Quick question: how many accounts are in your chart of accounts? Let’s talk about GP account segments vs Business Central dimensions
If you’re running Microsoft Dynamics GP, the honest answer might be “thousands — and we’re not sure what half of them are for.” That’s not bad bookkeeping. It’s just how GP was designed. Every department, location, or division you track gets baked into the account number itself, and the chart grows every time the business does.
Business Central takes a different path — and in Round 5 of our Functionality Face-Off series, we’ll show you why it’s one of the biggest quality-of-life upgrades a GP customer can make. (Catch up on Round 4: bank reconciliation if you missed it.)
How It Works in Dynamics GP: Segments
GP builds tracking into the account number. A typical GP account looks like this:
100 – 6200 – 02
That’s three segments: department (100), the natural account (6200, say Travel Expense), and location (02). Here’s how it comes together:
- The Account Framework is set when GP is first installed. It fixes the maximum number of segments (up to 10) and total length (up to 66 characters) for the whole system. Changing it later is a serious project.
- The Account Format (set per company) decides how many of those segments you actually use, and how long each one is.
- You define each segment’s values in the Account Segment Setup window (Financial > Setup > Financial > Segment) — for example, segment 1, value 100, “Sales Department.”
- Then you create the accounts themselves at Cards > Financial > Account — one account for every valid combination (Microsoft’s GP General Ledger docs walk through the windows).
That last step is the catch. Want travel expense tracked for six departments across three locations? That’s 18 separate accounts — for one expense type. Open a new department, and someone spends a day (or a week) creating every account the new department needs, usually with Mass Modify to copy ranges. Multiply that across the whole P&L, and it’s easy to see how GP charts swell into the thousands of accounts.
How It Works in Business Central: Dimensions
Business Central keeps the chart of accounts short: just the natural accounts. One Travel Expense account. One Sales account. Then it answers the “which department? which location?” questions with dimensions — tags you attach to every transaction (Microsoft Learn).
- Search (Alt+Q) for Dimensions. Create a dimension for each thing you track: DEPARTMENT, LOCATION, PROJECT, whatever fits your business.
- Select a dimension, choose Dimension Values, and list its values — Sales, Service, Admin, and so on. Adding a new department later is one new line here. That’s it. No new accounts.
- In General Ledger Setup, pick your two global dimensions — the ones you filter and report on most. They show up everywhere: journals, documents, reports. Up to six more shortcut dimensions appear as columns on journal and document lines.
- Set default dimensions on customers, vendors, items, and G/L accounts so the tags fill in automatically. You can even make a dimension required — set Value Posting to Code Mandatory and nobody can post to that account without saying which department it belongs to.
When you post, every entry carries its tags. Reports filter and group by any dimension or combination — travel expense by department, revenue by region by project — all from a chart of accounts you can still read in one sitting.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | Dynamics GP | Business Central |
|---|
| Feature | Dynamics GP | Business Central |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking method | Segments in the account number | Dimension tags on transactions |
| Chart of accounts size | Grows with every combination | Stays small — natural accounts only |
| Adding a department | Create new accounts for every combination | Add one dimension value |
| Structure limits | Framework fixed at install (10 segments / 66 chars) | Unlimited dimensions; 2 global + 6 shortcut on pages |
| Enforcing complete coding | Hard to require segments consistently | Code Mandatory / Same Code posting rules |
| Invalid combinations | Blocked only by not creating the account | Dimension Combinations rules |
| Reporting | By segment ranges | Filter and group by any dimension set |
Why BC Comes Out Ahead
GP’s segmented chart was a smart design for its era, and plenty of businesses run beautifully on it today. But dimensions solve the problems segments create:
- Your chart stops growing. The business can add departments, locations, and product lines for years without adding a single account. New value, one line, done.
- Analysis gets richer, not heavier. Segments give you as many views as you have segments. Dimensions let you tag entries with as many attributes as you like — and BC’s analysis views and financial reports slice by any of them.
- Data entry gets guardrails. Code Mandatory rules and default dimensions mean entries arrive tagged correctly, instead of relying on people picking the right account from a 4,000-line list.
- Migration is the perfect moment. Moving from GP to BC is exactly when you get to collapse those thousands of segment-combination accounts into a clean natural chart plus dimensions. It’s a fresh start most finance teams have wanted for years.
Ready for a Chart of Accounts You Can Actually Read?
Redesigning a GP segment structure into BC dimensions is the part of a migration where an experienced partner earns their keep — and it’s some of our favorite work. The Aisling Dynamics team has done it for companies of every shape and size.
Contact us or call (251) 293-0555 for a look at what your chart could look like in BC — and catch Round 6 of the Face-Off tomorrow.