Default Order Settings in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

I have encountered many situations where clients expressed their wish to set up units of measuring such as 6x1kg, etc for the simple reason that they want to prevent their order takers from making a mistake. Although they sold and priced their products by the 1kg bag/box, they had the agreement with their customers that they can only order full cases, as cases will not be broken – very typical wholesale scenario. They thought they’d just set up the price for the case as well. All this just so their customer service / order takers would not make mistakes and create orders for partial cases.

There are several issues with this solution, though. The very first and obvious one is that the SO will now have a unit and a unit price which does not match agreements / contracts with the customer. At the very least the customer will call back and ask about it, but in more serious situations it could lead to legal disputes. And not to mention all the manual calculations to calculate the prices to be entered in the system for a case, the setup and maintenance of all these new units and the conversions related to them – as in the majority of these cases companies buy / inventory / manufacture by the 1kg bag. There is then also the question of margin calculation, though this could at the end have the same result as if we sold by 1kg bag.

The solution is a setup often forgotten in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, called Default Order Settings. Here you can set up order minimums, maximums, standards and multiples for each product to help the order processor to enter the proper quantity. If this is set up on the item, it will be automatically filled on the sales order line, taken into consideration by MRP and if the order taker enters a quantity which is not a multiple of the order multiple setup, the system will give them an error and remind them to convert the entered quantity to the multiple of the order setting closest to the quantity entered. The same happens if they were to enter less than the minimum or more than the maximum order quantities.

So what happens if the company operates in multiple sites and the policy for breaking cases for customers differs site by site? In a multi-site setup, you may use default order settings based on sites, where you are able to set up the default order quantities (minimum, maximum, standard and multiple) per each site. Set it up for those sites where there are limitations and do not worry about the ones where any quantity can be ordered.

The same settings are available for purchase and inventory purposes, if you are the customer who has an agreement to buy full cases from your vendor or if only full cases can be transferred between your locations / written off, etc. Just use the appropriate tab on the Default order settings form.

If you have any questions about using Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, please contact us!