Copying a record
The same again, with one thing changed — on every list and every record page, through the rules a typed record goes through.
Every enterprise day has the same shape: last month’s purchase order with two quantities changed, this customer again for a different plant, the same routing for the next size up. Copy is on the row actions of every list and beside Print on every record page.
A copy is a create
It is not a duplicate row. The copy goes through the same create endpoint your own Save goes through, so it takes a new document number from the same range, picks up the current company defaults, is judged by the required fields, the value rules and the organizational-consistency rules, runs your company’s own validation layer, and is audited. There is no way into this platform where the rules do not apply, and a copy is not one either.
What does not come across
| Left behind | Why |
|---|---|
| The document number | The copy takes the next one in the same series. Two records with one number is a corruption, not a convenience. |
| What happened to the original | Posted, approved, paid, received, cancelled, reconciled — with who did it and when. A copy of a paid invoice is not a paid invoice. |
| The status | Back to whatever a new record of that kind starts at, which is what makes the copy a draft. |
| Who made it and when | The copy was made by you, today. |
Everything else is the specification of the thing, and the specification is what you are copying. A field that says which PARTY does something — who pays for a compliance check, for instance — is a specification and comes across; a field that says who signed and when is a record of an event and does not.
The lines come too
A purchase order without its lines is not a copy of a purchase order. Lines are renumbered from one and the header is recalculated from them. If the lines cannot be written for any reason, the header is removed as well and you are told why — half a copy is worse than none.
On a purchase order, requisition, quotation, sales order or invoice, every copied line is worked out again exactly as on a new document, and so is the total in the company’s currency ("In base"). A copy therefore goes to the same approvers the original would. Documents copied before this release that showed 0 in that total have been corrected by the update.
When it cannot finish on its own
Most master data is identified by a code with a uniqueness rule on it, so a straight copy would collide. Rather than a message and nothing to do, the ordinary create form opens on the record the copy had prepared: everything filled in, the reason above the fields, and the one thing that has to differ waiting to be typed.
An employee is copied the same way: the form opens filled in from the original and nothing is saved until you press Save. Enter the new person’s name and hire date; once saved, the new record opens with a confirmation. See Working with an employee’s record.
Copy asks for the ADD permission on the screen, not change. Somebody who may raise purchase orders and not amend them can copy last month’s; somebody who may only amend one cannot make a second.
A screen that has nothing to copy INTO — a view assembled from other records, an immutable posting, a read-only register — says so instead of offering the action.