workflow will determine the appropriate approver(s) and send the request. The approver gets notified and can then Approve, Reject, or Delegate the request.

The workflow can include multiple approval steps if needed (sequential or parallel approvals). Finally, once all approvals are obtained, the workflow can execute a final action – such as automatically posting the journal or marking a document as approved. Alternatively, if any approver rejects, the workflow can send a rejection notice back to the requester and halt the process.

Business Central (SaaS) comes with many pre-built workflow templates you can use. These templates cover scenarios like:

• Purchase Order Approval
• Purchase Invoice Approval
• Sales Order Approval
• Customer Approval
• Vendor Approval
• General Journal Batch Approval, etc.

You can create a new workflow from a template and then adjust it as needed.

For example, to set up a journal approval, you would go to the Workflows page, create a new workflow from the “General Journal Batch Approval Workflow” template, specify any conditions (like which journal batches or template names it applies to), assign the approver (e.g. a specific user or the first manager in an approval chain), and then enable it.

Once enabled, users attempting to post in that journal will instead trigger an approval request that must be completed before posting is allowed. The system even adds “Approval Status” fields on journals in recent versions, so users can see if a batch is pending approval or approved.

Note: Business Central’s built-in approvals work without needing external tools, but if you use Microsoft Power Automate, you also have the option to integrate or even replace some approval workflows with Power Automate flows.

For instance, some organisations use Power Automate to send approval requests to Microsoft Teams or to approvers outside of Business Central.

However, for most internal finance workflows, the out-of-the-box approval features in Business Central are more than sufficient and simpler to manage (they also work even if approvers prefer to get an email and approve via a link).

Conclusion

Journals and workflow approvals in Dynamics 365 Business Central are indispensable for efficient and controlled finance operations.

Journals provide a flexible way to record every type of financial transaction, from daily receipts and payments to monthly allocations, with features like recurring entries and templates that can automate finance tasks and save time.

Meanwhile, approval workflows act as your automated gatekeepers, ensuring that important transactions and data changes are reviewed and authorised according to your company’s policies. This combination of automation and control helps businesses maintain accuracy, compliance, and efficiency.

By implementing these tools thoughtfully, finance users can transform their day-to-day work. Routine processes (like posting journals or paying vendors) become faster and more reliable, and approvals ensure accountability without creating bottlenecks.

Whether you’re managing the books of a busy retail chain, a professional services firm, or a distribution company, Business Central’s journals and approvals can be tailored to your needs – from automating recurring journals for monthly bills to requiring manager sign-off on big expenditures.

The result is a smoother workflow for the finance team and greater confidence in the numbers.

Next Steps:

Want to learn more about journals, workflows, or automation? Get in touch!