New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2: Make Entry of Variant Codes Required

This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2.

The sixth of the new functionality in the application section is Make entry of variant codes required.

Avoid mistakes in data entry when dealing with items that have variants.

Enabled for: users, automatically
General Availability: October 2022

Item variants are a great way to keep your list of items under control, especially if you have a large number of items that are almost identical and vary only in color, for example. Rather than setting up each variant as a separate item, you can set up one item and then specify the various colors as variants of the item.

With this release wave, administrators can require that users specify the variant in documents and journals for items that have variants.

To activate the capability, navigate to the Inventory Setup page and select the Variant Mandatory if Exists field.

You can override this global setting for specific items.

For each item, the Variant Mandatory if Exists field on the item card has the following options:

• Default: The setting from Inventory Setup applies to this item.
• No: Users are not required to specify a variant for this item.
• Yes: If one or more variant exists for this item, users must specify the relevant variant; otherwise they will be blocked from posting the transaction.

If the capability is switched on, for items with variants, users will see the field mandatory icon in documents. Users won’t be able to post an entry if the variant is not specified.

My opinion

I’ve not really dealt with any variants yet, but reading up on this subject it seems that not having the ability to enforce setting of a variant code can lead to significant problems so this seems to be a good addition.