Security, Auditing, Compliance, and More! (Webinar Recording)

Melissa: Good afternoon, everyone, thanks for joining us today. My name is Melissa Greenhill and I’m a marketing specialist here at Encore. So today we’ve got Alicia from Rockton and she will be presenting on “Security, Auditing, Compliance and More!” We’ll be sure to leave some room at the end for questions. So feel free to type your questions into the side panel or in the chat window and Alicia will address those at the end. We will be sending out a recording today to everyone who’s registered for today’s webinar. So, now let’s get started. I’m gonna pass it over to you, Alicia.

Alicia: Thank you so much and I’ll get my screen shared here. All right, are you able to see that okay?

Melissa: Yep, that looks great.

Alicia: Perfect. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for attending today and thank you to Encore for having us today. We love receiving an opportunity to talk to customers and potential customers about our solutions and how we can make GP work simpler and easier for you. So today we’re gonna be talking about GP security, some auditing pieces, compliance, and then some super searching in GP. And I’m not much for slideshows, so I’ve just got a couple here. But for those of you that are on the call that may not know a whole lot about Rockton, I’ll just give you guys a little background on us. We’re primarily a GP offering, however, we have recently expanded into the D365 market or the Business Central side. So we do offer some solutions for that as well. But you’ll notice under the Dynamics GP Add-Ons, the top three that we’re gonna be looking at today are Auditor, SmartFill and Toolbox. So we’ll talk about those in a little more detail, but we also offer solutions for reporting if you need to schedule reports and launch reports in different fashions, we can do that. And then we also have a pricing solution. So we just like to make people aware that we’re not just the GP side anymore, but we do focus on that. And that is my primary role here at Rockton.

So without further ado, we’ll start kind of getting into some of the products. And the first one that I always show, number one, because it only takes about two seconds. And number two, this is really a solution that anyone that touches GP in their day to day can make use of. And this is really a big… Oh, I’m just drawing blanks all over. This is a big enhancement as far as efficiencies go throughout your system. So I’m gonna show you guys how this works because just looking at the slide doesn’t really give you a whole lot of information on the product. So we’re gonna jump in and actually demo some of the pieces here. So we’ll jump into Dynamics GP and I’m gonna go out and find an account here.

All right, so we’re in an account maintenance field. Now, if you think about your day to day operations throughout GP, whether you’re the finance manager, you’re in payables, you’re in receivables, wherever, if you think about your daily operations, think about how many times a day you click on this little magnifying glass. It’s probably a lot. That is not the most efficient way of searching GP, in my opinion, and in about 22,000 of our customers’ opinions. We felt that it would be easier to search rather than waiting for this lookup to display your search results if you could just type whatever you know about what you’re looking for. So wherever there’s a little magnifying glass, you can use SmartFill to search for that item or that customer or that account. So in this case, if I’m looking for an account and I type “cash” and I just type it right across where I would have to normally have a number value and you’re just gonna hit Tab to get through the rest of your segments, SmartFill will go to work and in a fraction of a second, bring you back all of your accounts that have something to do with cash. So you can see that I’m searching on three different criteria here. I could look for it by an account alias. The description, so somewhere in here there’s the word “cash,” or I could search on part of a segment. So we try to make it really flexible for you where you can search whatever you know. And you can customize each of these search criteria and you can have up to 10. So that gives you a lot of flexibility as far as, you know, how are your different users gonna use it throughout the system. And those qualifiers, or those search pieces, they’re gonna change based on the record that you’re looking for.

Now, for example, with “cash” here, if I had maybe 50 cash accounts, here, I’ve only got 12 results so it’s not a huge amount, but if I wanted to subset search my list, I can. So I could say, you know, let’s look for cash payroll and I just got part of the word “pay.” Now it brings back just my payroll account and from there I can select it and it’s gonna populate that window for me. Now if I only had one result and I got it right on the nose, so let’s just say “petty cash,” it’s just gonna populate that window for me. So if I nail it right on what I’m looking for and there isn’t another option, it’s just gonna auto-populate that field for you and this will work throughout the system, so cards, transaction windows, inquiry windows, anywhere that you would wanna use SmartFill, it’s gonna be working out of the box and it’s set up in about 4,000 searches. But if you wanna expand on that and add it to other third-party products, maybe you’re using a collections management or a Mekorma solution or something like that, you can use this, you can add it to those additional windows. Manufacturing is a big place where this gets used a ton. If you don’t know those item descriptions or you don’t know necessarily a part number, this can sort your inventory sets about 100 times faster than just clicking on this little icon.

We have one customer that’s got six million items, something like that. It’s just an insane amount, but now they can come in and they can search whatever they know. So in this case, I know it’s “green.” I can look for “green” as a description, maybe that’s some sort of, you know, other attribute of that item. I can search for quantities available versus quantities on hand. I have vendor item description so it’s really flexible as far as what do you want to search on. So you can see I’ve got lots of different pieces here because I can even link tables. So I always like to start with SmartFill just because that’s, no matter what you do in GP, you could use that solution as a way to make your job a little easier. So that’s what I wanted to start you guys on.

