NAV AS 101 Lesson 12: Drilling Down

I don’t know what kind of questions you need to answer as a part of your job, but here are a few of the questions I need to answer in my job every day:

Why is that sales number so low?

Why is that sales number so high?

Where did the expense for “x” end up?

What exactly did that team spend all that money on?

Did we get invoiced for that thing yet?

Did that journal entry get done?

Where did that number come from?

I use account schedules to answer those questions and in most cases, I use the drill down feature to get the answers. Each version of NAV does this a little bit differently, but it’s a very intuitive feature to use no matter what the version.

• CLASSIC:  Drill down using the arrow in the cell
• RTC:  Right click to drill down
• NAV2013: Double Click to drill down

The mantra you need to learn when using the drill down feature is “drill down to navigate”. In order to get through all the layers of a posting starting with the highly summarized number you see in your account schedule you need to drill down at least a couple of times until you can see the numbers you are looking for. Sometimes you can tell what your answer is by seeing what account or set of accounts the number came from, but other times, you are looking for the entry point of the number – generally either an invoice (sales or purchase) or a journal entry. You can get to all of those juicy answers by drilling down starting from the account schedule, and once you get to the screen that shows you the Navigate function, you can navigate directly to the journal entries that were made and see them in detail or even call up a copy of the invoice you are looking for.

This posting is part of the NAV Account Schedules 101 series.  Find the entire list of lessons here.

Don’t forget to visit the Account Schedule Formulas and Account Schedule Examples pages if you’re looking for even more ideas on how to improve your financial reporting using account schedules with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.