Some end-users utilizing Acumatica’s ERP application today can be slightly intimidated when hearing the term “Generic Inquiry”. What does that mean? How can I make one? Where do I go in the system to make one? Etc
I have come to learn over the past couple of years that a Generic Inquiry is just a list of data already pre-configured in the system. Like a simple item list shown below.
This is actually a Generic Inquiry, pre-configured for us by Acumatica, allowing one to add and remove supplied columns to our view as needed.
What new Acumatica users might be unaware of, however, is the ability to alter some of these default Generic Inquiries given to us by the system, with simple joins of other tables.
For example, choosing to “edit our vanilla generic inquiry” as per below.
We can then add additional tables to it, create the “relationship” between the tables through a common data field, and then check and uncheck the “results” we would want to view in our edited generic inquiry. These are steps many of you have already gone through when creating lists for your clients.
However, one thing I had come to learn recently, which caught me pleasantly off-guard, was the ability to MASS EDIT data through a Generic Inquiry window itself.
So, without the need to have to train a less advanced end-user of the system to build Import Scenarios, Data Providers, etc., one can start at the ENTRY POINT tab of a Generic Inquiry edit window, as per below.
Click the “Enable Mass Record Update” checkbox, which will immediately add a new tab to our Generic Inquiry, called MASS UPDATE FIELDS.
In my case, the field I would like to update “in mass” is the DEFAULT PRICE one for all of my items.
With this change to our item’s default generic inquiry list, we now have an ACTIONS menu which did not exist beforehand, where if I decide to update all of the records on said list,
to have a DEFAULT PRICE of $75 as per below,
our updates will take place on our records, without the need to perform somewhat complex mappings that an Import Scenario in the system would cause an end-user to take on.
Of course this type or MASS UPDATE doesn’t read a file, so we can’t have different values for unique records like a normal Import Scenario would allow us to do. But for a quick and easy fix, or change in a company policy, one of your clients might have implemented (item sales will now be “commissionable”, so we would need to mass change the field at the item level for example), the inline editing capabilities of a generic inquiry could be a great tool to utilize.
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