Introduction

Though many entities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are equipped with status fields, in many cases these provide insufficient support for complex business processes. Let’s take the sales order as an example: the order is equipped with the status Open or Released. In many cases, a workflow between multiple roles exist in getting the order from Open status to Released status. A check on the customers’ credibility, a check on the presence of documentation required to export the goods sold, or the check to see if production capacity exists to fulfill the order, are a few examples of intermediate stages of a sales document, before being ‘released’ for logistical shipment.

The same applies to important master data records such as Customers, Vendors, Items, Purchase Orders, Production Orders, Lot Nos., and Routings. As master data setup greatly influences how you can use Dynamics 365 Business Central, making sure that new customers are set up correctly before they are used in transactions is of vital importance. It is common that multiple people or roles are involved before new master data are approved for use in transactions.

The difficulty with supporting these intermediate stages of the transaction and/or master data approval is that they can differ substantially between (sub)industries, companies, or even sets of records (e.g. a different workflow applies to approve a purchase item versus a production item). Coming up with best practices and applying them by default is therefore rarely successful. The Aptean Status Management (STM) extension allows flexible definition of various statuses that subsets of business central entities can be in before being released for general use throughout the system. Per record type supported (Customer, Vendor, Item, Sales Header, Purchase Header, Production Order, Lot No. Information, Routing Header, Production BOM, Production BOM version, and Routing Version), subsets can be defined in the form of filter groups (e.g. Purchase items versus Production items or Sales headers of type Order versus type Quote) after which multiple stages can be defined per subset.

Furthermore, per status, you can set up the mandatory fields and the fields that should be locked from previous statuses for further editing. A link with Dynamics 365 Business Central permission sets exists, making it possible to define what users are allowed to promote the record to the next status.

Besides the possibility to assign statuses to the Dynamics 365 Business Central entities defined, functionality in the form of status management alerts, status management logging and a notification system allows the design of fully customized workflows to support the introduction of new master data or the correct handling of purchase – and sales transactions.