Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Customer and Vendor Maintenance in Business Central (Demo)

I want to show you a few things in Dynamics 365 Business Central that will make working with vendors and customers just a little bit easier. I’m going to show you how you can change the vendor or customer number.

Modifying Vendor Numbers

Here’s my vendor list. Let’s open up the first vendor. You can see here that the key field, the vendor number, is 10,000. If I needed to change that for some reason, maybe it was entered incorrectly, or the way we number vendors has changed, I can easily change it here. All I need to do is change it and tab off of it. I’m going to get this notification.

Updating Customer Numbers

What’s nice about this is that it’s not only going to change it on the master file, it’s going to change all the records related to that Master file. So, let’s go ahead and do that. So the vendor number has been changed, and if I look at the vendor look at The Ledger entries, all those Ledger entries are all there, and the vendor number has been changed for all those transactions within the system.

Combining Vendor or Customer Records

Now let’s take a look at the situation where you’ve got two vendors in your system that are actually the same vendor, and you want to combine records from both of those vendors into one.

Merging Vendor Records

I have one vendor here, and what I want to do is merge this with another vendor’s data. I’m going to go down here, click on Merge. I’m going to select the other vendor with whom I want to merge the records. We’ll choose this one right here. What this does is it takes fields from both Master records and shows them on this screen.

Customizing Merged Records

If I accepted this, it would basically take all the fields from the primary record and replace them with the fields from the secondary record, and I would have one remaining vendor. If I look at these fields and there’s anything that I want to override, I can just select it. Let’s say I want to override the name of the vendor but keep everything else the same.

Managing Entities as Both Customers and Vendors

Another thing that might happen in your organization is you’ve got an entity which is both a vendor and a customer, and it might be nice to see the vendor activity and the customer activity together.

Creating Entities with Dual Roles

I’m going to create an entity that is both a customer and a vendor. The easiest way to start that is to add a new contact. I’ve got a new contact here, Marshall Engineering. Let’s open that up. This is just a contact.

Configuring Dual Roles for Entities

What I can do from here is create this contact as a customer and a vendor. So, I’m going to go ahead and do that. Let’s create a customer first. Customer has been created. Now, let’s go back and create a vendor as well.

Importing Vendors or Customers Using Excel

The next thing I wanted to show you is how you can easily import vendors or customers using the Excel interface.

Streamlining Data Import

This is my vendor list. What I want to do is edit this in Excel. It’s going to open up a new list in Excel and populate it with the data from Business Central. It gives me a secure connection to that data.

Adding New Vendors via Excel

This is the standard ‘Edit in Excel’ function within Business Central. But what I want to do now is I’ve got my existing vendors, and I want to add two more vendors. All I need to do is enter the information on the empty rows here.

Simplifying Data Addition

I’m just going to add these two vendors, and I can add additional information here, like the address. I’ve added two new vendors on this Excel worksheet.

Automatic Vendor Number Assignment

All you need to do now is publish this, and Business Central will automatically assign a vendor number to these new vendors and add them to the vendor Master file.