Andrew Karasev

SAP Business One Customization: User Defined Fields and Tables

If you think about light customization of your user interface, prior to considering SDK programming we recommend you to review User defined fields and tables with your consultant.

We would like to show you where they are and give you some modification case studies.  We will base our publication on current version 8.81.  However similar functionality is available in earlier versions, such as 2007A and B and 2005A/B.  Let’s begin with extending existing master records:

1. Business Partners table extension with user defined fields.  Both Customers and Vendors are united in the same table.  Let’s now assume that you would like to add several persons with specific commission description and percentage each, where you need no more than three sales representative.  Add nine fields to the Business Partner, each three per commission (Salesperson ID, Commission description and Percentage).  How do I get there?  Tools -> Customization Tools -> User Defined Fields Management, here expand Master Data, then Business Partner, highlight Business Partner and click on Add button on the right bottom corner of the window.  Now, how do I do calculate commission without programming it in SDK?  Good question.  Consider Crystal Report, which looks at paid invoices and business partner custom commission fields

2. New User Defined Table – monthly service unit cost.  Let’s now imagine that you are reseller of something like advertising time and your franchisor is varying your cost every month.  Instead of updating the cost in all your Inventory Items, you would like to have one central table, where the cost is specified for each month, and probably in relation to the country or region, if you are participating in international business.  If your business is relatively simple in the form of Sales Order and Invoice creation, you may decide zero cost for your service items and do one General Ledger monthly cost transaction to keep your Balance Sheet, P&L accurate.  User Defined Cost table is accessible through normal user interface

3. Animating User Defined field or tables via SDK programming.  If you feel that customization and reporting options described above are not doing the job, the next step would be to register User Defined Object or appeal to SDK programming.  Object will be described in separate publication.  Software Development Kit coding should be done through certified SB1 reseller, who carries certified programmers in staff

4. Some notes about version 8.8 and 8.81.  First of all there are no more of such things as A and B versions.  This means that your corporate ERP SAP Business One could be installed on the same Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 Server with companies for all the countries, where you have facilities (assuming that SAP B1 is localized for these countries).  Previously there were two flavors A and B (like 2007A and 2007B, where USA and Canadian versions were available in A and Brazilian or Chinese in B, and you had to have two server installs).  Second, we would like to mention such cool feature as Purchase Quotation and Purchasing Quotation Generation Wizard (in Corporate ERP terminology it is also referred as Requisition Management)

5. Business One as an option for your international subsidiary, where in USA or Canada you are deploying Microsoft Dynamics (GP, AX, SL, NAV).  We did it for several of the well-known multinational corporations.  There are several methods.  One of them is to export SAP BO GL Trial Balance into Excel worksheet and use it in your FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter consolidated P&L or BS (this should be setup in Reporting Tree).  The second method is GL transaction level consolidation.  Here you have SB1 as your overseas accounting application and in US you have the shadow company with exactly the same GL accounts.  You export SBO GL transactions every night or weekly and import them into Dynamics via Integration Manager or eConnect programmed custom integration.  Similar options exist for Axapta, Navision, Solomon, as well as for non Microsoft Corporate ERP platforms, such as Oracle eBusiness Suite/Financials

6. Crossing the borders in Easter Europe and South America.  This Corporate ERP application is localized for Russian Federation, where it is facing strong competition with such locally developed package as 1S Bukhgalteria (1S Accounting in English translation).  In Brazil this small business MRP and ERP package has very good reputation and it is often implemented for larger organizations.  It naturally competes with local accounting application Microsiga

7. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. help@efaru.com  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese

Article Tags: User Defined Fields, User Defined, Defined Fields

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