John Sauber

I'm not sure how widespread this is throughout the system, but I expect it shows up all over the place. If one attempts to post, say, a Purchase Order, and does not include the External Document Number, appropriately, an error message is displayed, explaining the problem at hand. There are so many problems with how this is done in Business Central compared to classic NAV. 1. Consider the fact that you had the PO open when this occurs. A new window on top of that PO shows up and covers the PO up. Depending on your screen, this error message could easily obscure the entire PO, including the field in question (External Document No. in this instance). 2. The amount of whitespace on the pop up window is excessive like it is everywhere else in this app. Never enough room for the fields needed to get work done. This is coupled with the fact that the pop up window maxes out at 970 pixels wide, no matter how wide of a window you're using. This width literally does not even hold the description of the error message! You can move the pop up to wide layout so you can see all of the text in the Description field, but that's yet another click, and that guarantees you obscure the PO in the background. 3. Then, you click the hyperlink that appears on the Description to take you to the record, and it opens up the PO, which is already open underneath, right on top of the error message. Not only that, it does it in Read Only mode, which, at our company, we have completely eliminated because you can't get any work done on a PO in read only mode. So now you have a PO you were working on, an error window on top of it, then the same freaking PO in read only mode on top of that. Close down two windows and you're back to your original PO. Hopefully, you remembered which field you're missing! The UI has never been worse for this product. The U has been dropped from UI as far as I am concerned.

If you pop a page out to a new window via the new "Open This Page in a New Window" button, that does pop out after it literally re-loads the entire web application in that window. This is slow and scary. Once you're on that page, you cannot personalize the page, or run a page inspection. There are also many parts of the application, including in the main window, where you can't pop something out into it's own page unless you navigate to it. Right-clicking something that links a page should bring up a right-click menu in the context of Business Central. Instead, it opens in the context of whatever browser you're using. One of the items in this right-click menu should be "Open This Page in a New Window." To summarize, here's how it works now if you want to open the Purchase Order list in a new window from the home role center: 1. Open the list of Purchase Orders 2. Press the button to "Open This Page in a new Window" so you can open the list of Purchase Orders, which you actually already have opened. This is insanity.

If a vendor has a credit memo which outsizes invoices which are due, Business Central presumes that no invoices should be paid. This functionality means that one must simply wait for enough invoices to accrue that overcome the amount of any credit memos on the account. At this point, a payment is suggested when using the Suggest Vendor Payments function in the Payment Journal. This can break down, however, when vendors provide discounted terms. What mechanisms are in place to both preserve discounts, and acknowledge credit memos that are owed? /e think there are none. One option could be that upon running the "Suggest Vendor Payments" routine, there be an option for something like "apply discounts to open credit memos which are preventing vendor payment" would be very nice. When natural invoices finally results in a payment, both the check stub and remittance advice will have to document / explain why discounts are being take for checks issued many days after the "payment discount date."

Items needs to regularly be filtered by specific attributes. It would be more user-friendly to be able to filter them just like we filter items based on field values. Right now, when you run through the Attribute Filter "routine," the system returns an obnoxious filter of item numbers returned by the attribute filter routine. This is nonsense and remains a half-baked part of BC. Please change the way these are filtered so that it's uniform with all of the other filtering across the environment. Did Microsoft hire the intern who designed this feature? I wonder if that same individual helped on the NAV -> BC user interface!

It looks like in Businesse Central, the "Copy Link" action, which was found in Dyncamics NAV is no longer available. If one is using the Universal WIndows App, how does one send a link to a specific record or page to another user? If one is using the web page, copying the URL is a quick way to get this done. However, if one is in the "Edit" mode of a page, the link seems to send someone to what looks like is going to be the editable version of that page, but it comes up in the "View" mode. This is unhelpful for our implementation, where we do not use the View pages due to the extra clicks it incurs.

It would be nice if extended text could be set to tables unrelated to just Sales and Purchasing. Consider, for instance, a resource line on an Assembly or Production BOM. Wouldn't it be nice to have extended text come through on these, which could offer some guidance and help in creating these items by hand?

It would be really neat to be able to create customized notifications for the My Notifications page with a wizard, much like the way workflows are created. Workflows have their advantages and their disadvantages, just like the My Notifications messages. Sometimes, it's best to have a message come up before closing a document. Consider the case of a soft-enforcement of recommended fields. If a recommended field is not filled in, creating a custom message upon closure of the document might be a good way to warn the user of this. I recognize that the development of this is possible in AL, but we're not all developers :).

I like the idea of a button to put the status of a document into a "released" state to protect it from accidental modifications as it goes through the workflow of the business. However, consider the simple fact that the shipping for an item is not knowable at the time of writing the order because the items might need to be weighed to get the exact total of the shipping line. Consider then that a person in the fulfillment role will then try to add that shipping amount, get denied because the document is in a "Released" state. He will have to clear that warning, move the status back to "Open," make the modification and hopefully remember to move the order back to "Released" if it's not going to ship at that very moment (because if it remains in "Open," then the status moves that document back off the radar of the ones fulfilling the order. We believe that there should be setup options that allow administrators to allow certain fields to be edited even when documents are in a "Released" status.