Derived financial hierarchies - For Adhoc Financial Analytics

Derived financial hierarchies in MS Dynamics AX 2012 Public Sector solution are very useful for adhoc analytics and gives you the provision to associate the financial dimensions (including main accounts) with financial categories. This avoids entering the financial categories at the transaction level. In other words, these financial categories are sort of virtual dimensions. The derived financial hierarchies feature was developed in AX 2012 considering the CGAC requirements for US.

As far as using the derived hierarchies is concerned, you can use it either from AX rich client (GL>Financial dimensions>Set up hierarchies button>View filter results button) or from the Ledger cube (OLAP reporting).

Signing limits in AX 2012

Efficient management of expenditures is the key to financial risk management for an organization. Organizations can now strengthen their internal controls on expenses using signing limits feature of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Signing limits is an integral part of expenditure management where organizations can assign certain limits to their workers to spend a maximum amount on a purchase or gives authority to specific employees to authorize a certain amount of purchase initiated by their sub ordinates. Signing limits are based on either employee's job or compensation level. An organization can assign the signing limits automatically to an employee when taking on board or the employee can raise the request to assign signing limits through employee self service portal.

Out of the box, two types of signing limits are provided by AX, spending limit and approval limit. Spending limits are invoked at the time of purchase while approval limits at the time of approving a business document as part of approval workflow.

Advice to ISVs: How to license your solution developed on AX 2012

With new licensing Server/CAL model that MS has introduced for MS Dynamics AX 2012, it becomes really easy for resellers and customers to purchase AX leaving behind the old AX2009 licensing complexities. For ISVs now, they need to be very aware of the new licensing model and how it relates with new AX role based security framework in order to do the licensing for their custom developed solutions on AX 2012.

An ISV can follow the top-down or bottom-up approach to model the licensing for their solution. MS recommends top-down approach, where an ISV needs to think of who (users) will be using their solution, identify the potential roles, anticipate the expected duties and then further down to privileges, permissions, entry points (menu items). Finally, at the menu item level, they should think about what level of access is required to view or maintain the functionality exposed by this menu item and what should be the user CAL type assigned to view and maintain user licenses (menu item properties). This makes it easy to correctly assign the user CAL types to menu items.

In the bottom-up approach, an ISV will be directly assigning the user CAL types to menu items that will be exposed by privileges to roles to users. This is rather more error prone and hectic approach.

How an ISV can actually generate a license for custom solution using new licensing feature that comes with AX 2012, I will try to post an step by step guide for that.

Trace parser giving "Access deined" error when trying to save trace file

Using Trace Parser with MS Dynamics AX 2012 gave me "Access denied" error when I tried to save the file name in local folder. I was able to get rid of this by starting AX client as an administrator. You can also turn off the UAC in Windows to get rid of this.

Relationships on GL Account Structure in MS Dynamics AX2012

Further to my last post on Relationship types in Organization administration module of AX2012, I came to know that in GL, on Account Structures, the Relationships form not only displays the relationships from Relationship types in Organization administration module, but it also shows you the relations developed as Organization hierarchies. Following procedure illustrates this:

In CEU Company of Contoso dataset, I created an organization hierarchy named “Test”:

Viewing the hierarchy, I then selected CEU as the LE and Administration (UK), Administration (US) as departments under this LE. Under each respective department, I then selected Advertising (UK) and Advertising (US) as cost centers as shown below:

Publishing the hierarchy makes it available to appear in the Configure account structure form:

I then edited the account structure and selected on Test record (Party A = Department, Party B = Cost Center). At this point, do select both Test records as it will end up showing no matches while doing the transaction entry. Activate the account structure.

For transaction entry, I used the General Journal and selected a Sales account (4***) on line. Now when I selected the Department segment on journal line as Administration (UK), the next segment which is Cost Center gives me only one value as shown below:

The system has automatically filtered out the cost center value for me considering the relationship that exists in the organization hierarchy where Cost Center “Advertising (UK)” comes under Department “Administration (UK)”. Same would have happened if I selected Administration (US) as Department on journal line where Advertising (US) would be the only choice to select from available cost centers.

This is really a powerful feature in AX2012, where organizations can leverage the operational hierarchy to control the transaction entry and draw a border line between accounting and operational aspects of the business.

Email templates for employee recruitment process in AX2012

In AX2012 HRM module, there are default email templates available to be used during the employee recruitment process. The templates can be used to send interview invitation, rejection, on board confirmation etc. emails. More flexibility has been provided using the application bookmark variables that can be used within the email body.

You can access the email templates from Human resources>Setup>Recruitment>Application email templates and the bookmark variables from Human resoruces>Setup>Recruitment> Application bookmarks.