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Creating a copy of an existing company has been made easier in the higher versions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This allows users to easily copy an existing company, e.g. your current production company, into a new ‘test’ company containing all the same setups and data from the current company.

The benefit of having a test company is that users can explore changes within the master setup when examining potential business process changes or running irreversible batch jobs to evaluate the result in the test company which contains the up to date data before applying the same changes in the production company.

In the previous versions of NAV from NAV 2013 and below, creating a test company require lots of steps which generally includes backing up the database, renaming the production company, restoring the backup into a ‘test’ database, and so on. In the higher versions of NAV, a copy company function has been introduced to easily handle this lengthy task.

Below is the guide on how to copy a company in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. We do not recommend doing this during business hours as it will slow down performance or generate table locking errors in NAV. So it will be best to be doing this at the end of the day and leave the task running overnight. We also suggest to temporarily set any Job Queue status to ‘On Hold’ before executing the copy function.

Step 1. In the NAV search box, type “Companies” and click it. The companies page will show all the existing companies within the database.

Step 2. Highlight the company that you want to copy and click the copy button from the ribbon. The screenshot below shows that we are copying the Cronus Australia Pty. Ltd company into a new company name.

Step 3. Enter the New Company Name and hit OK. This process may take a while to complete depending on the volume of the data from the company being copied.

Step 4. Once the copy is finished, you will now see the new company name from the companies page.

Step 5. To open the new company, click Select Server and select the new company name. Check if the data has been copied by opening the Chart of Account and opening the Ledger Entries.

Step 6. If applicable, set any Job Queue status to Ready if it has been set to On Hold as per mentioned above.

That is basically it! Copying a company to be used for testing purposes has been made easier in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

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