Change the expected receipt date on many purchase order lines at once

The ship is delayed, and the expected receipt date has to be changed on many purchase order lines. Doing it line by line takes a long time. This article explains how the date fields relate to each other in standard Business Central, what you can do today to change many lines at once, and which traps to avoid so the dates do not end up wrong in purchase planning. You also get a short checklist to avoid mistakes.

The dates on a purchase order

A purchase order has dates both on the header and on the lines: order date, requested receipt date, the date the vendor has promised and expected receipt date. Expected Receipt Date is the date you yourselves expect to be able to use the item. It affects when the item appears to be available, and therefore what sales and planning believe.

Microsoft Learn has no single page that describes exactly what happens to the lines when you change a date on the order header. Descriptions from Danish and international consulting firms say that the system asks whether the lines should also be updated when you change the date on the header. Try it on a test order in a sandbox environment before you rely on it, because it depends on which date field is changed and what status the lines have.

Three ways to change many lines today

Change the date on the order header and answer yes if Business Central asks whether the lines should be updated. This works per order, so if there are 40 orders, it is 40 times the work.
Use Edit in Excel on the order lines. Filter by vendor and delivery period, change the date column in Excel, and publish the changes back. Learn says the action is available on most lists, but not all, so check that it exists on the page you use.
Use a configuration package or an import if it is a one-off job covering several hundred lines. It takes more preparation and should be tried out in the sandbox first.

How to use Edit in Excel safely

Edit in Excel follows the same rules as Business Central itself. If a line cannot be changed in the system, it cannot be changed from Excel either. The change only happens when you choose to publish, and a column can only be edited if the field is editable on the page.

Learn also mentions that the export is limited to 100 columns when OneDrive is set up for system features. Remove columns you do not need if the workbook gets too large.

Checklist before you publish

Is the filter set to the right orders, so you do not move dates on orders from another shipment?
Have some lines already been partly received? Then only the remainder of the line should be moved.
Are there sales orders or reservations that are based on the old date, and which customers need to be told about?
Have you saved a copy of the workbook, so you can see what the dates were before the change?

Why the date matters

A wrong expected receipt date leads to wrong decisions. The salesperson promises a delivery date based on a date that does not hold, and the planner orders an item that is already on its way. Make sure, therefore, that you know who owns the date. If it is the purchaser who talks to the vendor, the correction should also be made there, and the warehouse needs to be told.

When the same delay hits every order

If a whole container or shipment affects many orders, you would prefer to change one date in one place. Standard cannot link lines from several orders to a shared shipment and move them together. That is why we have the idea PO Date Sync and a container solution on our list of possible apps. These are ideas we are considering. They cannot be downloaded or bought yet.

If you want to see what we are considering and vote for what you are missing, you can use the list of app ideas.