Using Alerts to Stay on Top of Your Business

One area of SAP Business One that is often talked about as a very proactive tool, but is not often used is Alerts Management. This tool gives you instant notifications of anything important that's happening in your business and needs your attention. For example, here at ProjectLine, we use a custom alert to notify our Marketing team when contacts in SAP Business One have incomplete contact information. This helps us catch any inconsistencies in data entry and maintain quality information on our business partners.

There are two types of alerts – standard alerts that come with SAP Business One and custom alerts that are driven by an SQL query that your Consultant can help you with. These are the 7 standard alerts that come with SAP Business One out-of-the-box:

1. MRP Recommendation Due
2. Deviation from Budget
3. Deviation from Discount (in %)
4. Deviation from % off Gross Profit
5. Deviation from Commitment Level
6. Deviation from Credit Limit
7. Minimum stock Deviation

In this article, we’ll show you how to set up one of the most commonly used alerts – Deviation from Credit Limit. Once you’ve seen how you can set up one alert, you’ll be able to follow the same process for any of the other standard alerts.

1. To access Alerts Management under the main menu, go to the Administration > Alerts Management.
   
   
2. In the Alerts Management window, you can access any of these alerts simply by selecting the Next Record button in the Icon Ribbon.
   
   
3. Once on the Deviation from Credit Limit screen, select the people who will be getting this alert and what form of communication you will be using. Make sure you select Active and the Priority Level. Then enter the maximum you will allow for deviation from their credit limit.
   
   
4. Click the Documents tab and select the documents that you want the alert to be triggered from. Then click Update and you’re done!

So you can see, with very few steps, you have a very useful alert to indicate that something important is happening and requires your attention. Then you can be proactive and make the appropriate business decision before it becomes a problem. Quick to set up, simple to use, yet very effective.

If you’re looking to create a custom alert and need a refresher on writing queries, check out our earlier post on using the Query Wizard.