As a sales or purchasing manager, you often need to add specific comments or references to your sales orders, quotes, or purchase orders, like internal instructions, special delivery notes, or vendor item numbers. Previously, you could only use fixed options and changing where these comments appeared required development work.
With the new Dynamic Document Reference feature, you can easily add and control which information appears on which documents, without needing IT support.
Let’s see how it works!
First, we have to activate the feature.
Note: Once this feature is activated, you cannot deactivate it. Therefore, make sure to test it first in a Test environment.
To do so, go to acadon Upcoming Features.
Here you find features that are turned off and are optional for a period of time until they are automatically enabled for all users in a later software update. This gives an opportunity to prepare in advance by enabling these features in a Test environment first.
Under Timber, find New Dynamic Document Reference. Select it and click Enable in the top menu.
Now that it is activated, create a new Sales Order to try it out.
Fill out all the mandatory fields in the General FastTab and add at least one Item with a Quantity to the Lines FastTab.
Select the Item Line and click on Related Information and Comments in the Lines menu to add or edit the Comments for that Line.
Let’s say this Item should be protected with a cover plate when it is shipped. To ensure this is done, you want to add a comment for all internal Shipment reports. Click on + New to create a new Comment.
In the Comment column, add Note for Warehouse: Use a cover plate.
To make the comment stand out, let’s print it in bold by selecting Bold in the Expression column.
In the Document Reference Code column, you find the newly created Document Reference Codes that determine where each comment is printed. Three codes are created automatically when activating the feature. Of those, select SHIPMENT-INT.
To see on which Reports the Comments with this Code are printed, open the drop-down list for the Document Reference Code column, select SHIPMENT-INT and click on Show details.
In the window that opens, click on Related and Report Assignments in the top menu. An editable list opens with all Reports on which the Comments with this Document Reference Code are shown.
Go back to the Comment Sheet to add another Comment. This time you want to make sure the correct product is purchased from your vendor, so you would like to add the Vendor Item Number as a Comment which should be shown on the Purchase documents.
Click on + New to add another Comment line. In the Comment column, enter Vendor Item No.: 4711, for example.
As by default no Document Reference Code for Purchase documents exists, open the drop-down list in the Document Reference Code column and click on + New.
Enter PURCHASE in the Code column and Purchase Information in the Description column.
Activate the Copy to Purchase Document column to ensure a Comment with this Document Reference Code is copied from Sales documents to the related Purchase documents.
In the top menu, click on Related and Report Assignments.
In the window that opens, click on + New to add the relevant Purchase reports, like 5041333 Purchase – Quote and 5041334 Purchase – Order.
Go back to the Sales Order and, in the top menu, click on Print/Send, Print Confirmation and Preview in the window that opens to see that only the Comments that should appear on the Sales Order are printed. As we only added Comments that should be shown on internal Shipment documents and Purchase documents, they should not be visible here.
Now, you can easily add and control custom information on your sales, purchase and shipment documents, making communication clearer and reducing manual work. While only two use cases are described, the possibilities are endless. For example, you could add commercial texts which should only appear on your Sales Quotes and create a special Document Reference Code for these types of comments. And while we focused on comments per line, you can use this new feature for all types of comments, e.g. comments per document or per customer. No more waiting for IT changes, just set it up and use it as needed!
