Dynamics GP Tips and Tricks (Video)

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TRANSCRIPT

Okay. So, we’re gonna be going through Dynamics GP, some tips and tricks today. And we’ve got about 25, maybe a little bit more tips in 50 minutes. We’ll be talking about some of the admin tips, finance tips, distribution, sales, inventory, and purchasing, and some reporting. Document attachment setup, document attach usage, using workflow, company offline for maintenance, send a message to the users, disable the action pane, and hot keys in Dynamics GP. Okay so, I’m gonna be kinda toggling back and forth between GP and the slide. So, we’re gonna go ahead and look at the document attachment setup which gives us some different options for using documents and attachments.

So, go over to GP and here under Administration, we should have… All right here, document attachment. And you can see here that we could select to allow a document attachments that is throughout GP. We can select the location where the default is to store those attachments before we move them in. Also, you can also browse out too at the time, you don’t to have that set there. And then [inaudible 00:01:24] we can delete the file from the default location after we attach it, meaning it will go away and will be kind of embedded within GP because this does document embed. We can also have some other options here. A maximum file size by megabyte and allow the attachments to be deleted, which I would suggest in case you don’t need them in the future.

We also have some other options here about allowing attachments to flow from master budget records. And if you are going to be using email and you want to get emailing invoices, purchase orders, things like that, you need to select the send documents and email check box. Okay. So, then when we go into the actual document attachment screen, we can see how that works. So, upon purchasing and I’m doing my transaction right here, I can go…there’s two types of attachments. There’s a doc attachment that applies to each window GPs. So, if you attach here, every single payables transaction will have that attachment.

People sometimes use that for instructions on how to complete the window. Your record attachment which is applicable specifically to this voucher number would be the records that are in here. And if I click on my little link there, then I can see here that I can attach. So, I could browse out here to any file and there it is, okay? And it will allow me to click on it and preview that document as well. Preview. Maybe [inaudible 00:03:14]. Okay. So, in any case, it should preview. This is just not working at the moment. Okay. So, I’ll go ahead and close that and close that but you can see here how we can go ahead and attach documents. I’m just gonna go ahead and delete this guy.

A lot of people ask about that all the time so that is your method. So, if we go ahead and we go on now, we’re gonna look at workflow. We have a lot of clients who started to implement this and workflows actually allows for approvals for various types of documents. So, if I come back over into GP and under admin, and we go to workflow. There should be workflow setup here. And we can say that we want to enable email which is usually important. Okay, and we would set up mail servers, things like that. This is more of a technical setup that your technical resource would go through with you when you’re setting it up. And then when we come down here to the company setup workflow here, under workflow maintenance, we have all these different workflows.

So, we have payables batch approvals, payables transaction approvals, purchase order approvals, purchase requisition approvals, vendor approvals, that’s just under purchasing, general ledger batch approvals. Under sales, we have receivables batch approvals. Under payroll, we have various employee profiles, employee skills, payroll direct deposit, payroll time card, payroll W4. And then even some things under project. So, we can go ahead and set up workflows. I can’t go through a whole workflow because it actually requires web services and things that I don’t have on my computer. But just to give you a little idea, if we look at purchasing and if we went to payables transaction approval, and if we added new workflow here a little bit.

And we have some options to allow the approver to delegate tasks, originator to be approver, require at least one approver which is what I usually select. And then if it’s overdue, meaning you can set a timeframe that after a certain amount of time, something happens. So, it either escalates to a next approver, it escalates to a specific person. You can reject the overdue batch, or take no action. So, I’ll just leave it there and then I’m gonna ahead and save it. And then our next step would really be to adding steps to this workflow. So, we’ll just call it approval. This is just a very basic one. I will say that action is already always required and then we would assign it to someone which I can, I’m not set up for, this is more of a server, but we would select the person to approve.

