Block (“Inactive” in Dynamics GP) Inactive Mark to inactivate the item record, which will prevent the item from being sold, purchased or processed, but maintain item history. Before you inactivate an item, the following conditions must be met: If the item is assigned to an active kit, you must remove the item from the kit. If the item exists on an active bill of materials or finished good, you must remove the item from the assembly. Before you inactivate an item record, you should be aware of the following: Existing, unposted transactions or documents that contain inactivate items can be processed, for example, you can transfer an inactive item on an order to an invoice, but you can’t change the quantity. Manufacturing transactions that contain an inactive item can’t be released. Inactive items can’t be added to existing transactions or documents. If the kit item or bill of materials item is inactive, you can inactivate the components, but you won’t be able to re-activate the item if there are inactive components. You can enter new transactions with inactive items for the following: Returns (sales and vendor) Inventory transfers between sites and bins Increase and decrease variances Stock counts Decrease adjustments Standard NAV only has a "Blocked" status for Items. Item status (Dynamics GP) In Inventory Control, you can assign item types—such as Sales Inventory, Discontinued, and Services—to items. These item types affect what you can do with the item records. For example, you can’t assign a price list to an item unless its item type is Sales Inventory or Discontinued. To manufacture an item—that is, to create a manufacturing order for an item—its status must be Sales Inventory. In Manufacturing, you also can assign statuses to items. Like item types, item statuses affect what you can do with an item. Refer to the following table for information about the item statuses that are available. Status Use Active status Select Active status for items that are part of your current processes. Items must have Active status before you can create purchase orders or manufacturing orders for them. Inactive status Select Inactive status for items that aren’t currently part of your process. Some companies use the Inactive status as a step toward making items obsolete. Obsolete status Select Obsolete status for items that were once part of your processes but aren’t any longer. You can’t open manufacturing orders or purchase orders for items with this status. Pre-release status Select Pre-release status for items that you’ve entered but that you don’t want to be generally available yet. Some companies might enter item records for products under development, for example, keeping their status at Pre-release until the product is ready for production. Released status Released status is the same as Active status. You can select this item status for items that are part of your current processes. Service status When you create an item with the Service item type in the Item Maintenance window, the corresponding record automatically is created for the Item Engineering Data window with Service status. These items can be used to track the costs of outsourcing services. NAV Customization for “Item Status” The “Item Status” is purely informational customized field in NAV and does nothing to block any purchasing or any other activity. In Arena, it is called “Phase”: (1) In Production, (2) Deprecated, (3) Obsolete. On the item card, Item status is set up as ‘Promo’ or ‘Discontinued’. The problem is there is no time stamp for “Item status” so we started to lose the visibility if an item was used to be promo but changed to another status or vice versa. Assuming that the status field is a custom field your company added. So, a couple of suggestions. Other may add more. You could add another field called “Status Change Date” which is triggered to the change to the current date whenever the status changes. While it would give the date of the change, it wouldn't track history, so that may not be the best option. Add the “Item Status” field to the change log and allow the change log to capture whenever the status changes. The problem here is linking any reporting the change log entry table which could be difficult. Change the sales order creation process to bring the “Item Status” on to the sales line. Then add that field to the posted invoice line table and post the status along with other item information of the sales line. This would allow you to track the sales by status. Lastly, you could create a new “Item Status” table which would capture the date of any change. This could be similar to the change log table, but more focused on the status changes which would make linking to it easier than working with the change log.
