Multiple budgets

We use the Jobs granule (3.7) and need the ability to store multiple budgets for one job. On the budget, we will list all items needed to build a new water system for a particular job. Not all of these items will appear on the quote as we roll the cost up into one main item. We do not want to create an item with a BOM at this point, because throughout the planning/quoting process, there will be multiple revisions to the items used based on the customer’s request. We would like to retain all versions of the budget for each job so we can reference them as the customer’s tend to go back and forth on what they want. Keep in mind, that the customer is only seeing a few items on the quote, not the actual job budget that contains all the items. Currently we are managing this by creating multiple jobs Job 1234-R1 (revision one), 1234-R2, 1234-R3, and so on. Each job has the different budget detailed out. Does anyone have any good ideas on how to customize the system so that we can have one job and multiple budgets? Does anyone know if 5.0 addresses this type of issue?

If creating multiple jobs isn’t enough for you, and has you said you want to customize you can take the idea from Sales Order.
For example in sales Order you can create a copy of current sales order with function “Archive Document”. Every time in select this function it will create a new copy of current sales order and later you can see all revisions of Sales Order.

If don’t think NAV 5.0 has that feature that you were asking.

Job budgets no longer exist in 5.0, they are replaced with a much easier to use system called tasks. But like budgets, you only have one overall Task list per job. You may possibly be able to use this system by creating Start End groups for each budget plan, But it would not be ideal. To modify either system would require adding a new Code field tot he primary key of the Planning tables, which definitely I would advise against.

Since the system is totally different in 5.0, I would not recommend any development in 3.70 Jobs, since none of it would work in 5.00.

In 5.00 what I would do is create two new tables :

Job Budget - Primary Key, Job No. , Code.

Budget Task line, a copy of Table 1003 but with primary key Job No., Job Task No., Budget Code, Line No.

Then create a funciton that can transfer lines from Budget to Planning, it would then be really easy to create a form that compares current to budget.

The biggest issue will be keeping the field “Line No.” in sync, but maybe that wont even be important, since you could add a field “Planning Line Line No.” in the new table, and use that for synchronization.

Has said David synchronizing lines in real-time it’s always a problem. If you delete a line, insert a new one, it involves some work to keep everything correctly synchronized.
The model that David had described is the concept applied in several places in Navision, that for most of users it simply works quite well.

Thank you for the information. What you both are saying makes sense. We’ll just keep doing what we are doing until we convert to 5.0, which will be first quarter 2008. Thanks again!