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Our company would like to separate non-commercial income from commercial income by using different G/L accounts so we can better track margins and other performance metrics.
In our business we have:
Items that are solely non-commercial
Items that are sold both commercially and non-commercially
Customers that are solely non-commercial
Customers that buy on both a commercial and non-commercial basis
My understanding of Business Central is:
Sales revenue is driven by the combination of the General Product Posting Group and the General Business Posting Group.
On the item card, you assign a General Product Posting Group, and (when the General Business Posting Group is blank) this determines the G/L revenue account used.
On the customer card, you can assign a General Business Posting Group, which will override the “blank” business posting group and therefore drive a different revenue account when posting sales for that customer.
Based on this, I see two possible approaches for separating commercial vs non‑commercial revenue:
Create new item numbers for non‑commercial sales, each with its own General Product Posting Group that points to a separate non‑commercial revenue account.
Create separate customers for non‑commercial sales (for example, “Customer X” and “Customer X – Non‑Commercial”) and assign a different General Business Posting Group to the non‑commercial customer that points to a different revenue account.
To me, option 2 seems easier to manage than creating and maintaining duplicate items.
My questions to the community:
Are these the only practical ways to separate commercial vs non‑commercial revenue accounts, or are there other preferred patterns in BC (for example, posting setup variations, dimensions, or something else I am overlooking)?
Is my understanding of how General Product Posting Groups and General Business Posting Groups drive revenue postings correct?
Am I missing anything important in my analysis, especially for scenarios where both items and customers can be mixed commercial/non‑commercial?
Any additional advice or “lessons learned” from implementations where you needed this kind of revenue separation would be greatly appreciated.
Your concept is correct. That’s how the system determines the G/L accounts based on the combination of those two posting groups. So, whether you choose to use multiple items or multiple customers depends on your preference. However, the general recommendation is to use alternative items instead of creating multiple customers. Dimensions are a powerful feature, but keep in mind they do not change the G/L accounts. Instead, they help segment (bifurcate) your data. You can then use reporting to easily extract both commercial and non-commercial information from the ledgers. I will definitely suggest to go through Dimension once.
In short, the system always determines the G/L accounts based on the combination of these two posting groups. For example, if you post a positive inventory adjustment, the system uses a combination of a blank Gen. Business Posting Group and the Item’s Gen. Product Posting Group, since no customer or vendor is involved in that transaction.
Nothing as such but there's many more possibilities, if you wish to discuss then have those questions and we will answer.
Normally Dimension comes as a rescue always. :)
Hi,
Yes your understanding is correct, the combination of Gen. Business and Gen. Product Posting Group drives the G/L account, you got that right.
Both options work but neither is perfect for your case because you have mixed items and mixed customers on same time which make things complicated.
Option 2 is cleaner yes, duplicate customers easier to manage than duplicate items, but you still have problem when same customer buys both commercial and non-commercial on same order - you cannot have two business posting groups on one document.
Honestly what most people do in this situation is use Dimensions alongside the posting groups. Create a dimension CHANNEL or INCOME TYPE with values COMMERCIAL / NON-COMMERCIAL. This way you tag individual lines on mixed orders without needing separate customers or items and you can report margins by dimension without changing G/L structure.
If you really need separate G/L accounts then Option 2 is the way but prepare for the mixed customer problem and make sure your sales people know which customer code to use - in practice this gets messy without training.
If you have find this helpful can you please kark it as verified?
Thank you all for your responses. They've been very helpful.
Our main objective in separating commercial from non-commercial income is to more accurately calculate expected trade spend, with a clearer view in the P&L. Non-commercial items are not included in trade spend, and our sales team also excludes them from the sales forecast.
Non-commercial items are limited in our setup. We have one product group classified as non-commercial, and we also have some items sold to co-manufacturers in two different ways: commercially, when they use the product in their own production, and non-commercially, when they use it to produce a turnkey product that we later buy back from them.
Based on this, I am leaning toward setting up two customer records for our co-manufacturers: one for commercial transactions and one for non-commercial transactions.
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