Navigating the Financial Period Close Workspace in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Before diving into the other sections, let’s take a deeper look at some of the more important components and options for task lists. When you open any task list, you’ll see the same columns across the board with a portion being affected based on how you configured the workspace.  There are some important columns that will populate based on how you configured your template tied to the Period you chose. These include:

• Task
• Area
• Company
• Responsible (based on what role you assigned to a “resource” when configuring the template tab in the Financial period close configuration)
• Due Date
• Closing Schedule (towards the right in Figure 3 above).

Next to the due date column, you’ll see the Status column. Under the status column, you’ll notice one of two symbols:

1. Exclamation marks indicating a specific task is past due (the due date will also be marked in red).
2. A lock symbol indicating a specific task cannot be finished yet until the task or tasks you set as its dependency or dependencies are finished first (also known as a blocked task). Hovering over the status symbol for a specific task, will reveal what tasks need to be completed before the specific task is marked as complete (see Figure 4 at the end of this section). It’s also important to note, if a task with a dependency is past due, the exclamation mark will show instead of the lock symbol.

Next to the due date column, you’ll notice the Completed column. When you click a task, a checkbox will appear under the Completed column for that specific task. When you click the checkbox, the task will be marked as complete and disappear from the list. To show completed tasks in any task list, you’ll need to click “Show completed tasks” located in the blue action pane at the top of the tasks list.

You’ll also notice that there are two columns towards the right relating to attachments. If something is attached to a task, you will see a paperclip symbol . You can attach one or multiple items to a task and those attachments can include:

1. File
2. Image
3. Note
4. URL

It’s good to note you can attach a report created from financial reporter (formerly known as management reporter) by:

1. Opening the specific report you want to link in financial reporter
2. Copying the web URL
3. Go to the task you want to attach the report too, and attach as a URL.

If you assigned a task link to any task during configuration of the workspace, clicking the task line and then clicking the task itself, will take the user to the specific form required to complete the task.

Lastly, looking at the blue action pane at the top of the task list, you’ll see a lot of the same selections you had when creating your template in the Financial period close configuration. Any task list will have these options available from within the Financial Period Close Workspace. However, it’s important to note that any changes to tasks made from within the task list will not carry forward to future period closings To edit your tasks and make your changes carry forward, navigate to General Ledger→Period Close→Financial period close configuration and edit your tasks under the template tab. Be sure you are editing the desired template if you have multiple templates.

Figure 4 – Hovering your cursor over a status indicating dependencies