We could have multiple approvals. We could have multiple steps where if the item is like over $500, we could add an additional approval so you can really layer the workflow, but that’s just a little piece of it that that is now available now in GP. So, we’ll go ahead and close that. [inaudible 00:06:22] here. We can also take the company offline for maintenance. So, people sometimes use that for the year-end close. Again, we have the option of doing it for maintenance or mass changes and allows only a single user to access the database. So, that means if you’re doing maybe some mass work and you don’t want people just popping in while you’re doing it, you can go ahead and you can take it offline.

So, if we come up here, see where we find that. Right here under utilities, take company offline and you’re gonna wanna know your system password. And here, it will tell us. We can insert that and then add, you know, the current user. So, here, right? And it says we just want SA to be able to do that if I inserted that. Okay, so that’s a way to take it offline. And here, we can send a message to users. So this is really useful if you want to keep people out of the system. You could send a message and it will be popped up right for them within GP while they’re working. So here, we have right here, send users message. So I’ll go ahead and enter that and I only have two users because this is just my system but I could uncheck this.

We can check and uncheck who we wanna send it to. And I can say, notification message, “Get out of the system,” and so on and so forth. We could also send a task along with that. Task with a reminder if you wanna do that. We just click send and then everybody who is selected up here is going to go ahead and get that message. So, I’ll go ahead and cancel that. And here is where we can set our user preferences. This allows us to disable the action pane which then shows the old menu bars. You can do that if you absolutely have to. It’s required for some legacy issues but I think we’re at the point now with GP 2018 that this is not really going to be particularly necessary.

But if you did need to change your view, we’ll go ahead and come over here and under…let’s go ahead and find our user preferences. If I go home, my user preferences are here. Everybody has access to their own user preferences. I can take this area here, action pane, and I can make it a strip. And say, “Okay,” and that would change the view once I log back in. I can also come in here and I can make it the menu bar which is the old menu bars that GP used to have. Okay. But, again, that’s probably not going to be really required unless you’re coming off a very, very, very old version of GP. So, I’m just gonna set my back to action pane.

Also, under user preferences, I’ll just point out something here pretty quick that is nice is if you want, and a lot of users don’t know this, you can change how the field links look. So, the field links are set default as blue and underlined, and that would be a link that opens another field. But what a lot of people don’t know is required fields, we can change that to red and we can make that bold, italic. And what happens when I do that is any window, if there are required fields there will show up in red. So, if I [inaudible 00:09:57] will change. So, a lot of users like to then highlight those fields in red that are required. Okay, and I’ll just point this out. I really don’t use this a lot but you can.

Here are different look ups that we can use. This is for keyboard, for people who like maybe used the old DAS keyboards. Control L will do a look up up from a field, the space bar toggles, the Tab, Shift Tab moves the focus, and the arrows up and down move to the same field of the next record, and then we can set Enter to accept the document. So, those are just some of the keyboard toggles that you can use. Okay. So, now we’re gonna move on to some financial areas. Reversing a year-end, correcting and reversing journal entries, copying journal entries, importing journal information from Excel, and importing budgets from Excel.

Okay. So, one of the things and I actually helped a couple of clients with this recently is we now have the ability to reverse our year-end close. So, for various reasons, that might be necessary. Maybe you’ve forgotten a thousand payables that we needed to enter, whatever reasons, something, multi-currency issues, for whatever reason something just didn’t come out right. I’ve had that issue happen with people with our local accounting. And really, the best solution is rather than just doing a journal entry into prior year, we really want to just open that year back up. So, I’m gonna come over to GP and under financial, and under our routines. Under our year-end closing, which we use to close the year, we are going to then select reverse historical year.

So, we’re not closing, we’re going to go ahead and say, “Reverse,” and it will bring up the last prior year, okay? I think you can go back two years, so if you need to open a year before that you could. It goes back here to 2013, and we would just select process. And it just takes a few minutes our year is open, and then we do wanna run the utility, the GL utility. So, after that is opened, we would come over here and we would run our reconcile for our accounts, and that would go ahead and set everything back up. And then you can go ahead and make your entries, reopen your year, adjourn reclose your year. That’s really helpful if you’ve got big issues that you didn’t realize when you closed.

