Perhaps someone will comment on best practices in Navision for service businesses. For service inventory items (haircuts, shipping, consulting, et al) the advised method appears to be to create a non-stock item. However, this method seems a somewhat awkward method to capture the business logic of a service business in that non-stock items have to be linked to a regular items, which seem most appropriate for physical inventory … I’m wondering whether Navision offers a more elegant answer that I’m missing, or if I should be considering custom modifications.
Non-stock items is something of a misnomer IMHO because, as you have found,the first time you use one of them, it creates a real item record which then acts as though you have inventory of it. As it has been explained to me, non-stock items were conceived so that you can do things like loading up a full catalogue of a vendor’s items and then you will only create real item records when you actually use one of them. In your case, I would use G/L account codes and then change the description accordingly. Alternatively, you could have one sundry item that you use for everything. Regards, John
Why not use Resources?
The G/L code approach may be feasible, though this approach would seem to have important implications and limitations … In particular, I’m thinking of how this approach might not be effective in a scenario with thousands of different service items. I’ve considered resources, but these default to either people or machines, and seem to reflect a very manufacturing-centric perspective. These could be modified, but the hope is that there is a more service-centric approach available without custom modifications. Other users have commented on the ability to use inventory items for this purpose by setting item value to zero (item table has a field for this). My initial impression is that this approach may be helpful for service items, and is a direction to consider.
Hi Michael Maybe consider using a dimension for service items when posting to G/L. Cheers Peter
Now what you really need to use is “Group Items”. Group Items work much like Items, except they don’t record a quantity on Hand. They record only the value. You buy them and sell them just as you would a normal item, and are ideal for service items. e.g. you can create a “Group Item” called CABLES. Then you just buy them and sell them. They record a$ value in inventory, and on a sales invoice you can print a quantity, which is just for printing, it has no actual effect. Group Items are a great feature of Navision, and have only one real problem, unfortunately a major one. … They were dropped from the product with the release of version 1.1. Anyway, if you can get a copy of Financials version 0.9 or 1.0, then you could copy the code across. If you have an old license, you may even have access to the original tables!
An extract from an old Navision FLF license: 4,010 Inventory - Basic Inventory 1 4,030 Inventory - Multiple Sales Prices 1 4,040 Inventory - Multiple Locations 1 4,060 Inventory - Bill of Materials 1 4,070 Inventory - Item Groups 1 4,750 Application Wide 1 4,760 General - Departments & Projects 1 4,770 General - Reason Codes 1
I used to use the “Group Item” in the past. Very usefull indeed, and I miss it as a standard granule. A pity that Navision removed it from standard.
I continue to explore this issue … thank you for the information on the “group item”, it sounds like it would be an appropriate way to address this issue. However, as you point you, it’s no longer supported out of the box … I’m relatively new to dimensions, but they do appear to offer a good strategy for handling large quantities of service inventory items. I’m not sure how this method would handle traditional inventory concerns (e.g price and cost), but I will try it with some sample data. I have some information from Microsoft coming on this issue, I will post it for the group once I have received it. Thanks for the feedback. M.
I would not recommend dimensions. This is NOT what they are designed for. I really don’t think your client wants to print a Profit Loss statement based on sales of service items. If you want to use items, then create a generic item, and then use Lot No.s to differentiate the particular item groups. Try to keep them as generic as possible. By using LOts, you only need to select the Lot if that particular item needs more tracking detail. Costing wise, think it through. If you decide to go for “Item Value Zero” then reconsider Resources, it may be easiest just to modify Purchasing to allow the purchase of resources (A VERY minor mod). Using Lot specific Costing would be the most straight forward.