Tag Archives: B1

SAP Business One 8.81 – Purchase Quotations

In a tough economic environment most small to medium businesses are looking for better control of their purchasing process. A key area of potential improvement for many businesses is purchase quotations – the ability to ensure that you receive the best possible pricing from your suppliers. The great news is that SAP Business One (version 8.81) includes a new “Purchase Quotation” feature to assist with this process.

This new feature in SAP Business One 8.81 is all about finding the best offer for goods and services based on your criteria of quantity, expected delivery date and price. You compare the quotations received and determine the supplier that you want to order from.

If you want to send the purchase quotation to multiple potential suppliers so that you can compare price, expected delivery dates and other relevant information, SAP Business One 8.81 also includes a Purchase Quotation Generation Wizard. Using the wizard a user can generate multiple purchase quotation requests for different suppliers.

This is the first of several blogs from the team at Leverage Technologies highlighting great new features and functions available in SAP Business One 8.81. More to follow next week…….

SAP Business One Sales Features

In Part one of the sales features for SAP Business One blog we explored the features of the ‘Item Availability Check’ in Business One marketing documents. Two features were left to cover in this instalment – ‘Change to Earliest Availability’ and ‘Display Available-to-Promise Report’

I have used the same IBM printer as in the previous Business One blog but this time I need it from warehouse 01. As you can see from the screenshot below I do not have sufficient available to fulfil this order. What is different however is that there is now a date populated in the ‘Earliest Available’ field. That means that I can select from within SAP Business One the ‘Change to Earliest Availability’ option which will change the deliver date on that line to ‘12/10/10’.

SAP Business One

SAP Business One calculated that earliest available date with the ‘Available to Promise’ Feature in SAP Business One version 8.8. We can explore that calculation and the detail behind it by selecting the ‘Display Available-to-Promise Report’ from the list of options. If we do so we are shown the popup window below:

As you can see the system lists in delivery date order all of the outgoing (committed) movements and incoming (ordered) movements. The ‘available’ column represents a rolling balance of the available stock calculated by adding and subtracting the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ to the stock physical balance. The document types are prefixed to show at a glance what they are (OR – sales order, PO – Purchase Order, PW – Production Order). The user can also use the orange drill down arrow to access the document and get more detail.

Thanks for reading – I will be posting additional SAP Business One Blogs next week.

Creating a SAP Business One SQL Query – Part One

This is part one of my two-part series on creating a basic query in SAP Business One. Over the next few months, I will be providing regular tips and tricks on some of the great functions and features available to users.

Many users of SAP Business One (SBO) are unaware that there is a powerful and simple query generator available within the standard product. The query wizard and the associated query generator are tools that make it easy for authorised users to extract information from the company databases.

There are many reasons why companies would want to query the database but generally, the requirement is to produce a view of the data that does not exist in one of the standard reports offered by SAP or to present the data in a customised format.

Take for example the common requirement to extract a customer listing main contact details. This is a simple task using the query wizard. Let’s take a look how SAP supports this requirement.

The first thing to do is identify the names of the database fields that we want to extract in our query. This is made simple by asking the SAP client to show ‘System Information’. To do this, drop down the ‘View’ menu from within the SBO client and select the ‘System Information’ option so that it shows a tick as indicated in the screenshot below:

Enabling the ‘system Information’ option allows the easy identification of field names and tables in the database simply by moving the mouse over the required data in the SBO screen. Identifying the data names and tables in the database is the most difficult part of the query so SBO has already facilitated the bulk of the report creation activity.

The screenshot below illustrates how this process works. First, move the mouse over the field in SAP Business One and then look in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen to see the information provided by the system about that field.

We can repeat this process by moving the mouse over all the fields that we would like to see in the proposed query and making notes of the field and table names.

Once that process is complete we are ready to create our query. The most accessible tool to do this is the Query Wizard. This can be accessed by dropping down the ‘Tools’ Menus from the SBO client and selecting queries à Query Wizard as shown below.

Another three steps to go….I will finish the blog with these steps early next week.