Okay. We can also do things like backing out and correcting journal entries, and a lot of people don’t realize that you have this option as well. So, if I’m in a journal entry, I’m gonna come up here to my general transactions. And I’m gonna go ahead and this time, I’m gonna select correct. So, when I say, “Correct,” I will have two options. I can back out, just reverse the general entry or I can back it out and create a correcting entry. So, if we’re just off a little bit or maybe we posted them on our account, we can literally create a correcting entry. So, let’s go ahead and back out and create a correcting, and we’re gonna pick the year, right? And really, it should be open years that you could use.

And I’m gonna go ahead and I am going to select from here, I’ll pull this down. Okay, here we go. We’ve got some things here. Now, what you need to really do is you need to make sure that it’s just a journal entry. So, I can’t back out a payroll entry. I can’t back out [inaudible 00:13:40] come across from the sub-ledger. These are all sub-ledgers so let’s go, if you go back to 2017, what would we do here? All right, let’s just do this and back out and correct. Okay. Let me pull this, see if we can get this down to the bottom. Okay, and here’s my journal entry. So, this came directly from the GL. So, I’ll go ahead and select this, okay? And I’m gonna just say, “Okay,” here, and look what it’s done for me.

It has now created the back out. It’s done the exact reversal of the journal entry that I did there, okay? So, I can go ahead and I can close that. And now, it’s made my correcting automatically set that up. So, maybe this was 50 but maybe this account, what it really needed to do was it needed to go to a different GL account, okay? So, there is our now correcting journal entry. You could have set it up as a batch and then posted it. I just went ahead and posted it through directly from the window, but that’s just really a nice function. Again, it’s only applicable to journal entries made directly to the general ledger.

Okay. Another thing we can do, let’s go ahead right here, is we can copy a journal entry. So, by copying, again we’ll come in here in general. We’re gonna select copy and I’ll just pick [inaudible 00:15:17] Okay, and then I’ll just pick this guy here, and we’re gonna say, “Okay,” and it has totally copied that journal entry. I can change the date. I can create a batch, whatever I need to do, and go ahead and post that. And it’s copied it exactly the way that it was. All right. The other thing we can do, this is a great feature. We can import journal information from Excel. So, back in the day, you used to have to use Integration Manager or some other integration tool just to create a journal entry.

Now, we can literally copy and paste it. So, let me go ahead and show that. So, we’ll start our journal entry, okay? We’ll put in…you do have to fill out the header record so just make it a batch here, and go through and enter whatever information I need here. Once the header is done, we can go ahead and we have our Excel spreadsheet. So, let’s see if we can find that. Okay. So, we’ll skip that now. I’ll have it open. Anyway, so we would have a journal entry and go ahead and just select paste. So, we copy our journal entry, we select Paste, and it will paste down here. Okay. So, let’s go back through here. We can also import budgets much in the same way.

And again, I’ll show that. I have to have those field to have those windows open. Too hard to move around. So, let’s see. So, for distribution, we’re now gonna go through sales, suggested items for SOP, customer item numbers. Inventory, item site assignment, using reason codes. And purchasing, adding columns to a check batch, using attachments for document management, purchase requisition, and using workflow. Okay. So, this gives us suggested items for an SOP and what it does is it adds suggested items as order entry is performed. This will pop up a suggestion of additional items in SOP, and it’s added by document type.

So, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go over here and come over to inventory. And we’re gonna go ahead and go to our items, and we are gonna select an item here, okay? And then we can select the Suggest Items button and then we can select items that tie back into this. So, maybe we want this. That’s just gonna be a suggested item to go along with this multi-core processor, okay? So we can okay there and save there. And then that will create a suggestion. All right. We’re gonna go ahead and move on to this one. Add customer item numbers to GP and this is also available to print on SOP documents, provide customers their info on documents, and it can be used for language translation.