Now we’re gonna get into the compliance and the auditing and the security, all the fun stuff in GP. So next we’re gonna be looking at Auditor. Now audits can be kind of scary for some folks. Typically means you’re in trouble. So what we hope to do with our solution is kind of nip it in the bud before it becomes trouble. So tracking for data changes. If you’re looking for, you know, new vendors that are added to your system or maybe you’re concerned that someone’s changing pay codes or pay rate amounts, things like that, Auditor can really be used for a whole gamut of activities throughout the system. So it’s not just looking for that fraud, it’s also looking to prevent problems to help you with training and even to gauge performance.

So we’re gonna start looking at Auditor.

Alicia: Sorry, my phone decided to just mute itself. All right, I’m back. Okay. So Auditor. Again, I’m gonna run out and I’m gonna open up a master window. So in this case, vendors. Now, the first thing I like to tell people when I kind of start setting the tone for Auditor is that Rockton is kind of a unique auditing solution. There aren’t any other solutions that do it quite the way we do. And that way is that we are a field-specific auditing solution. There are other pieces out there that take snapshots of entire tables and kind of leave you to pick and choose what data did you actually want to report on, you know, what’s really changed in the system. We find that we’re able to keep performance really, really high for you as long as we’re doing it at this field-specific level. So that allows you to basically look at this vendor maintenance window, a transaction window, basically, again, any window in GP and say, ”Okay, I care about these five or six deals on this window. If someone changes a phone number, I don’t necessarily care so much about that, but I wanna know if their address changes, if their EFT account information changes and if a check name changes. Those are really important to me and to my business.” So you get that flexibility of deciding what is actually important to you and what do you want to spend the time sorting through.

So we’re gonna pick a vendor here and we’ll use the little SmartFill. We’re gonna look for a service vendor. So we’ll grab Hill’s Brokerage Service. Now with Auditor being field-specific, I’m not by any means limited to the number of fields I can track. For example, the vendor maintenance table has 105 different fields so you can track till you’re blue in the face if you’d like. I’ve got about 12 running just on this window. So I’m gonna come through and I’m gonna make some changes. So the first thing I’ll change is this vendor check name and that is considered a very sensitive field, depending on what your business is, but for the most part across the board, everybody I’ve ever talked to audits that field. So we don’t want people running in there and making changes, cutting themselves a check and then changing it back. And if you’ve ever checked into the table structures and things like that, if that were to happen and you don’t have an auditing solution in place, you have no way of tracking who made those changes, you’re essentially flying blind at that point.

So let’s go and we’ll make this change. I’m gonna cut myself another paycheck. So, Alicia Weigel is gonna be in trouble. And let’s say I wanna send this to myself because why not make it easier and just mail it to myself? And we’re going to Fargo, North Dakota. Now I’ve made in this case, one, two, three, four changes. Now with every change that you make in the system, you’re always gonna have two options. Number one is that you can choose to audit totally silently in the background. So basically your end user is not aware that there’s a change happening or an audit happening on that window or on that particular field. They just complete their work and the audits just seamlessly get reported on and tracked and that’s that.

The second option is that you can require that end user to tell you why they made a change. So it might not be very important for you to tell me why you made an address change, but you better explain to me why you’ve changed the vendor check name. So I’ll show you both examples when I hit Save here. We’ll have to excuse my cold. All right. So as soon as I hit that Save button, that was what triggers this particular audit. So it’s gonna be requiring me to confirm a change, save, delete, post, void, something like that. And as soon as I do that, Auditor Note Maintenance window popped open. At the same time, down in the lower right-hand side of my screen, I’m getting this Audit Message Center Notification that pops up in my GP.

Now this piece down in the right is actually going out in real time to my audit administrators. So my end user isn’t necessarily seeing that message. I’m just logged in as my “sa” user and I’m also an audit administrator. So I want this notification, the second that vendor check name changes, I need to know about it. So this pops up in my GP if I’m logged in and it does kind of fade away here. So that message is getting saved and cached to a message center that you can open anytime you want inside of GP. So if you miss the pop-up, it always goes to that message center so that you can go in and check that out. You can also have it flagged for an email so that if I’m not in the office today and I still wanna know about that, I can get that email notification and I can follow up on that however I need to. So those notifications are optional. You certainly don’t… I’m not notifying myself every time I change an address because that would drive me crazy, but that sensitive piece, I wanna know when that happens so that can be turned on with each and every field.

