Came across something yesterday I hadn’t seen before. I think it’s a bug, but I wanted to ask here first in case I’m missing some reason that it should be the case:
Was contacted yesterday because several customers’ data was not populating in a BAQ that our finance team has been using for years. There was a left-join to the ShipTo table, and none of the ShipTo fields would populate for some customers. If the left-join was changed to an inner-join, those records weren’t returned in the BAQ at all.
Based on that I went to the customer records to look into the ShipTo info, and the ShipTo locations didn’t appear in the list at all in Customer Tracker or Customer Entry. When I tried to find them using the “Search Customer ShipTo” option, I got an error message “Invalid Syntax Near ‘)’”.
When I ran a BAQ with Customer joined to ShipTo, with no other criteria, those ShipTo locations didn’t appear in my BAQ Results. They did appear in the results when I ran the same query in SSMS and LinqPad. Once I was able to get those results, it was pretty obvious the common denominator was that they were all in the same state. After a little more digging, they were the only ShipTo locations that had a specific Territory ID.
I’m not sure if it’s a bug or what… but we had an error from one of our shippers yesterday and I was on here searching for what might cause that error and I came across a different thread where someone proposed that by unsetting the territory ID on the Ship To it allowed them to get past that error. So there’s something to that Territory ID field.
Yeah it was an easy fix: make the Territory active again, change the territory on those ShipTos, make inactive again. I’m just not sure why an inactive territory would make the ShipTos unavailable in Customer Entry.
Not sure if you’re aware, but there is built in logic that hides/shows customers in many screens based on the territory setup. There is a View All Territories checkbox on Work Force and that essentially says yes, show this sales person all territories or no, only allow them to see the customers within the territory that they are a member of.
So within each work force, authorized users are assigned. And logically, if you are not an authorized user of a work force that can see all territories, you will only be able to see the customers within territories that the work force is a valid salesperson for. Finally, and this is where I think your situation may be in, if the territory is inactive, it probably hides customers assigned to that territory from everyone (maybe even if the view all territories checkbox is checked on your Work Force that you are a user for). Clear as mud? I am thinking this might all be part of what’s going on. Customers will just not show up in BAQs, dashboards, customer search, etc.
