(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)
Master data is all the key information to the operation of a business. Third-party companies, such as customers and vendors, are part of the master data. The items a company manufactures or sells are also part of the master data.
Many other things can be considered master data, such as the warehouses or locations, the resources, or the employees.
The first thing you have to do when you start using Dynamics NAV is load your master data into the system. Later on, you will keep growing your master data by adding new customers, for instance. To do so, you need to know which kind of information you have to provide.
We will open a customer card to see which kind of information is stored in Dynamics NAV about customers. To open a customer card, follow these steps:
The following screenshot shows the customer card for The Cannon Group PLC:
Customers are always referred to by their No., which is a code that identifies them. We can also provide the following information:
Besides the information you see on the card, there is much other information we can introduce about customers. Take a look at the Navigate tab found on the ribbon.
Other information that can be entered is as follows:
But customers, just as any other master data record, do not only have information that users inform manually. They have a bunch of other information that is filled in automatically by the system as actions are performed:
Not all the information we have seen on the customer card is mandatory. Actually, the only information that is required if you want to create a transaction is to give it a No. (its identification) and to fill in the posting group’s fields (Gen. Bus. Posting Group and Customer Posting Group). All other information can be understood as default information and setup that will be used in transactions so that you don’t have to write it down every single time. You don’t want to write the customer’s address in every single order or invoice, do you?
Let’s take a look now at an item card to see which kind of information is stored in Dynamics NAV about items. To open an item card, follow these steps:
The following screenshot shows the item card for item 1000 Bicycle:
As you can see in the screenshot, items first have a No., which is a code that identifies them. For an item, we can enter the following information:
Besides the information you see on the item card, there is much other information we can introduce about items through the Navigate tab found on the ribbon.
As you can see, other information that can be entered is as follows:
As with customers, not all the information in the item card is mandatory.
We will start with third-parties: customers and vendors. They work exactly the same way. We will just look at customers, but everything we will explain about them can be applied to vendors as well. Then, we will look at items, and finally we will take a brief look at locations and resources.
You can apply to vendors the same concepts learned with customers, as they work exactly the same way. You can also apply to resources the concepts learned with items.
We have seen in detail how customers and items work as master data. You can apply the same concepts to other master data. For instance, vendors work exactly the same way as customers. The concepts learned can be used in resources and locations, and also to other master data such as G/L accounts, Fixed Assets, Employees, Service Items, and so on.
This article provides a brief introduction on master data. Also, we can add new customers, items, vendors, resources, and location into the master data when working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Further resources on this subject:
I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…
Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…
Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…
Key-takeaways: Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…
While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…
Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…