# Tips for leveraging free text invoice templates

**Business scenario:** A company such as ABC Inc. generates invoices for its customers for a variety of services, fees, or charges that must be itemized and posted to specific ledger accounts. These ledger accounts must also have dedicated financial dimensions at invoice line level. There is, however, a relatively high number of invoices generated each day. In order to ease out their employees' daily tasks, businesses want to automate the invoice generation process.

**Solution approach:** Dynamics 365 Finance Free Text invoice is the best suitable approach considering the given business scenario to support “Create FT invoice by using the predefined templates”
Observations: Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations product version **10.0.28 (10.0.1265.60)** & **Update52 (7.0.6441.74)** does support Free text invoice templates functionality to define number of invoice lines along with dimensions. 

Despite the fact that there are multiple invoice lines in the template, the user can only set a single value for the financial dimension (perhaps a bug).

1.	User cannot define a dedicated dimension at the invoice line in the template form
2.	If the user creates an FT invoice with multiple lines with dedicated dimension and save the record as a template then financial dimension is not visible in the template form

As Microsoft's support team works to resolve this issue, the following approach/workaround can be utilized by Dynamics 365 Finance consultants to define dedicated financial dimensions on individual invoice lines using FT invoice templates.

**Workaround: **
*DRAFT Free Text invoices can be created to generate the required FT Invoice template, and later on you can clean the draft records and leverage the already generated templates.*

Here is a step-by-step explanation of the approach/workaround.
Test Data Preparation in USMF LE:
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660562787898/yb0-GOlPM.png align="left")

1. Go to Accounts receivable > Invoices > All free text invoices.
2. Click New. 
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574713076/7VfP2E5N_.png align="left")
3. In the Customer account field, enter or select a value.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574752439/jfNRX-YJr.png align="left")
4. In the list, select customer & system will create FT header record.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574773963/YXPk7FZmV.png align="left")
5. Navigate to Invoice lines fast tab.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574789117/czWm0is39.png align="left")
6. In the Main account field, specify the desired values.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574799692/3sOgPlNE0.png align="left")
7. In the Sales tax group field, enter or select a value or leave blank.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574811424/d9lxHc2xh.png align="left")
8. In the Item sales tax group field, type a value, if required
9. In the Amount field, enter a number.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574840376/BLrqmdfbh.png align="left")
10. Click Add line option to create another line.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574850038/NIwN0U2VI.png align="left")
11. In the Main account field, specify the desired values.
12. In the Sales tax group field, enter or select a value.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574872834/a12QuR0UR.png align="left")
13. In the Amount field, enter a number.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574883134/IGWVzbEqU.png align="left")
14. In the BusinessUnit value field, enter or select a value for the first invoice line.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574894680/DiFhHkM-9.png align="left")
15. In the CostCenter value field, enter or select a value.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574905367/hdrvwxYo5.png align="left")
16. In the list, select second invoice line.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574915396/3utZtyLiy.png align="left")
17. In the BusinessUnit value field for second invoice line, enter or select a value 
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574926753/RcrxqqTIK.png align="left")
18. In the CostCenter value field for second invoice line, enter or select a value. 
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574951670/KxPMILnBx.png align="left")
19. Click on “Save to template” option and enter the template name and description to save the template
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574966152/ZMIh_kXWv.png align="left")
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574977101/z8KU3p0sT.png align="left")
20. Go to Accounts receivable > Invoices > Recurring invoices > Free text invoice templates.
21. In the list, find and select the newly created template record.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660574995110/qK1tBSddo.png align="left")
22. Validate invoice lines & Dimensions (dimension values are empty).
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575010198/ESVTLGzhI.png align="left")
23. Go to Accounts receivable > Invoices > All free text invoices.
24. Click New from template to open the drop dialog.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575025425/kXQlu29MF.png align="left")
25. In the Template & Customer account field, enter or select a value.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575052504/CY7JeCU7W.png align="left")
26. Click OK.
27. Validate the dimension values which got created through template.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575167095/FsRNAMxg7.png align="left")
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575177035/ANAPoxTqK.png align="left")
28. Click Post.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575187465/nmbwmgWWv.png align="left")
29. Click Invoice journal.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575201559/mNqIR_QkE.png align="left")
30. Click View accounting. 
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575211635/WJCSd87x2.png align="left")
31. Click Voucher. 
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575221299/dLhTDv4J-.png align="left")
32. Validate posted voucher transactions with correct dimension values.
![image.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1660575236409/S0jsgCWz7.png align="left")

**Conclusion**

The above workaround/suggestion could also be utilized when you create a Free Text invoice using the template feature, if you wanted to take it a step further.

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