Finance

Business Central for Finance

Business Central for finance teams: general ledger, budgeting and reporting automation. See our finance implementation services.

Finance companies face specific processes that an out-of-the-box system covers poorly. We implement Business Central so it fits your reality — not the other way around.

Industry challenges

Manual period close takes weeks
Reports assembled in Excel overnight
No real-time multi-currency accounting
Hard to control departmental budgets

How it works in your industry

Period close in Business Central is a process, not a fire drill: bank statements reconcile semi-automatically (with Copilot's help), intercompany transactions eliminate, and financial statements build from configured schedules without Excel exports. Multi-currency with revaluation is standard.

For groups, consolidation works across entities with different currencies and charts of accounts. Budgets live in the system, and plan-vs-actual is available any moment — not after close.

What a period close looks like stage by stage

Stage	What the system records	What it gives you
Chart of accounts	Account structure and posting rules	Analysis lives in dimensions instead of a thousand accounts
Posting groups	How documents map to ledger accounts	Postings stop depending on which clerk raised the document
Sub-ledgers	Receivables, payables, fixed assets, bank	The ledger and the detail agree without a reconciliation file
Bank reconciliation	Statement lines matched to entries	A daily task of minutes rather than a monthly ordeal
Accruals and adjustments	Deferrals, provisions, recurring journals	Recurring entries are scheduled, not remembered
Reporting	Financial statements and management reports	The same numbers reach the board and the accountant

The four problems that come up most

Month end takes two weeks

Almost always the cause is reconciliation done outside the system. When sub-ledgers post automatically and bank statements match against entries, close becomes a review of exceptions. The sequence is set out in period close.

Management reporting lives in spreadsheets

Financial reporting in Business Central builds the statements from ledger data with dimension breakdowns, and Power BI covers anything genuinely analytical. The point is not prettier reports — it is that the board and the ledger stop disagreeing.

VAT and Making Tax Digital

For UK companies, Business Central supports MTD for VAT natively: digital record keeping and submission of the return to HMRC from inside the system. Businesses moving off spreadsheets and bridging software usually remove a cost here rather than adding one.

Nobody can explain a variance

Dimensions attach department, project or region to every posting, so a variance can be decomposed rather than argued about. Retro-fitting this after go-live is expensive, which is why it belongs in scoping.

Decisions to make before you start

The chart of accounts — and resisting the urge to encode analysis into account numbers.
What becomes a dimension rather than an account. See dimensions.
Posting group design, which determines how much of the ledger runs itself. Covered in posting groups.
Your close calendar and who signs off each step.
Bank feeds and the matching rules for reconciliation.

Key BC capabilities

General ledger & period close

Budgeting & spend control

Multi-currency

Financial reporting & consolidation

Discuss your project

Frequently asked questions

How much faster is period close?

It depends on your starting point. Automating reconciliations and removing manual Excel consolidation usually cuts close from weeks to a few days.

Is multi-currency supported?

Yes, with automatic revaluation at rate and exchange-difference accounting.

Can we consolidate several legal entities?

Yes, Business Central supports consolidation of multiple companies with different currencies and charts of accounts.

How long does period close take in Business Central?

In a properly configured system, days instead of weeks. Most of the saving comes from automatic bank statement matching, automatic currency revaluation and reports built from account schedules rather than exports to spreadsheets.

Is there consolidation for a group of companies?

Yes, as standard. Several legal entities roll up into consolidated reporting with intercompany turnover eliminated, while each company keeps its own books.

How do we control departmental budgets?

Budgets are entered by dimension and actual transactions post against the same dimensions automatically. An overspend becomes visible the moment the document is posted.