Posting profiles are made up of multiple posting types. So, what is a posting type? Posting types are the specific configuration that is called through various processes in D365 F&O when creating a voucher transaction and is defined as the main account assignment to a specific transaction step. A single voucher will contain more than one, or even two, posting types. Some users may be surprised that a voucher to post a sales invoice will contain more than one debit and one credit line. If you are used to a simple accounting system, especially a paper or manual ledger, the thought of having several debits and credits for a single transaction might seem a bit overwhelming. But once you have fine-tuned your posting profiles, you won't notice the difference!

Posting profiles are the collection of posting types for an item, item group, or company that control how the subledger transactions are converted into main account postings. Posting profiles can be setup as specific or as general as a company needs. While one posting type in a posting profile may look at a general configuration, such as Sales order revenue, others may need to be more specific, such as Sales order Cost of goods sold-invoiced.  The same level of specificity does not have to be used for each posting type but should make sense for your company to determine the right posting profile combination.

Posting Profiles can be found in several areas of D365 F&O and are usually separated by module. While some posting setup is module specific, several may impact transactions originating in other modules. Microsoft Learn documentation provides the following list of areas in the system where posting profiles can be defined:

• Accounts for automatic transactions

• Accounts payable posting

• Accounts receivable posting

• Asset leasing posting

• Asset management posting 

• Cash and bank management 

• Currency revaluation posting accounts

• Expense management posting 

• Fixed asset posting profiles

• Intercompany accounting posting 

• Inventory posting

• Landed cost posting

• Posting definitions overview

• Production posting

• Project management and accounting posting 

• Service management posting 

• Tax posting 

• Time and attendance posting 

• Transportation management posting 

• Rebate management posting profiles 

Depending on the transactions your company is creating, not all posting profiles may need to be configured. When in doubt, test it out! Creating test transactions (in a non-production environment) will help identify if any transactions are missing posting profile configurations. The error messages when a posting configuration is missing is usually pretty easy to decode, but may take some time to get used to.

This is a commonly asked question. I have been asked many times across many clients if their posting profiles are configured properly. A precursory glance is not enough to determine if the configuration matches the intended results of their organization. As a rule of thumb, I like to start with the following questions before digging into an analysis:

1. At the end of this transactional step, what is the expected outcome from a GL perspective? (It is simply not enough to know what the balance should be at the completion of an entire business process, such as receiving a good and then issuing an invoice. You need to look at each stage individually, as well as the whole process).

2. Should the expected outcome vary amongst different items, item groups, or other grouping of transactions?

3. Have you seen any balance discrepancies in your trial balance/balance sheet/income statement during month end close? (this is mostly useful after a company has been working in production for at least a month).

Once you know what the expectations or known areas of issue are, it's time to either review transactions in production or move to another environment to create test transactions to review. I like to work on this analysis in a UAT or Test environment to ensure I can make corrections when expectations do not align with results, and I can repeat the test. Once you know the correction to the specific posting type (and your accounting & finance team has approved the change) make the change in production and document the date and the change made for audit purposes.

But there is a catch.  If there are posting types that do not align with expectations, timing is everything on these corrections. Knowing the right time to make the change, in addition to some correcting entries to re-align balances from prior transactions, is an important step that should not be overlooked. Documentation here is critical, because if I know anything about auditors, they will sniff these corrections out every time and if you take the time to document these corrections now while its fresh in your mind, it will save you time (and a headache) when an auditor asks about these entries.