In an effort to continue to provide our customers and partners with a stronger set of tools for their businesses, the Jobs area of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 was redesigned and many new features were added to the module. Some really exciting functionality to help with productivity and flexibility such as an entire new budget structure and features like fixed item pricing, foreign currency functionality, copy job, calculate remaining usage, journal improvements and better integration with item tracking, costing and service management have been very well received.
However, it’s been brought to our attention that some customers and partners are having an issue with the new functionality. In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0, the purchasing process is initiated in the purchase invoice when some customers business processes dictate that they start the process in the purchase order. Technically there is little change in the underlying functionality between releases – in both 4.0 and 5.0 ledger entries for the job were not created until the invoice is posted. This said, we can completely understand the issue and a fix allowing users to start the process in the purchase order will be in Microsoft Dynamics NAV “6.0” and we are currently investigating the issue with 5.0. For the time being, if you upgrade 5.0 and are dependent on purchase order functionality with the Jobs area, you will experience an issue.
Some customers have also had an issue with dimensions on WIP (work in progress) in the Jobs module in 5.0. A fix for job WIP dimensions will be shipped in SP1 and is already included in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV “6.0” code.
We are making a site on both Partner and CustomerSource that will link you to a short whitepaper outlining the change in functionality from 4.0 to 5.0 in more detail. I will post again when I have links are available to these sites.