So, really, what we’re doing is we are…they’re ordering an item from us. So, here is our item number but that customer has its own item number and that can actually show up on the SOP as opposed to our item number when creating one and we have a description. So, if we come back over here and we go into sales, and we go into our customer, okay? And then we can go in. Where are we? Not there. It’s here. Customer items here, so we go here and we select our customer. And then we can select our item number and then we can go ahead and the customer item number is CPP001, okay? So you can literally set it up so that then you can order this item based on the customer item, okay?

And then we have additional information things here, substitute items that we can tag as well. Okay. We can also do item site assignment which a lot of people ask about this and this is a way to add multiple sites to new items, okay? We can also mark the item as inactive in the site, we can add landed cost defaults, and we can add the primary vendor by site. So, if I come over to my item and come in here let’s just select an item, and we’re gonna go to quantity sites from the go-to menu, okay? And then we’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna go from here, our go-to to our site item assignments. And you see now, here is all my sites. I can unmark all of them, I can select a group.

You cannot unmark the site in that item. Okay. I’m not sure why we’re getting that but, in general, you can go ahead and unmark all of these, mark all, so on and so forth. Okay. You can also mark the item inactive. You can select primary vendors, we can say it’s inactive for this site, so on and so forth, okay? And I’m not sure why we’re getting that. Okay. And, in any case, then we can go ahead and say, “Okay,” and we can save here. Go on here. We can use reason codes. This sets our reason codes. It reports on why there are adjustments, controls where the expense is coded, and overlays are still in effect, okay? So, if we wanted to setup reason codes that we can tie back to our items, we can go ahead here. Close that guy.

And we’re gonna go ahead and set up reason code setup here. [inaudible 00:21:54] And this makes sure that we add a recent code for adjustment, variances, right? That way, this give us a default off set account that we can set. Okay. And then transferring, this really tells us what type of transaction this recent code needs to apply to, okay? And sometimes, people use this because they want a special code associated with these different types of transactions, okay? So once that up, we can go ahead and save that. And let’s go on here. We can also add columns to our check batch. So, when we do our select checks, we can add additional information that shows up in our edit payables batch window over here.

And now go to purchasing, and let’s just go to select checks, and in our batch, just pick one that’s available. When we come over here to edit check batch, I can select here on the right side columns and I can add different columns. Maybe I don’t want to see the voucher number, I want to see the document number, and I say, “Okay.” So, look at that. It’s now replaced the voucher with the document number. We could add them, maybe I want to add terms, okay? So, you can see, you can really manipulate the columns over here to help you select which items that you want to pay by using our columns function.

This again is where we’re using attachments for document management. This attaches the copies to the document, it stores in SQL, and it’s very easy to get back to it. I’ve kinda showed you that a little bit. We have another function here where you can scan. So, if you have a Windows compliance scanner, you can literally scan a document right into GP from your scanner. So, if you got a scanner set up, this button will open up and you can do a direct scan. All right. We have a new window now in versions of GP called purchase requisition. Typically, purchase requisition is used with workflow and we use it for purchase requests.

And really what happens with this is you can give, typically it’s set up through the web, and you can give multiple, what we call limited users ability to create purchase requisitions throughout the organization. And those licenses are much, much less than a standard GP license because all they can do is go in and create purchase requests. Which then, typically, we run through workflow and it’s approved, and then created into a PO when it’s completed. So, I’ll also go ahead and show you that window. So, here we have something called purchase requisitions. And, again, if you enable the whole web workflow, your users would be accessing this out on the web, and your approvers would be able to get emails to approve them.

But you can also just use that directly within GP, maybe through security. Limit only some GP users to create PRX but they can’t create POs, so on and so forth, okay? So, let me just go ahead and comment, so on and so forth. We can type for project if it’s related to a project. This gives us our cost categories. I’m just gonna go ahead and select an item number, okay? And maybe I want 15 of these, so on and so forth. And what’s gonna happen is when I save this document, I would go through actions, submit. I would submit that then an approver would come in and approve it, and then turn that into a PO. But this is a new PO rep to give more people the opportunity to create requested items without formally committing it to a PO.

So, let’s go ahead here. We have a new field also. This warns us when a PO exists for a vendor. So, sometimes for whatever reason, documentation is all over the place and we may get an invoice and not know that it’s actually tied to a PO in the system. This actually a new check box will warn us that, “Hey, you’ve got this vendor out here has some POs that exists. Maybe you should go check the POs to see if this invoice matches up with one of the POs.” So, that is gonna be found here under payable setup and that’s right here, “Warn if the existing vendor has existing purchase order.” Okay, so I’ll just check that box and then that will be enabled.

We also have what I call all-in-one-views for sales and purchasing. And you can literally see the records of the documents from beginning to end. So, let’s go ahead and go over to that. And we’re going to do purchasing on one. So, we have it in sales, we also have it in purchasing. So, here’s my purchasing on one view. Let’s go ahead and select the vendor, and it’s gonna load a lot of stuff. So, here we see our POs. We can go right back in to that PO. We have receipts…this isn’t being receipted but we could select Receipts. We have invoices. We can apply filters on these, right? So, I could say that the invoice, POP invoice number date, right? Posted, unposted. If it’s in history, if it’s saved which could be items in work so I can apply my filters here.

We can sort up and down but here’s kind of my own all-in-one-view of all the documents that are from purchase orders all the way down to payments and returns. So, I can go ahead and select that and it will draw right down into the documents, okay? And I can select my payments, so on and so forth. So, that’s really a nice way for us to see a lot of documents all in one place, okay? All right. We also have something now for payroll called the payroll integration to payables. And what this does is it auto creates payables transaction during payroll processing. The batch must be posted from within purchasing. We can define vendor accounts and the GL account, and it works best for things like federal, state taxes, and garnishments, and things like that.

So, what happens is there’s something called the payable vendor setup. So, if I come over here and I go into payroll, see if we can find that. Payables integration right here, vendors, okay? Here’s our payroll vendor setup, and we can select the different transaction types. So, what this does is let’s say we’re gonna do federal tax, okay? So, it’s federal and we’re gonna pick our IRS vendor, see if we got one in here. Revenue service, so here’s our internal revenue service vendor. We can select an address that’s associated with this vendor, and we can select the GL account where that really where that is going to be is our accrue account, okay? And then we can add a voucher description which gives a check date, tax code, tax code plus check date.

So, what does this mean? What this means is that when anybody has a federal deduction, it’s automatically going to create a payable to your internal revenue service vendor. So, when you come through to pay either by check or EFT, it’s already there for you, okay? So, you don’t have to then go in and key in all these payables. They will be created for you straight out of payroll. And you can use it for federal, state tax, local tax, certain company deductions, employee deductions, benefits, employee benefits. Taxes are really popular. Sometimes with benefits, there might be an issue with that because the timing of when you get the bill and what’s actually been taken doesn’t match.

But certainly things like taxes, that is a great way to automate that process, okay? So, we have different options here. And this even here tells us if we’d use it for federal tax. We can summarize it. So, if you have 500 employees, you’re not gonna have 500 payable line items for your federal. It will summarize it all into one dollar value, one single payable if that box is selected. So, that’s kind of a nice feature that I don’t think a lot of people know about. So, let’s go again here and now we’re gonna look at some reporting. We can create SmartList now using a new tool called Designer. We can make column adjustments in this SmartList. We can use jet reports for financials. We can rename SmartList fields, and we can use a SmartList for exception reporting.

So, let’s go take a look at this. So, for a long time, there was only something called SmartList Builder that could really amp up your SmartList. There was no other way to create anything that was not already there for you in the SmartList. We now have a tool called Designer. My personal opinion is it’s nowhere close to SmartList Builder. I still think that’s a much better product. There have been some issues with this but, again, for basic building of things you don’t already have or you don’t wanna spend the money on SmartList Builder, you just don’t have a huge need for it, Designer then come in handy. So, it creates SmartList that combines information from multiple sources. We can add calculated fields. It changes the signs based on the types, and we can create custom go-tos.

So, if I come back over here, actually what I’m gonna need to do is go to my other version of GP and go here to SmartList, okay? And so, if I came over here to fixed assets, maybe I want a new SmartList that what’s here just doesn’t cover it. So, I can select new cap here and I can give it a name, and I can come right down to my fixed assets and this opens up the tables. So, again, you also have to have some understanding of the different tables that are associated. Most of them aren’t financial, so here is my asset account master, okay? And here are all the different fields. I can uncheck this and just check what I want, right?

And I can then create this. I could also join it. So if I wanted to join this asset account master, I can also join it to my book master, okay? So, when we join, we need to know what are the two unique fields? So, in this case, it’s gonna be my asset index. So, let’s go to my asset book master, open that up. Here’s my asset index, book index, and that’ll just add a couple of fields, okay? So, if you’re joining these tables this way, we then need to create a relationship. So, we’re gonna say our asset account master, the asset index. Left join means it could be one to many, inner join is equal, cross join, I don’t see that used very often. So, left join where you may have multiple records in one table that associate to a single record in another table.

So, we’re gonna do inner join here because they’re gonna be equal, and our book master is going to be equal. So we’re tying those together through that. We can also apply different filters. So if we wanted to only select a range of assets or maybe a certain book type, we could apply those filters. I’m just gonna go ahead and leave it like this. I’m gonna say, “Execute query,” and we can see we’ve got data. If we have no data, then we’re going to assume that these joins and these tables are not correct. Once I say, “Okay,” we can do a go-to, right? We could add a SmartList, a navigation list, or a web page. I’m just gonna say, “Okay” here. And look at that, we’ve got a new fixed asset SmartList.

So, SmartList Designer is available out of the box. You can’t do things like summary SmartList like you can with Builder. Once in a while, the data doesn’t come out looking great. You have to make changes in Excel but it’s certainly an improvement from just having the straight SmartList. So, that is Designer. All right. We can do a column adjustment in SmartList, which some people don’t realize. So, this is selecting the column, double click the width. It’s like Excel but the header is ignored. So, let’s come back here to GP and go to our SmartList. And I can just open up anything here, go look at accounts, okay? So, I can literally increase that, right?

You’ll notice this button shows the favorites, so I can, using this arrow I can close and operate to give it more space. We have our column adjustments there. We can also rename fields. So, if I come here to columns, maybe I don’t want this to be called period or I don’t want ID. So, we can rename any of the columns and when I say, “Okay,” there again, we have our new name. So, there’s lots of little tricks you can do with the SmartList to make them better for you. Okay, that’s our column adjustment. Jet Reports I don’t have that but really what’s gonna happen with Jet Reports is it’s gonna be a replacement for Management Reporter. It’s an Excel add in. It’s easy to use. It makes custom reporting simplified, and it references parameters for easy expansion of reports.

So, again, Management Reporter is not going away today, it’s gonna be a while but we’re trying to transition people over to Jet Reports particularly in new GP installs. Okay. So, again, it’s an Excel-based tool and it is gonna replace Management Reporter down the road. Okay. And I just showed you again that we can rename our SmartList fields. We can change the default name and then change the name to differentiate between my fields, and change to make the match your usage of the field. Okay, so we showed you that. And then we can use the SmartList as an exception using a custom reminder that’s gonna be in our reminder preferences.

So, let’s go ahead and take a look at that. So, let’s see here. And up here, let’s see where we got… We can add a pay favorite here, okay? And we can add a favorite and reminder. Okay, so let’s say we’ll give it a name and we can say who it’s visible to the whole company. So if you have multiple GP companies, it would only show up in this company if you selected that. User classes, user IDs, we’re just gonna give it to everybody, so we’re gonna say system. And we’re gonna add a favorite reminder, okay. So, what comes up here is when the number of records is greater than, so maybe when you get more than 500 accounts… Wow, our GL, our general ledger is getting pretty big, it’s gonna give you a reminder.

You can also say the total column. So, again, this is available for any SmartList maybe when the number of past due accounts gets a certain level you want to get a reminder, but that is a custom reminder that’s available. Okay. And that is end of our tips and tricks presentation, do we have any questions?