Issue Client requests expanding a 30 character field to 40, 50, etc. characters.  Could be any field but most commonly Vendor Name or Customer Name.
Solution
 In general, I would highly recommend against increasing the field size of the Vendor Name.  This is not to say that it's not possible, but it will more likely create more problems than it's worth.  The problem is that we do not just need to increase the "Name" on the Vendor card, but we need to increase fields throughout the system on pretty much every object type.  I can say with 99% confidence that we cannot find every one of these fields.  You will need to expect at any time to get the following error:  "Overflow under type conversion of text to text.".  You will be constantly calling us to resolve this error, and it will more than likely get annoying for your users as well as for us, as these errors more often than not need to be resolved ASAP and this may not always be possible.

So what are your options?

Option 1 - find a way to reduce your vendor names to 30 characters for now (cheapest!)

Option 2 - extend the Vendor Name from 30 to 40 characters and try to find all other areas in the system where this must be done.  Disadvantages are described above.  It's difficult to know how to put an estimate on this, but I saw one developer state it this way:  "You will under quote the client for the amount of work required, and will be doing free work to fix it for years to come.".  If you're willing to live with the "text overflow" messages and pay for them as they happen, we could take that approach as well.  We could for example, start with about a 12 hour estimate of development time to try and nail as high a percentage as possible of errors you're likely to encounter so you hopefully don't get too many "text overflow" errors.

Option 3 - add a new field called "Full Name", 40 or 50 characters in length.  Take the first 30 chars from this new field and place it into the existing 30-char "Name" field, and the next characters into the "Name 2" field.  We could actually expand the "Search Name" field from 30 to 50 characters so at least the Search Name shows everything.  The advantage of this approach is that you will avoid the "text overflow" error that you'd get with Option 2.  All existing functionality will still work as is.  You would then need to identify where you would like us to use the full 40-character vendor name instead of the shortened 30-character name.  Wherever you see a 30-char name and you'd like it to be the 40-char name, you would just tell us and we could make that change for you.  At least in a pinch, you could still do your work without being stopped with the "text overflow" error.  We could probably start this with a rough estimate of about 6 hours, and the actual amount of time could be higher or lower depending on how many areas where you feel it's important to see the full 40-char vendor name.  

Option 4 - This is a variation of Option 3.  There is an existing field called "Name 2" in the Vendor table.  This field currently is not shown on the Vendor Card, but we could put it onto the card underneath the "Name" field.  You should not get the "text overflow" errors.  You would again need to identify all areas where you would like to have the full vendor name appear, and we would have to do some customizations to concatenate the "Name" and "Name 2" fields as appropriate.  A rough estimate to start with would be about 6 hours.

Option 5 - consider an upgrade to NAV 5.0.  This version of Navision actually already has 50-character Vendor Name and Customer Name fields.  A disadvantage of Options 2, 3 and 4 above is that those customizations will need to be removed when the time comes where you do actually upgrade to NAV5.0 - so you'd be paying for something that you will end up not needing in the not too distant future.  (SIDENOTE - the "Item Description" field is still only at 30 chars in NAV 5.0.  My guess for this is that Microsoft just did not have enough time to identify all the areas in the system where they could get the "text overflow" error when dealing with Items, as this can get very complicated.).

Note:
Majority of clients will opt to not expand the field length and this is the recommendation of Open Door development.