When payroll posts into the ledger, how does each salary know which department it belongs to?
It’s a simple question, and in most businesses the honest answer is that it doesn’t. The salary lands as one number, and somebody works out the split afterwards in a spreadsheet. The same thing happens to every other cost the business wants to see by branch, project, or donor.
Business Central answers the question properly with a feature called Dimensions. It is one of the most underused features in the product.
The spreadsheets beside the ledger
Walk into almost any mid-sized Kenyan business, and you’ll find the same arrangement. The accounting system knows the total. Everything else lives beside it.
There’s a spreadsheet for profit by branch and another for profit by product line. There’s one for the donor-funded project, rebuilt every quarter for the report, and one for the vehicle fleet. And there’s the one the MD asked for once, which nobody has dared to stop producing.
Each of them starts from the same ledger, and each is rebuilt by hand. At the monthly management meeting, two of them disagree, and 20 minutes go on working out why.
A finance team of four, each spending a day a month on this, loses roughly 48 days a year moving numbers that already exist from one place to another. That’s the visible cost. The less visible one is timing: by the time the branch report is ready, the month it describes is over.
This applies whether you’re a SACCO with branches across the country, an NGO running donor-funded programmes, a farm operating several sites, or a state corporation reporting by department.
What a dimension actually is
A dimension is a tag on a transaction. Branch: Naivasha. Project: Programme 4. Donor: EU. The ledger stays one ledger, and every entry in it simply carries a few labels saying what it belongs to.
Here is one salary, tagged once at posting:
KES 85,000 salary — Department: Packhouse · Site: Timau · Project: Programme 4
From that single entry, the same KES 85,000 appears in the Timau site P&L, in the Packhouse departmental cost report and in the Programme 4 donor report. No one re-keys it, and no one splits it in Excel.
Business Central organises dimensions in three layers. In plain terms:
The two ways you’ll slice everything (global dimensions). These are stored on every ledger entry, so you can filter by them almost anywhere in the system. Choose your two most important views of the business, usually department and branch, or project and donor.
The codes staff pick as they post (shortcut dimensions). Up to eight dimensions, the two global ones plus six more, can appear as columns on journal and document lines, so people code transactions at the moment they enter them.
Reports that combine several views at once (analysis views). These combine up to four dimensions, so you can see branch by product by project without a spreadsheet.
You can define more dimensions than this. These are simply the ones that surface where people work.
Where the split comes from
Back to the salary.
Most master records in Business Central (customers, vendors, items, fixed assets, employees and G/L accounts) can carry default dimensions. Set an employee’s default department to Packhouse and their site to Timau, and anything posted against that employee inherits both.
That’s how payroll cost gets split without anyone typing a code. Your payroll system stays where it is. When its journal posts into Business Central, each employee’s cost lands on their default dimensions. The split is decided once on the employee record and applied every month.
This works when the payroll integration posts one line per employee. Many integrations post a single summarised journal straight to G/L accounts, and the per-employee split is lost before it reaches the ledger. It’s worth confirming how yours works before go-live.
There is one more subtlety, and it comes up often with farms and multi-site operations.
A default dimension records where someone is assigned. It doesn’t know where they actually worked. In a business with permanent departments, those are the same thing, and the defaults are enough. On a farm that moves pickers across blocks at harvest, they aren’t, and the labour cost of a busy week ends up entirely against one block’s books. The fix is to carry the dimension on each line, from timesheets or biometric data, rather than from the employee record. That’s a decision to make during design rather than discover at month-end.
Budgets by the same tags
Dimensions don’t only apply to actuals. Business Central budgets can be held by the same dimensions, so a branch, programme or donor budget sits in the system alongside what was actually spent.
For NGOs reporting against donor budget lines, and for state corporations reporting against approved budgets by department, this is often the most valuable part. Budget vs actual by donor or department comes straight out of the ledger instead of being reconciled in a workbook.
The mistake to avoid
The businesses that get the least from Dimensions are usually the ones that get most excited about them.
They create one for everything: branch, product, salesperson, vehicle, customer type, project, region. Seven dimensions, some with 40 values. Within six months, nobody codes transactions properly, half the entries land in “General,” and the reports are less trustworthy than the spreadsheets they replaced.
Business Central gives you tools to prevent this. You can make a dimension mandatory on certain accounts, force the same code on related entries, or block combinations that make no sense. But the discipline that works best is simpler. Start with two dimensions and make them your global ones. Add a third only when someone can name the decision it will change.
When you don’t need this
One branch, one product line, no projects, no donors, and no cost centres anyone asks about? Then the total in your accounting system is the answer, and dimensions are overhead you don’t need.
For everyone else, Dimensions are already in the licence. They ship with Business Central Essentials, and most businesses running it are paying for them without having switched them on.
Why start now
Dimensions tag what is posted from the day they are set up. Adding them to past entries is slow, manual work, so every month without them is a month of history you won’t be able to slice by branch, project or donor later. The sooner the tags are in place, the sooner your comparisons become useful.
What the split makes possible
Once the ledger can split, reporting stops being a monthly reconstruction. Business Central’s Financial Reporting (formerly account schedules) reads dimensions directly, so the board pack comes out of the system in the shape the board wants, by branch, by project, or by donor, instead of from a workbook someone rebuilt on the Thursday before the meeting.
A quick check: if anyone on your team rebuilds a report by branch, project, or donor every month, Dimensions will save that time.
If you want to know which two dimensions your business should start with, and what the setup would take, that’s a 20-minute conversation with no slide deck. Write to info@trendpro.co.ke or call +254 723 343 353.
Wilfred Onsongo, Business Development Manager, TrendPro Systems. This series covers one Business Central module at a time: what it does, when you need it, and when you don’t.
Related in the series: HR and the payroll boundary, on why Business Central holds the employee record but not the payslip. Financial reporting, on what the split lets you see.
