A Tale of Two Start Screens

Most of the visual elements of the Classic client have been the same for the past several years:

1. Toolbars
2. MenuSuite
3. Working Area
4. Status Bar

The Role Tailored Client, however, is an entirely new interface:

There’s a lot to take in:

1. The History buttons and the Address Bar (also known as the Breadcrumb Bar).
2. The Search functionality (Searching for functionality, not data)
3. The Menu Bar, including the Microsoft Dynamics NAV menu, the Actions Menu, the Reports Menu, the Customize Button, and the Help button.
4. The Navigation Pane, which is now more along the lines of a catalog of lists (and Saved Filters).
5. The Departments section, which allows you to go beyond the readily accessible parts of the system to any you need to get to (security still applies)
6. The Activities panel for a given Role – more on this shortly.
7. The My Customers / My Vendors / My Items panels
8. The Outlook panel (covered RTC Outlook Panel).
9. The Notifications panel (covered in The Power of Notes and Notifications).
10. (Unmarked) The Status Bar. Company Name and Workdate are not only displayed, but you can click on them to change company or date now.

Let’s take a closer look at the Activities panel:

1. Each Activities panel has one or more Cue Groups. In this snippet, we can see a For Release Cue Group and a Sales Orders Released Not Shipped Cue Group
2. As one might expect, within a Cue Group, you find one or more Cues. Each Cue has a visual component (the varying stack size) for an easy glance indicator, as well as a quantity indicator and a description.
3. Each Cue Group also can have related Actions. In this Cue Group, we can jump straight to making a New Sales Quote or New Sales Order.

In Part 2, we’ll talk about how Lists and Cards have changed for the better.

In our example today, we have a Customer who is pretty behind on their payments and we’re going to block them, note why, and ask our collections person to call them.

Depending on the size of your Customer Card, you may not be able to see the Notes FactBox, like so:

The farthest right scrollbar is for the FactBox area, so you can scroll down to find the Notes FactBox:

As the panel suggests, you can click on the Click here to create a new note, which will give you a tiny little panel to enter info into:

This note area may be small, but it can hold a massive amount of text,
so if you want, you can paste whole emails into the space.

In our example, we’ll just note that we’re blocking this customer. We don’t need to say either the date or who is writing this note. (Skip the To: and Notify options for now) When we press Save, we’ll see our new note:

It provided the author information and the date for us. It’s saved with the Customer, so it’ll be present everywhere NAV users are looking at the Customer record (Note: Not available in Classic!).

Now let’s notify our Collections agent, T. User, that they need to follow-up. Click to create a new note, enter some notice info for Ms. User to see, and then take a look under the To: option:

Other users of the NAV system will be available to select from. We’ll select TestUser, check the Notify box, and select save. Now when Ms. User next opens her Role Center, she’ll see an entry on her My Notifications panel:

By simply double-clicking on this Notification, the Customer Card for customer 30000 will open up. (This applies to Sales and Purchase documents, such as Orders or Credit Memos, as well.)

The note clearly shows who the note was from and to on which date.

When Ms. User is done resolving the issue, oh her My Notifications panel, she can right-click on the Notification and choose to remove the Notification part of the note. The note remains on the Customer Card, but it no longer will show on the Notifications list.

One other great feature mentioned above is that the Note space is very small on the screen, but it can hold a lot of information if needed. For example, Miss Doyle from John Haddock emailed us back with a written agreement for paying down the open balance. It would make sense to store that in a Note as well. So, Ms. User adds a note and pastes it into the new note.

How do we view the whole note? Simply double-click on it to see this great view:

Hopefully this article will help folks see new ways they can move information out of Inboxes (where it can be forgotten, deleted, need someone to forward, etc.) or out of binders and folders into their powerful Microsoft Dynamics NAV system.

We’ve talked before about the data structure behind reports from a technical point of view, but let’s look at the possible use.

Take this Customer and Item Statistics report:

Per Customer, it’s pretty solid information. If we send it to Excel, it’s still pretty nice:

But, it’s very formatted, which can be tricky to work with if doing calculations or filtering.

Run a report in the RTC. Under the Help button, select About This Report, like so:

You will get a message:

Do as it instructs. When you head to About This Report again, you’ll see something akin to:

That’s a giant List of all the data the report is using to produce the results. You’ll see all sorts of things in there you may not realize would be, such as Captions, Formats, Header info.

