| bc-version |
domain |
keywords |
technologies |
countries |
application-area |
|
|
finance |
| ledger-entry |
| immutable |
| reversal |
| audit-trail |
| correction |
| custentry-edit |
| non-financial-fields |
|
|
|
|
Correct posted ledger entries by reversing, not by editing or deleting them
Description
A posted ledger entry is part of Business Central's permanent audit trail, and its financial content is immutable. The amounts, accounts, posting date, and quantities on G/L Entry, Cust. Ledger Entry, Vendor Ledger Entry, and similar tables must not change after posting, because registers, applications, VAT statements, and statutory reports all assume that content is append-only. Correcting financial content is therefore itself a posting: BC provides reversal (the Reverse / Reverse Register routines) and correcting documents (credit memos, correcting journals) that post a new, offsetting entry and leave the original intact. This immutability rule is about financial content — it is not a blanket ban on touching the entry (see Best Practice).
Best Practice
To undo or correct a posting's financial content, post a reversing or correcting entry through the normal posting path so the offset is itself a balanced, dated, traceable transaction. The original entry stays in place and the two net to zero, preserving the audit trail.
Non-financial operational fields are a deliberate exception and are meant to be edited after posting. BC supports updating a defined set of post-posting fields — payment and application data such as due date, payment-discount dates, on-hold status, applies-to ID, and recipient/communication fields — and the Customer and Vendor Ledger Entries pages expose several of them as editable. Make those changes through the dedicated CustEntry-Edit / VendEntry-Edit routines (which those pages call), not a raw Modify, so the edit stays within the supported set and leaves the entry's financial content and audit trail intact.
Anti Pattern
Calling Modify or Delete on a posted ledger entry to fix a mistake — changing an amount, repointing an account, or removing the row. Detection signal: Modify, ModifyAll, Delete, or DeleteAll on a *Ledger Entry or G/L Entry record outside a dedicated *Entry-Edit routine. This destroys the audit trail, desynchronizes the entry from its register and detailed entries, and corrupts any report or reconciliation that already consumed the original value.
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