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.

Relationship types in MS Dynamics AX2012

A very powerful feature has been added into AX2012 to maintain relationships between different party records in the form of parent child relations. One can access the relationship types form from Organization administration>Setup>Global address book>Relationship types. For example, if I have created a relationship type using the following information:

ID = Child, Party A type = Person, Party B type = Person, Relationship A to B = Child of, Relationship B to A = Parent of

I can now use this relationship while maintaining the Personal Contact information for an Employee record in HRM module. In the personal contacts form, I can specify a person who is the child of my employee. The system will allow you to define the relationship of this employee with contact person using the relationship type.

There are other application areas where relationship type can be used to define relationships between party records like GAB in Home module, Configure chart of accounts in GL etc.