If you’re trying to learn about a new system like D365 F&O, whether as a junior consultant or an end user, it’s not easy! First you need a sandbox environment that’s safe to “play” in, then you need a user with a security role with sufficient permissions to see and test all of the options available. Then you need the gift of time to review and test all of the functionality, so you understand all of its practical applications.
The aim of this post – and its inevitable successors – is to give you a relatively speedy walkthrough of a common area of the system, by way of screenshots from a “Contoso” sample data set. These screenshots provide a useful reference for much of the breadth of functionality available around sales orders.
The Lines view
This is the default view when you select a sales order from the grid view. From here you can see all of the constituent lines that make up a sales order. There may only be one, or there may be hundreds, but they have a single customer and sales order reference number in common.
On the default Lines view, we see a few key fields from the Header view in the Sales order header FastTab, followed by the Sales order lines themselves, and then the Line details FastTab, which we’ll cover separately in a moment.
The Header view
The Header view is where you manage all of the common aspects of the sales order, including the default financial dimensions (account segments) for all lines, as well as extensive options e.g. tax, pricing, delivery, and warehouse options, many of which can be overwritten on a line-by-line basis, back in the Lines view.
These screenshots will give you a feel of all of the default options for a sales order at the header level:
Line details
The Lines view gives you a basic level of detail and control over each line. Whilst the grid in the Lines view can be personalised, with columns added or removed by the user, depending on the admin rights applied, the real power lies in the Line details tabs beneath.
Tip: You can select multiple lines in the Sales order lines FastTab, and edit them in Line details in bulk.
Here are screenshots of the default layouts and fields of all of the Line details tabs, specifically:
- General – largely includes the key fields you will find in the default Sales order lines FastTab itself
- Setup – includes stock, VAT, returns and commissions
- Address – allows a different delivery address per line/lines selected
- Product – where we define product, stock and tracking variants, based on configured dimension groups
- Packing – includes bar code, packing material, and gift card options
- Delivery – such as estimated and actual dates, carrier, and direct delivery options
- Sourcing – supplier options, whether for (i) items from our organisation’s stock or (ii) items for direct delivery, straight from the supplier
- Price and discount – allows detailed pricing, rebate, and line-level discounts per line/lines selected
- Project – where the sales order is linked to a project in the Project management and accounting module
- Foreign trade – key elements related to export and import compliance
- Financial dimensions – allows line-level definition or override of header-level dimensions
- As a reminder, financial dimensions are segments for account charts, and can include custom and entity-backed dimensions.
- Loads – pertaining to transportation management, showing the breakdown of individual shipments
Action Pane options
The following screenshots show all of the actions that can be taken on an individual sales order.
It’s worth remembering that in a production environment, these actions will be limited the security roles and associated permissions assigned to your user, so if you’re expecting functionality, but can’t find it, speak to your security/system administrator.
Business Central
I gave a very high level overview of the differences between D365 F&O and D365 BC in my post, Battle of the Microsoft ERP solutions. For reference, I thought it would be useful to include some screenshots of sales orders in Business Central, for a side-by-side comparison of available field sets and functionality.
Here is the default sales order form view:
And here is a feel of the menu options available:
Clearly the options are not as extensive as in D365 F&O, but are more than sufficient for smaller businesses with similar trading operations.