A Checklist to Complete Before and After Losing Your Cell Phone

 April 26, 2025

If I missed any key points or got any details wrong, let me know.  This post is only for iPhones, since that is what I use and know.  I am not going to attempt to cover Android.

I lost my cell phone in the ocean.  In the middle of my vacation.  In El Salvador.  Fun!

I'm guessing it's one of the least convenient times and places to lose a cell phone.

I thought I was smart by bringing a spare phone with me on the trip, something I've done for several years when I travel overseas.  That spare phone definitely saved the day, but I learned several lessons and discovered a few mistakes I made that cost me time, hassle, and money.

Several of these items relate to filing an insurance claim to replace your phone.  If you don't have phone insurance, then you can potentially skip these.

Things to do BEFORE you lose your phone:

1.  If you have phone Insurance:  Record the exact model number, specs, specific part number, serial number, and IMEI of your phone.  I typically record all of this information in my personal password manager.  I also recommend taking screen shots of the phone info screens and store those images as well.  If you still have the original box for the phone take photos of all of the phone specs and info on the box label as well.  Unfortunately, I forgot to do this for the iPhone 15 that I lost, which has made the insurance claim process a major hassle.  It turns out that my cell phone provider, AT&T, and the insurance company, Asurion, have no idea which specific phone model I was using.  They are completely unable to determine if my iPhone 15 was a 256GB or 128GB model.  And due to this, they have denied my insurance claim for the lost phone.  Even Apple was unwilling to provide me with the specific "part number" of my phone that would allow me to prove the phone storage, even though my Apple account shows me the phone serial number.  Yes, this is beyond absurd.  I was surprised to learn this.

2. If you have phone insurance:  Verify your phone IMEI and unlock status:  This web site provides a free IMEI lookup to verify general phone model (not color or storage), Find My iPhone status, lock status, and blacklist status.

https://www.imeipro.info/check_imei_iphone.html

 

How many digits can a Business Central Amount field actually support?

 by Steve Endow

(If anyone has a technical explanation for the discrepancy between the Docs and the BC behavior, let me know!)

On Sunday night, as I am prone to do, I was testing something obscure in Business Central Online.

I was checking to see how many digits were supported in a "currency" field, aka an Amount field.  Different numeric fields will have different limitations, but I was specifically interested in the limits of currency amounts.

For instance, if I needed to create a transaction in Venezuelan Bolivars, could Business Central handle a large number of Bolivars?  And could it also handle a large number of Bolivars with "cents"?

500,000 US Dollars is approximately 1.8 trillion Bolivars, give or take

So I entered a really big number in Business Central and saw this error:

Type Decimal

So I learned that the data type is Decimal.  I can never remember the maximum data type values, so I searched for "Business Central decimal data type", which led me to this page:

Filter by Date Range with Business Central Web API v2.0 - OData date filter syntax

by Steve Endow

I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out the proper syntax for date filtering with Business Central Web API v2.0 endpoints, so I am documenting it here for future reference.

I don't regularly work with BC Web APIs these days, so when I have to dig back into them every 3-6 months, I'm almost always rusty and have a hard time remembering the URL format and the OData filter syntax used by Business Central Web APIs.

Today I was trying to filter the results returned from the generalLedgerEntries endpoint.  If I try to call that endpoint without a filter, Postman gives me an error because it is returning too much data.

The body of this response was too large to be saved

Fine, let's filter based on postingDate.  But I don't remember the OData filter syntax.  Unfortunately, the OData documentation has ZERO examples of filtering by date.

Business Central Simple Tip #5: Comment Lines, Standard Text Codes, and Extended Text

by Steve Endow

(Thanks to Kristen Hosman for showing me this feature!)

Business Central has a very cool feature that allows you to add text Comments to transaction lines.  I'm excited about it because I don't believe we had an equivalent feature in the Dynamics GP world.

The feature appears to be well designed and implemented in Business Central, but the official MS documentation on the elements of the features are limited, so I don't think the docs to the feature justice.

There are 3 elements to the overall "feature" in Business Central:

1. Comment Line Type

2. Standard Text Codes

3. Extended Text

Comment Lines

When entering a transaction in Business Central, such as a Sales Invoice, the Line "Type" field can be set to "Comment".  You can then manually enter comment text in the line Description field.  This is the simplest option for ad-hoc comment lines, but the Description field is limited to 100 characters, so if you need more than 100 characters, you would need to add multiple Comment lines.

Documentation. Documentation? Documentation!

by Steve Endow

How do you create your documentation?  

When do you create your documentation?

Who in your organization creates your documentation?  Who doesn't?

Does anybody actually read your documentation?  How do you know?

Do you specifically budget for documentation in your projects?  How much?

Are your customers reluctant to pay for documentation?

Can your documentation keep up with your software releases?  Do you maintain detailed release notes?

Do you methodically and consistently update your documentation over time?  

Update:  (based on a response from Erik Hougaard on Twitter)

Do you create instructional videos or video tutorials as part of your documentation?  If so, how do you consistently record, edit, store, publish, and index such videos?  Do you have public and private (e.g. customer specific) videos?  If so, how do you handle publishing videos for those different audiences?

By now I'm sure you are excited beyond belief, as there are few topics more glamorous than "documentation".  

Is it read?

Over the last 20 years, I've worked with over 700 customers.  I've documented business processes, business procedures, ERP training guides, user manuals, customization specifications, integration designs, data mappings, installation guides, and software user manuals.

Business Central Simple Tip #4: Exporting Leading Zeroes to Excel and then CSV- It works fine!

by Steve Endow

This may seem obvious to some, but I've learned through many painful lessons that unless I actually test a scenario and see for myself that it works exactly as desired, it can be dangerous to make assumptions about software functionality and offer promises to customers...

ERP users regularly need to export data to CSV files, and then send or use those CSV files somewhere else. 

A common problem with working with CSV files is that leading zeroes can sometimes be removed by Excel.  This typically occurs when a user opens an existing CSV file, makes a change, and then saves the CSV file.  During that CSV editing process, Excel will typically remove all leading zeroes from field values.

A customer recently asked us to create a custom file export to send to their bank.  They need a list of payments created in Business Central, as well as all of the purchasing invoices that were paid by that payment--essentially a remittance file.

To keep things simple at first, we're looking to create a custom Business Central List Page that has all of the fields the customer needs for their bank.  A user can then just click on the Open in Excel action from the list page to save the data to a file.

Open in Excel from a List Page

Business Central Simple Tip #3: Those Role Center "Square Things" - Cues and Action Tiles

by Steve Endow

I was recently researching those "square things" that are displayed on the Business Central Role Center "home" page.

You know, the square things:

"Square Things"

After searching my memory, I recalled they were called "Cues".  As in they provide a visual "cue" with information.

But when I started to research them and how I could create a custom Cue, found an article that mentioned both "Cues" and "Action Tiles".

What?