Business Rules Overview

Purpose of Business Rules:

Business rules provide a simple interface to implement and maintain fast-changing and commonly used rules. You can create business rules and recommendations to apply form logic without writing Jhaving to use the Business Central Workflow setup as Fundamentals will automatically create those as needed..

Business Rules Types:

Once setup and implemented, Business Rules will help with:

• Batch Approvals-used for approval of journal batches
• Document Approval-used for approval of document total amounts (e.g. total invoice amount)
• Document Line Approval-used to approve each document line such as an invoice line or journal line
• Budget Control – used to check the budget availability based on the “magic” formula below for journal and document

Validation Rules help to define valid combinations for data entry and allow the definition of funds, dimension vales, as well as common master data elements like Customer, Vendor, Item, Fixed Asset, etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE: validation rules make the Business Central Dimension Combinations obsolete as these rules are much more powerful in controlling data entry.

Special Vocabulary:

• “Magic Formula”- When set appropriately a budget rule uses this formula to check for budget availability before posting invoices, purchase orders or otherwise removing funds from an account. This is that formula:
  • AVAILABLE  = Budget (less) Commitments, Encumbrances, Actual and optionally (Unposted journals and documents)
• Approval Process- the method your organization uses to approve anything from documents, invoices, budgets and purchase orders to a new process you may want to implement once you’ve selected a software like Fundamentals. Automating approvals is an excellent way to make sure you maintain a consistency in the operation of your organization.
• Journal Batch- This is a way of organizing journal entries with common attributes together into a group or batch. Fundamentals allows you to allocate expenses to either a batch or to lines within journals.
• Line Approval- Within Fundamentals you can approve whole documents or batches, but you can also set approvals by specific line items within an invoice, purchase order or other business documents. These lines should contain the information to complete an automated process for detailed but quick review.

No Business Rule Card

There is no one general business rule card. Rather, you will set your rules in one of these subheadings for the Business Rules Menu:

• Batch Approval Rules
• Budget Rules
• Document Approvals
• Document Line Approvals
• Validation Rules

Together, these business rule setups will support your efforts to provide consistent management of your organization’s funds.