This falls under the category of "Who knew?"!

There is a long story as to why I even tested this in the first place, but it's not very interesting so I will spare everyone the details!  Suffice it to say I'm evaluating some requirements for a client planning to add a significant volume of transactions to Dynamics GP (potential volume in the millions of transactions per year).

The Question

In a discussion, someone asked me "How big is the Journal Entry number field?".

Great question!  I can't say I ever really looked at it, it is sufficiently large I never have needed to look.

The Answer

The answer?  It's an 8-digit field, and the highest allowed number is 99,999,998 (oddly enough, 99,999,999 is not allowed, go figure!).

So like any other geek out there, my mind wandered to "What happens if we get to that number?".  I thought oh my, this conceivably could be an issue some day far down the road if this volume translates to individual journal entries.

What Happens Next?

In almost any other area of GP, this usually means trouble.  We're trained to leave leading zeros in front of all sorts of "next number" fields for future growth.

Well with the Journal Entry number, after posting/saving the document with JE# 99,999,998, it automatically reverted to 1 or the lowest unused journal entry number not used in an open year.

Huh?

That last "or" is an interesting one.  When testing this in Fabrikam, assuming no years have been closed, that part is what one will find out because of the odd data in Fabrikam specifically.

The JE# cycle will start again at 1, in most cases, assuming the organization runs a normal operation, has closed previous fiscal years and is not running this many transactions through in the course of an open business year.

However, with Fabrikam (and it could happen anywhere), it so happens that in my sample data, JE#1 to 4 were posted but in an open year. For those that don't use Fabrikam much, it has a gazillion open fiscal years which usually people ignore (or fix) for their testing purposes.

So I closed the year 2014 and once JE#1 to 4 etc. was in history, I could use it again. Before closing the year it jumped to JE#5, then to some number in the 60s, and it would keep jumping to the lowest JE# not already used in the YTD open table.

If trying to re-use a JE# in an open year, a message will tell the user this JE# has already been used.

I love learning something new, no matter how trivial it may seem!  I doubt I will often use this morsel of information in my consulting, but one never knows!