How to Determine a Parameter’s Purpose, or The Order Entry Statistics Checkbox

Posted Friday, August 20th, 2010

Recently, our team was reviewing the Accounts Receivable Parameters in Dynamics AX 2009 in order to create a standard configuration and to ensure that everyone knew the consequences of enabling or disabling any one of the parameters. With the vast number of combined years of experience with Dynamics AX, this was a simple exercise with the only hiccups being parameters that dealt with European accounting rules which were quickly discarded. There was, however, one exception and that was the Order Entry Statistics checkbox on the Updates tab.

Even with our accumulated knowledge, no one on the team had used this checkbox or had the slightest idea what the checkbox did. With umpteen parameters settings to cover, the issue was set aside for investigation until later. At the end of the meeting, it was decided that, since the Associate Consultants are the lowest members on the totem pole and that this was a good opportunity to learn, we would be charged with discovering the checkbox’s purpose.

Armed only with Help’s definition of “select this check box to activate order entry statistics; every insertion, modification, or deletion of a sales order line is recorded,” we began our work on finding the use of the checkbox. It seemed simple enough that the checkbox would record order entry statistics when enabled but it wasn’t clear on what those statistics were or where those statistics were reported. Initially on hearing statistics, we thought that maybe it was the mean sales price of an item or it showed some distribution of sales prices, but those didn’t make much business sense. Another thought was that AX would calculate a salesperson’s “batting average” of invoiced sales orders from quotations or a whole array of sabermetric-esque stats for salespeople to judge each other and build fantasy teams, which would be pretty cool but seemed a little too far-fetched.

We searched the Microsoft training materials, but none of them mentioned the checkbox. We searched Help, but the words “order” and “entry” are quite popular and drowned out relevant information. Searching for just “statistics” did help to cut down on the number of results but there are multiple types of statistics within AX, so we still had to trudge through the mire to find what we sought.

We thought we had our first break with the Business Statistics form. It is part of the Accounts Receivable module, it reports user defined statistics, and uses information entered in sales orders. Thinking that it met all the criteria of the checkbox, we then proceeded to conduct a test script in order to determine the checkbox’s effect on the Business Statistics Inquiry.

Our test script was rather simple. We would enable the Order Entry Statistics checkbox, enter a sales order, run the inquiry, note the result, and then repeat with the checkbox disabled. When working with the Business Statistics Inquiry, the test returned no different results, with either the checkbox enabled or disabled. Unfortunately, the Business Statistics inquiry was not the right form.

After meeting this stumbling block, we turned to the online community. We posted some discussions on various discussion boards for AX professionals and after a day or two we were happy to find some responses. A majority of the responses aimed us toward the Customer/Item Statistics and Item/Customer Statistics reports located at Accounts Receivable>Reports>Statistics>Order entry. Bingo. We were kicking ourselves for not finding this on our own.

We ran our test and, sure enough, the statistics in the report were only recorded when the checkbox is enabled. We had found the use of the checkbox, now we were interested in the use of the reports.

The Order Entry Statistics reports are used to view statistics on customers and items, grouped by customer for the Customer/Item Statistics report or grouped by item for the Item/Customer Statistics report. The statistics reported include the quantity sold, revenue, and margin. Statistics in the report can also be compared across two periods.

The information in the reports can be very beneficial too many companies and since it is an “out of the box” report, the time to create them is minimal. All that is required is that the Order Entry Statistics checkbox on the Updates tab of the Accounts Receivable Parameters is enabled. Some of you may be wondering why the checkbox is even there in the first place. The only answer that we can come up with is that it’s there to save disk space but we cannot be certain.

UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that this checkbox is only available if the Sweden configuration key has been enabled. Hopefully this post is still a good example of how to go about finding answers to questions on AX’s functionality.

Tags: Mystery, Order Entry Statistics, Parameters, Reports