Enable cleaner data entry and customer and vendor management in #MSDyn365FO #MSDyn365F #MSDyn365SCM

One of the most important, if not the most important, success factor in your ERP system is data. Whether it’s manually entered master, reference, or transactional data or data being provided and processed during data migration or through EDI and e-commerce channels, the accuracy and understanding of that data is critical to a company’s ability to operate efficiently and effectively. Early in my days as an end user, it would drive me crazy that we could not get accurate, meaningful reports from our AX system because the system was fraught with duplicate entries of customers, vendors, contacts, addresses, and items. There was no checks and balances from a process standpoint and there was still much left to be desired from the system standpoint, as far as analyzing and helping keep the data clean.

With enhancements to the Global address book, the Dynamics platform has been catching up in recent iterations. Today, I want to talk about an example of this in Account or Organization data entry in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (Or just Finance, or just Supply Chain Management, or D365WhateverMicrosoftCallsItNow). With just a few simple configurations and key checks in your business process and eliminate many of the user-related data entry errors and help keep a cleaner system.

First, as a SysAdmin, take a look at your Organization administration settings and check to make sure you are searching for duplicates in your Global address book. This will make sure that when creating new Party records, whether directly from module forms like Customer or Vendor, or from the Global address book itself, the system will match the value you enter to records including that value so you can see if that particular record has already been created or not. You can even configure the system to check for duplicate DUNS numbers if you are maintaining them in the system for credit check purposes.

Now that our parameters are set, let’s take a look at the functions used during day to day entry. First, the D365 Vendors form has a built in action button to easily copy vendors from one legal entity to another.

So, if you just created a brand new vendor or have an existing one, and that vendor now needs to be added to other companies, you can do that here:

This will even do some validation to check for things like a Vendor group value has already been setup and can leave those fields blank if the supporting reference data does not exist.

If you are creating a new vendor or customer (or just a Party record of any type) that’s when the previously set parameters come into play. Take a look at when I start typing in a value “general” after I click create new Vendor or Customer:

The system showed me other party id’s that started with the word “general.” Now in the case where multiple people enter records and there are different naming conventions used, maybe to be safe, I want to look for any records including “general,” not just records that begin with the term. After typing the value, I can change the filter criteria in the column header to “contains” so that no matter where the word “general” appears in the party ID, it will be included in the match contents.

If matches are found, I can click the Role tab to see what type of record it is and what legal entity it belongs to currently.

As shown above, if the record is an existing Customer or Vendor, I can copy the details of that account between legal entities.

You can click “Use match” if you found the record you were going to create rather than creating a duplicate entry or click Cancel if the matched accounts were not the same as the new record that needed to be created and just had similar names.

Just putting some structure around your data entry and processes for buyers, account managers, and data entry personnel can go a long way to your data integrity and ensure that you can get meaningful reporting from that data because you can trust that the accounts and records created are accurately setup and do not have to merge arbitrary or bad data to get the results you are looking for.