Most importantly, under the Actions menu, you can Send To -> Excel all the raw data. When you do that, Excel will instead look like:

There will be many columns you don’t need, but this way, you can build some great PivotTables to analyze the data as you need, like so:

Using some of the great PivotTable and Conditional Formatting allows me to quickly analyze what Customer/Item combinations are underperforming. I can see at a glance that we need to review Customer 30000, as it’s dragging us below our target margin.

Save As Excel brings some great power to the table (pun no intended), but being able to build off the raw data can bring your existing analysis tools to the next level.

When using Recurring Journals, there are some ways you can have the document number or description be automatically updated. Let’s look at this example:

In the Document No. field, we have the odd looking setting 2011-%3-COMM. In the Description field, we have normal looking descriptions, but with an odd %4. (To see more about the Recurring Frequency formula shown in this example, please see our post DateFormula Part 1: Closing Tricks.)

When posted, that’ll look like:

%X options in those fields are substituted with Posting Date based information. Here’s the list of options:

The only small downside to the options is that you can’t do ’01′ instead of ’1′ for the month, or padding on other numerical options. All in all, though, it’s a nice little extra touch to making your recurring entries crystal clear.

Please note this is a simple example and depending on your accounting practices, commissions may have to be handled with Accrual/Reversing Entries.

Thankfully, Microsoft gave us a way in the Shortcut to the RTC that allows us to override our default Role Center with a specific one. NAV Consultants often have folders that look like this lying about for easy use:

If your organization also makes use of the Profile Customization level, you might have twice that number of shortcuts. Obviously, making all of these can be fairly time consuming.

To streamline this process, we created a NAV Classic Form that will generate shortcuts for any or all Profiles. (Note: There are also options that let people choose their role during the RTC opening process with some customization.)

Make sure the Locations are set up top (they default to common locations in Windows 7 64 bit environments, you may need to adjust them), select which Profiles (Roles) you’d like shortcuts for, and click Generate. You can also set the shortcuts to be created in Configure mode if needed. The resulting shortcuts tend to be fairly portable, as long as they’re moving between similar environments. This tool also handles custom profiles as easily as built-in ones.

This allows you to give IT staff, department heads, or anyone the ability to access the specific roles that are needed via easy to use (and easy to create) shortcuts.

Download it here: RTC Shortcut Maker Object

When you click on a Tab, one set of fields and captions disappeared, and another group of fields and captions took their place.

In the RTC, we have the FastTab headers:

Other than the obvious Horizontal to Vertical shift, they still provide the same idea: as the user, you can hide/show fields and captions. But, there are some advantages to the new style:

• You can have multiple FastTabs expanded at one time
• FastTabs have room to support Promoted fields showing up right in the bar (more on that in a moment)
• FastTabs can be customized per user or per profile, down to the field level or at the whole Tab level (more on that in a later post)

All fields on a FastTab get assigned an Importance by default. Users or system administrators can customize that importance for your environment.

Importance: Standard

By default, most fields are set to an Importance of Standard. When the FastTab is Collapsed, you won’t see any trace of it. When the FastTab is Expanded, you’ll see it without any extra steps.

The Home Page field in our example above is a Standard Importance Field.

Importance: Promoted

Some fields are very useful to be able to see whether the FastTab is expanded or collapsed. For example, on the Purchase Invoice, you’ll find both the Payment Terms and Due Date fields on the Invoicing FastTab are Promoted. This ensures that the user can see the Payment Terms and Due Date, even with the Invoicing FastTab collapsed (its default status). When you mouse over a Promoted field’s value, the ToolTip will show which Promoted field is involved:

Importance: Additional

When a field is set to Additional, it will not be displayed until explicitly shown. You’ll know if a FastTab has Additional fields, as you’ll see a Show More Fields option, like on this Sales Order Page:

When the Show More Fields button is selected, we’ll see a much different FastTab:

When you head over to https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions, this is what you’ll see:

Click on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. You’ll need to login with (or create) a Live ID. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see this “Welcome!” Screen:

Click on the Feedback link on the left column, which will bring you to the Feedback area you want:

Here’s a breakdown of what you can see:

• Open: Shows you all the open feedback items, with Title, name, and Votes/Comments. You can Vote Up/Down ideas you’d like. More votes will tell the Microsoft team people really want a feature
• Most Voted: Shows you the most popular open items first
• Watching: When you view a Suggestion you like, you can click a link to Watch it so you can easily find it again.
• My Feedback: Shows you all the feedback you have submitted
• Resolved: If Microsoft has evaluated it and decided what they’re doing with it, it will live here (rather than as an Open item)

And of course, you can Submit Feedback, which will guide you through that without my help.

