The day a company moves to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, they can start creating all kinds of documents in the system for their daily work: sales orders, purchase orders, production orders, and so on.
There may be cases where some documents on the old system have not yet been completed; for example, sales orders that have not yet been shipped, purchase orders that have not yet been received, or production orders that have yet not been finished.
What should be done with all these documents?
The first recommendation is to have the least possible open documents on the old system on the day you start working with Dynamics NAV. Make sure the customer calls their vendor, informs the production team, and notifies the shipping team that during this date all open orders should be closed in their legacy system.
For those documents that could not be finished before migrating to Dynamics NAV, there are a few strategies you can follow:
How should the users act if this is the chosen option?
When an open sales order is shipped in the old system, you will have to do a negative adjustment in Dynamics NAV to reflect the inventory decrease. No sales shipment will exist in NAV though; the person responsible for posting the sales invoices will not have the information in NAV for what to invoice. He will have to check the old system and do a manual invoice in Dynamics NAV. This will be done using a G/L account and not the item number since we do not want the inventory decrease to be posted again while posting the invoice.
You can think of similar strategies for all other kinds of documents that still exist on the old system and that will be finished at some point.
Open documents can be handled, but they imply extra work. This is actually why our recommendation was to try to finish as many documents as possible in the old system before migrating.
You can also think of some other strategies. For example, you could have created the open documents in Dynamics NAV in a way in which no extra work was needed in any of the processes to actually finish the document.
In the sales order case, you could have created the pending lines for the pending quantities and also the lines already shipped but not yet invoiced.
For those last lines, you could have used G/L accounts instead of items. After creating them in Dynamics NAV, they should be posted. This way, we have a scenario in which:
Even more elaborate strategies can be used. Think of all the possible strategies, analyze them, and determine how much work is needed in the migration process (define the data to be imported, the migration tool to be used, and so on), how much work is needed by the users to finish those documents, and so on. After analyzing all of them, choose the one that best meets your requirements.