Copying Purchase Orders or Sales Orders with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

One of the items that I come across is my line work in Dynamics NAV is the question: “how can we easily duplicate purchase or sales orders”? Often individuals are looking to copy information from a previous purchase or sales transaction.

This scenario is quite common. Like most individuals would be, the concern from these Microsoft Dynamics NAV users is on how to reduce keystrokes during data entry. Seems logical, doesn’t it?

This is especially applicable in scenarios where purchase or sales transactions with the same information exist for recurring transactions for vendors or customers.

Enter NAV’s Simple Commands

A simple way to solve this is with standard purchase / sales codes that can be used to create and post sales or purchase lines with the same information.

Many companies have purchase or sales transactions that are frequently posted with similar information. Some examples are items such as posting of utilities expenses, service fees or other periodic charges to specific vendors.

One way for us to achieve less data entry is to setup a standard purchase or sales code, which can be set up using G/L Accounts, Items, Fixed Assets and Item Charges. If required, dimension values can also be set up in the standard purchase or sales code lines.

There are other options to retrieve or copy previous transactions to new or existing sales or purchase lines, for example:

• Copy Document – Copy document is useful when you need to create sales orders or purchase orders and want to have the exact lines and cost of a previous item. This is really only good if there only a few posted transactions.
• Recurring Journal – A recurring journal is used to post transactions that occur frequently – but it only works in the Journal. Thus, it cannot be used in the Sales or Purchase Order/Invoice transactions. However, in our case, the standard purchase or sales code is more useful if there are multiple recurring transactions for specific Vendors or Customers.

My recommendation though is that you can set up multiple standard purchase or sales codes and simply select the standard code during data entry. This process makes repeat sales or purchase order entry much easier.

To do this, look at the following:

• Create a standard purchase or sales code. Start by assigning using GL Accounts, Items, Fixed Assets and Item Charges. Also, you can assign the Dimension Value for each line (if required). By assigning the Dimension Value already to the line the dimension will be automatically inserted in the Purchase/Sales Lines.If required, you can also assign the Currency Code if the purchase or sales order is using multiple currency.

• Assign all the applicable standard purchase codes to the appropriate Vendor in the Vendor  Card and the standard sales codes to Customers in the Customer Card.

• During data entry use the Std. Vend. Purchase Codes” function for purchasing and the  “Std. Cust. Sales Code function” for sales. Then, select the standard purchase / sales code to automatically insert sales and purchase

And we are done. If need be, you can still modify the line by adding or deleting them from the purchase or sales lines.