The share of journal postings created manually rather than by a sub-ledger or system process. A high reading signals control risk and automation gaps.
At a glance
The percentage of total journal postings over the period that were entered by hand, as opposed to generated automatically by a sub-ledger (AR, AP, Inventory) or a system process (recurring, batch, integration). It is a control-health gauge: the more your numbers depend on people typing entries, the more exposed you are to error, fraud, and key-person risk.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Microsoft Dynamics 365 data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US health & beauty brand on Business Central, single legal entity, snapshot 12 Jun 26 over the trailing 30 days. The controller suspects too much is being done by hand at month-end.
Manual share = 840 / 7,500 = 11.2%, comfortably below the 25% alert line.
Three things to notice:
- 11% is healthy for a single-entity commerce brand. Most postings flow from automated sales and purchase sub-ledgers. The manual layer is reclasses and accruals, which is normal accounting hygiene.
- Watch the month-end spike. If you scope to the last five business days of the period in isolation, the manual share often jumps to 30%+ because accruals and corrections cluster at close. A high reading driven purely by close-week is less alarming than a high reading spread evenly across the month.
- Above 25% sustained is the warning. It means routine activity is being booked by hand, which is where misstatement and fraud risk concentrate. The usual fix is to automate the offending category (a recurring journal for predictable accruals, or fixing a broken sub-ledger mapping) rather than to work faster.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Manual Journals as % of Total is a control-health summary. Pair it with these to find the cause and the consequence.Reconciling against Microsoft Dynamics 365
Where to look in Business Central / Finance & Operations:Business Central: Finance > G/L Registers (entries with the general-journal Source Code are the manual numerator) Business Central: Reports > Finance > G/L Trial Balance (with Source Code analysis to isolate manual postings) Finance & Operations: General ledger > Journal entries > General journals (filter to Posted; these are the manual journals) Finance & Operations: General ledger > Inquiries and reports > Voucher transactions (group by source to separate manual from subledger)To reproduce the ratio: count posted manual general-journal lines over the period, divide by total posted journal lines over the same period and scope. The card should match within the OData / DMF sync window. Why our number may legitimately differ:
This card is purely GL-internal, so there is no commerce-side counterpart. Indirectly, better automation of commerce-order postings (a healthy AR slice on Journals by Source Module) tends to pull this percentage down over time.