Errors seen in Purchase Order Processing when Encumbrance Management and Requisition Management are installed

Have you ever had a situation where you were trying to receive a shipment or shipment/invoice document against a Purchase Order in the Receivings Transaction Entry window and receive the following error:  “One or more purchase order items can't be received as they have an encumbrance status of pre-encumbered or invalid.”

Starting with Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 Support started to see an increase in this error.  In many of these cases we noticed Encumbrance Management was enabled and the Purchase Order Documents that received this error came from Business Portal Requisition Management.

No integration has ever been written between Business Portal Requisition Management and Encumbrance Management, so we would recommend that they not be used together. When new columns (Workflow_Approval_Status and Workflow_Priority) were added to the POP10100 table for workflow functionality, it rendered steps used on previous versions as a workaround obsolete. This resulted in the above error.

In versions prior to 10.0 RTM, users would not receive the error. Users would have used the Mass Encumbrance window to Encumber the document that came from Requisition Management.  However, the budget was not being validated. The PO would show as encumbered but would not have done the check to see if you were over budget.

More Information:

The Workflow_Approval_Status and Workflow_Priority columns have a default values of zero when Purchase Order documents are brought in from Requisition Management. The default values for a Purchase Order created through the Purchase Order Entry window are 9 and 2 respectively. Since there is no integration between Requisition Management and Encumbrance Management, there is no mechanism within the application to make them work together. As a result you would need to update the values in the above columns via SQL to get around the error.  Here are 2 options for you:

1) Manually update the tables via SQL to show the Workflow_Approval_Status field as a value of 9 and the Workflow_Priority field as a value of 2 in the POP10100 prior to printing the PO.  Note: If the PO is printed prior to this update, the PO will be in an incorrect Pre-Budget status.  An update to the ENCBSTAT field in the ENC10110 to set it to a 2, (pre-encumbered) would also be necessary.  In addition you would need to use the Mass Encumbrance window to encumber the PO prior to reprinting it.

2) If manual updates are not suitable for your business, you can look at creating a SQL trigger to automatically populate the data for you. 

Note: Keep in mind that even with doing the above, the Encumbrance budget will not be validated against for POs that originated in Requisition Management.  If you are looking for similar functionality we would recommend using PO Commitments as that does have a full integration with Requisition Management.

Thank you,
Angela E.