Russian localization of Dynamics NAV: missing longer fields

When you implement a localized version of NAV in Russia, you would face a situation that some text attributes are too long to fit into fields, offered by standard functionality. In particular, I refer to customer and vendor information that can be much more lengthy then the standard NAV fields allow to. Legislation wise, when you talk about vendors, it might be not so crucial to input shorter information.

However, if we refer to customers, the situation is more critical. In Russia, you need to provide to your customers specific documents, such as VAT invoice and a Way-bill. There you would need to indicate the real attributes of the customer, such as full customer name and full address. If you would put those details incorrectly in the document (e.g., because the address field is too short and you had shortened the input), tax office in theory might reject the customer’s application to deduct VAT for your transaction or include the COGS into deductible tax base. Customers do not want these risks, and they would be unhappy to receive documents from you that do not contain full details. You do not want your customers unhappy, do you?

Thus, it is inevitable to have all information correctly stored in the system. But, here is the limitation we are facing for more than a decade: standard fields, provided by Microsoft, are too short sometimes to handle some customer’s attributes.

E.g., if we take a customer card (Table 18), in a standard functionality we have two standard fields for customer name: Name and Name 2. For the address, we have Address and Address 2. All of those fields are text fields and they are 50 chars long.

In standard Russian localization, Full Name field (250 chars long) has been luckily added. All subsequent reports have the following logic: if Full Name field is filled in, then it is showed in the printforms of the reports. If Full Name is empty, then you will see the result of concatenation of Name + Name 2 fields.

The address field is not so lucky – no changes has been made to Russian localization. And this is quite awkward, as there are many examples of customers having very long addresses (close to 250 chars), that needed to be printed on the VAT invoice. Standard Address + Address 2 would give us only 100 chars in total, which can obviously be too short for Russian customers. In this case, there are few options to proceed:

• Input as many chars as standard functionality allows, print the documents and hope none will ever notice. Not the best option, as the customer most likely will notice and return the documents for correction.
• Export the documents in Excel and make changes to the lengthy address manually – hoping that there are not so many lengthy address customers.
• The other option is to make a customization and increase the length of the existing fields. Here you would need to be very careful and also increase the length of all subsequent tables where this field is transferred to (e.g., unposted and posted sales invoices), as well as verify needed variables. Do good testing before putting this to live environment, otherwise users would not be able to post or process the documents correctly.
• Another option is to add a new Full Address field of 250 chars and populate it on the customer card page. Here the disadvantage would be to make changes to all subsequent reports to switch the address fields to you new field. Another disadvantage, you might face a limitation of SQL length of the record per table, as adding too many lengthy fields would cause a risk that you would face this 8 kb limitation.

Whatever you choose, it is additional work or customization, and this could be a good change in the standard Russian localization as it has been asked from Microsoft already many times during the years.