Many of the transaction documents in
Dynamics GP provide a place for comments that can print on the document.
Some common examples of these types of documents include Quotes, Sales
Orders, Invoices, and Purchases Orders. Comments were originally
intended to be recurring messages and were typically used to thank
clients for their business, remind clients of holiday hours, or provide
similar standardized messages. Consequently, each comment had a Comment
ID allowing users to add a consistent comment to a document with a
minimum amount of work. This worked great for standard, recurring
comments. Unfortunately, the world in which we live is not standard and
it's only occasionally recurring. Users really wanted to provide Ad hoc
comments to clarify the specifics of a transaction.
Ad hoc comments can include clarifications to a
vendor similar to "Ship the hex head version, not the Phillips head".
They can provide information to customers such as "We've shipped 6 of
the 10 items requested. The others will ship on Tuesday". In short,
almost anything a user could come up with can end up in a comment that
needs to appear on the document. The problem with this is that if each
comment gets an ID the system is soon overwhelmed with Comment IDs. It
becomes easier to contribute to the problem by creating a new ID for
each comment than to figure which comment could be reused.
There is an option to create and use comments without
assigning a Comment ID. These comments appear on a document as if an ID
had been used and users have the option to modify the comment. By
creating a comment without an ID this process doesn't pollute the list
of actual, recurring comments that a business wants to use. Creating
comments without a Comment ID is the focus of this recipe.
How to do it...
To create comments without using a Comment ID:
1. Select Sales from the Navigation Pane, and then select Sales Transaction Entry under Transactions.
2. Click on the right arrow in the lower left to select the first available Sales Transaction:
3. Leave the Comment ID field blank and click on the blue arrow next to the Comment ID field:
4. In the Comment field type This is a comment without an ID and click on OK:
5. Notice that a new indicator appears between the Comment ID prompt and the Comment ID field to show that there is a comment without an ID:
6.
Any documents that already show comments will include comments entered
without an ID. The documents don't have to be changed at all.
How it works...
This recipe is the perfect solution for Ad hoc
comments without polluting comment IDs. As a plus, it continues to allow
the use of traditional comments with an ID. The biggest problem with
this process is that it is hidden so deeply that most users don't find
it.
There's more...
This works for all Comment ID boxes including line item comments.
Line Item Comments
Our example showed a transaction-level comment that
would appear at the bottom of a document. However, each line in a
document such as a Purchase Order or Invoice can also use comments
without an ID the same way.
Clicking on a line item in a document and selecting
the blue arrow key opens up additional details about that line and
exposes another Comment ID field. This works exactly like
transaction-level comments except that the comments appear below each
line item on the document by default, as shown in the following
screenshot:
