Create a Test Company in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016                    

Today what I wanted to go through is how to create a test company in NAV 2016.

So we’re thinking about doing a lot of things with coffee mugs and we had all kinds of discussions regarding business processes etc. And I sort of need a test company that I can test things in before I actually put them into the production company. And how do we do that in NAV?

Well I have my production company The Coffee Mug International and there I am actually just posting day to day transactions. I would like to get a copy of this where I can go in and post test transactions and see how things work and then I can go back into the real company and actually do the same thing there if it makes sense.

Selecting a Company
Now in NAV we can have as many companies as we like and in order to select a company I just go into that little hidden arrow here ‘Select Company’ click on that.

Pick from a dropdown list. I actually have a few more companies in there, the Cronus company, test companies that come from Microsoft, they contain furniture and stuff like that.

Copy a Company
But what I want to do is create a Coffee Mug International test company, copy what I have and use that going forward.  

Now NAV 2016 has a really neat feature. I can actually go in here and say Companies and click on that. 

I see a list of the companies in a plain list inside the application. Here I can just go ahead and hit Copy.

Naming the New Company
The system says ok well what do you want the new company name to be called? CMI- TEST, stands for Coffee Mug International Test. I just hit OK. 

And then it just churns – this might take a while if you have a big company. What it is actually doing right now is creating a new table structure in SQL for this company and populating all the data, copying all the data of the entire company over.

So I recommend NOT doing this during production hours, definitely doing it over the weekend and possibly if you can test how long it takes in a database that is not the production database.

Viewing the New Company
But as you can see with my test database which isn’t huge it was pretty quick going and creating test company and now I can actually just go ahead and say Select Company. 

And if I go in here I go into CMI Test hit OK.

Now I’m in my test version of the Coffee Mug International. I can see all the Sales Orders are here etc. 

If I go into My Customers.

My customers are here everything is as it is, or as it was in the actual company.

And that’s how you create a test company.