This can be a really fantastic way to get things you (or your clients, fellow partners) think are needed within the product. You can also easily have your whole team sign up and up-vote your issue to give a true voice to how many people a suggestion would impact. You can then link people directly to issues, like so:

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/666449/add-recent-server-company-to-the-rtc-drop-down

For today’s example, we’re going to be using Classic Client, as the UI to this tool still works a smidgen better (at least in the version I’m using) in Classic.

The Background

Linda Martin, our employee, is a salaried, biweekly person, with all the usual payroll setup. But, your company just got notice that your tax rate for Georgia has been changed by the state, going up 0.2% across the board. You think you’ve updated the correct places in the system, but their GA SIT amount on their paycheck is the same amount as last Pay Period. You need to print checks, and the clock is ticking: How do you figure out why the rate is wrong?

Enable Calc Trace

For this step, you need to either be a SUPER user or ask a SUPER user to perform this process.

You need to open Table 91 – User Setup, via the Object Designer under the Tools menu. Locate your user record and locate the column Allow Payroll Calc. Trace:

Make sure not to change anything else while in here. You’ll know this setting is correct if you see a new button (View Trace) on the Payroll Journal:

Tracing a Payroll Control

Now that you have permission to use the Trace system, we need to recalculate our GA SIT entry for Ms. Martin. To do this, we’ll need to select the GA SIT line for Employee LM, then under the Payroll button, select Calculate Single Employee (rather than “Calculate…”):

You’ll see a new set of options (shown on the left). If you see the blank space as shown on the right, the Enable Calc Trace was not completed correctly:

In our case, we want to check the Enable Calc. Trace box, then select GA SIT for our Payroll Control Code Filter, then press OK.

Once that completes, you’ll want to press the View Trace button on the Payroll Journal. You’ll see the Payroll Calc. Trace Lines form. I’ve re-arranged mine a little to better show what we’ll need, but it will roughly look like:

We’re most concerned about where her -94.46 came from, so note that it first shows up on the line APPLY TAX BRA…. Off to the right, we’ll notice that it’s using the Bracket GAWHSTATUS type WITHHOLDING. This tells us where we’ll find the Tax Rates.

Tracking Down the Rate “Bracket”

You can check the Employee Card, Payroll button, Tax Auth. Info to see which Filing Status Code the employee has if you don’t know already. We know Ms. Martin is ‘M BOTHWORK’. So, we’re going to go review the GAWHSTATUS Bracket details. It can be found under Payroll’s Setup -> Calculation -> Brackets option:

Locate the GAWHSTATUS bracket and press the Details button. In our demo database (where the rates are not likely current, do not use these screenshots as your configuration settings), we can see our rates are:

We’ll go ahead and update all the Tax % columns to our new state supplied rates. We then can re-run any form of Calculate against Ms Martin in the Payroll Journal and we’ll see that it is now withholding the correct amount:

This post won’t solve many of your common payroll issues, but it might help you identify what’s going wrong when something is only slightly off. You’ll be able to provide more detailed information to your Payroll Support Team. Which, you have, right?

You can alter the way this is configured to be more adapted to your need. In the upper right corner, when you mouse over it, you’ll see a little lightning bolt:

Click on that and select Customize. You’ll see this Options panel:

Mail Settings

You can choose which folders you want to see a quick count of. If you press Select Folders, you’ll see a lot of options:

One neat option is being able to show RSS feeds you’ve created in Outlook (as outlined here). Make sure to include your Inbox folder, which only gets Auto-Added if your folder list is empty.

Calendar Settings

A pretty straight forward option for now: How many days to show. I expect they’ll expand this option in future versions to include alternate views, like Week View or Month View. (Did you know you can suggest features directly to Microsoft here?)

Task Settings

This one is a little more robust, allowing you to see All Tasks vs Today’s Tasks, with some sorting options to help keep focused.

It’s a small feature, but pretty handy. This will run even with Outlook closed, so you can close up Outlook and focus on NAV if you need, and every time you head to your Role Center’s Home, you’ll see if anything is piling up.

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV Role Tailored Client has the great new date chooser:

However, as with many things, if you know some little keyboard tricks, you can speed things along. For example, most folks know that if you just enter ‘t’ into any Date Field, it will convert to today’s date.

Here’s a small table of what other ‘secret’ date translations there are, using today’s date of Friday, 4/29/2011 with a Working Date set to Monday, 4/25/2001:

NAV being a savvy world-travelled system, this is all dependent on the Language you’re using it in, and the Regional settings of your system. For example, in many parts of the world, ’0429 is not a valid date’ but 2904 would be.