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[Jennifer Fernandes Hanf]

Hi All,

I’m looking for an easy way to segment and filter for a specific group of customers for reporting and analysis without setting up more dimensions (we have several dimensions for customers).  We do not need to track at the transaction level, just the customer level. We do not currently use customer price groups or customer discount groups in NAV.  Are there any downsides to setting up a customer price group or a customer discount group and assigning the group to the customers for easy filtering purposes? 

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Jennifer Fernandes Hanf
World Wide Sires, Ltd
Visalia CA
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[Lewis Rosenberg]

I’m not in favor of using an existing field with logic tied to it.   Are you using the SEARCH NAME field?  There is also a field (not on the Customer Page by default called CHAIN NAME that has no functionality that I know of.  I believe it is a ten character CODE field.

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Lewis Rosenberg
IT Manager
Mars Fishcare
Chalfont PA

NAVUG Board of Advisors, Programming
NAVUG Programming Commitee
NAVUG Membership Committee
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[David Wiser]

I second Lewis’ reluctance of re-purposing existing fields.  The fields he mentioned will work or you could easily add a new field to the customer card to categorize the customers.  Additional coding would be needed if you wanted that code to flow to sales order and invoices.

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Dave Wiser
Controller
Beckwith & Kuffel
Seattle WA
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[Jennifer Fernandes Hanf]

Thank you Lewis and Dave for your suggestions and guidance on this. 

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Jennifer Fernandes Hanf
World Wide Sires, Ltd
Visalia CA
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[Jason Nicolaou]

Good morning Jennifer.  You said that you have used dimensions, but you didn’t mention if you had used the customer posting group.  You have to consider how your transactions are mapped and the structure of your G/L, but if the routine was mapped the same then you created a filter without impacting your posting.  This is similar to a dimension, but not exactly the same.  Second, what type of report are you trying to create?  This filter works fine for Customer Sales Statistics.

I also agree with the other comments about re-purposing a field with logic.

Good luck! 

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Jason Nicolaou
Solutions Architect
Socius
Dublin OH
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[Jeane Meade]

Like Jason, we use the Customer Posting Group for segmenting customers.

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Jeane Meade
IT/DBM
Sheldons’, Inc.
Antigo WI
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[Clive Parker]

We have several added fields on the customer card and they work well for the sort of reporting you are describing.  I have also set up power pivot (PP) – which was a lot of learning – but permits amazing slicing and dicing of data.  It also adds to reporting capability. For example many NAV reports must be run multiple times to view multiple periods, but can be run just once in PP.

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Clive Parker
President, CFO
Macho Products, Inc.
Sebastian FL
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[Cynthia Priebe]

Jennifer, 

I agree with Jason and Jeane, however another option to consider is Gen. Bus. Posting Group.

You have indicated that you don’t need this value for reporting at a transaction level, but that is today. If you can make a decision for today that may also benefit you in the future, then it should be considered. Gen. Bus. Posting Group is saved to G/L Entry and Sales Invoice Line while Customer Posting Group is not. The Customer Posting Group is saved to the Customer Ledger Entry, where Gen. Bus. Posting Group is not.

Consider all options, however as stated by others, I would suggest NOT re-purposing a field for what you are attempting to do. Either Customer Posting Group or Gen. Bus. Posting Group, IMHO, would be properly used if enlisted for your purpose. 

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Cynthia Priebe, MCTS, DCP
Senior Business Analyst and Project Manager
Liberty Grove Software
Grafton OH
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[Jennifer Fernandes Hanf]

Thanks everyone for the additional suggestions and ideas.  We are already using Customer Posting Groups for our main customer segmentation along with some dimensions but I hadn’t thought about using a General Business Posting Group.  That is an interesting idea. 

Our goal is to find all customers that are using a special free service we provide and analyze sales statistics and measure market share. We decided to add a custom field to the customer table and build a Jet Report to achieve this.

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Jennifer Fernandes Hanf
World Wide Sires, Ltd
Visalia CA
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[Mark Rhodes]

Did someone mention Robb Delprado’s 2nd favorite topic, posting groups?  We have some great recordings on that and using dimensions in the recording library.  See the links before for those searches:

Posting Groups: https://www.navug.com/search?executeSearch=true&SearchTerm=posting&rf=%5ETags%3Awebinar_recording%5E

Dimensions: https://www.navug.com/engage/recordingsarchive/searchrecordings?executeSearch=true&LibrariesList=6b336b93-62a5-4fe1-bf9f-074d4ed8292e%2cf878622c-36bc-414d-a9d4-1c0789df23e1&st=MostRecent&rf=Tags%3aaccount_schedules_and_dimensions

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Mark Rhodes
Director, NAVUG
Dynamic Communities
Windsor CO
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