Now again, back to my end user position because I changed that sensitive field and I wanted a note to tell me why, this window popped open and now I am essentially locked in this window until I give a reason why I made that particular change to the vendor check name. So as you start using these notes, your users are gonna get familiar with them and they’re gonna see this field was changed. Here’s the old value, here’s the new value. Explain why that happened. Now you can set up some predefined reasons if you want to. So maybe there’s gonna be a common reason in payroll, you know, there’s pay rate changes, maybe it was an approved bonus, something like that, but not every reason code’s gonna fit every situation. So we do allow you to free text type in here as well. So I’m gonna be honest about it and I’m committing fraud. That’ll probably get you fired if that’s your reason. And we’re gonna apply that note to the change. And then as soon as I’ve done that, that’s all the further interaction that I as an end user have with Auditor. I give that note and then my screen clears out. I can move around in other windows again and continue on my day. Everything is tracked, put away and I’m good to go.

Now I’m, as an Auditor administrator, I can go and I can start reporting on those changes. So when I go to my reporting, again, unique to us is that all of the audit reports are gonna be inside of GP standard SmartList. We felt like this was the most universally known reporting system inside of GP for one, it’s way less cumbersome than having an external report server and you don’t have to have any technical knowledge of writing an SSRS report or customizing a report to get what your auditors want. A SmartList is as easy as it gets, so that’s where our reporting is. And we’ll take it a step further. When you install Auditor, we’ll automatically create the Auditor folder for you as well as the subfolders underneath. So you don’t have to set anything up. It’s just there for you ready to go as soon as you install the product.

So we’ve got our folder, now let’s talk about what’s in these subfolders. Audits. Pretty self-explanatory. This is gonna be everything system-wide. So the cool thing about Rockton Auditor is that we live in the Dynamics database, so we’re actually over-watching, we’re watching over all of your companies at the same time. So you don’t have to install Auditor in multiple companies. You don’t have to create the audits in multiple companies, but you do have the flexibility of deciding, you know, maybe you don’t wanna audit your test company or maybe you don’t care about payroll in this other company because you don’t use payroll in that company. So you have the option of turning audits on and off in companies, but it’s basically encompassing everything from the get-go. So audits, it’s everything system-wide, so it doesn’t matter which company you’re in, you can report on all of them from wherever you’re logged in.

E-Sign Approvals. This is a feature that’s included with Auditor at no additional charge and this allows you to put approvals or locks on fields so that they can’t be changed until someone has signed off on that change. So kind of think of it as that workflow approval or something like that but for fields. So for example, that vendor check name field or that pay rate amount field. If I wanted that to have an approval before it can change, I can set that up and then when I go to make that change, they’re gonna get a notification that pops up and says you need to select an approver so you can pick from a list of predefined approvers for that particular change. And then once they’ve received that approval, that change will take place at that point. We did just enhance this particular feature. So we allow for the queued approval. So basically you don’t need to have a sign-off right then and there like you used to. This is gonna send out an email and allow that user to approve that change outside of the system via email if they need to. And then that way, work can kind of continue as normal. And then as the end user, I’ll get a notification whether my change has been approved or denied. And then this folder is gonna keep track of that entire activity, who was requesting, who was approving, why was that approval given, all of that information is kept separate in this folder.

Then we’ll move down to Security Audits. So basically we have one checkbox that you mark and when you install Auditor and mark that checkbox, we’ll automatically track any changes to your GP security. So things like creating a new user, if you gave someone access to a new role, created a task and applied it to a role, anything like that is considered a security change and we’ll track it for you and keep it in that folder. That way, if you are being audited and they need to see, you know, “Give me all your security changes in the last six months,” you could go in, run it for that particular timeframe, and provided you’ve been auditing for those changes, just hand them that report. But we think that we’ve made it easier because we’ve already predefined all those audits. You just have to deploy it. You do still have the option, though, to require those notes if you want to on specific changes. So we’ve tried to make that simple for you.

All right, so now we’re gonna focus on the audits, what we all are here for. Now, to start with, you guys would only have this little asterisk. What I’ve got below here are audit favorites that I’ve started saving as reports. So you’d start with this and you’d kind of create these as you go along and you find what are your auditors looking for, what are your end users needing to know about? So when we click on the little star, we get everything so you can see how we are listing them out broken by company name, by field names, by users that have made changes. So I’ve got a lot of options here for filtering and you’re gonna filter this list out just like any other SmartList. So you’re just gonna use the search criteria and kind of parse that data out.

So if I wanted to see all of the changes that one particular user has made, I could do that by going to the User ID is equal to. If I wanna look at, you know, just a specific company, I can do that or let’s say a date range. If I wanted to look at the entire month of September, let’s go with is between September 1st and September 30th, hit Okay. Got a few different audits in here, and now what I could do is save this as a favorite and we’ll just call this “September 2018 Audits.” If I add that as a favorite, now I’ve got that where I can come in here anytime I want and pull up my September audits. So we try to make it easy again.

Now for just looking at today’s audits, here they are. We’ve got one, two, three, four, five. I did some changes before I logged in today, so I’ve got one extra one, but here’s those four changes that we just made to that vendor. So you can see how again, they’re all broken out, city, state, address, and vendor check name, and I can see them in detail if I zoom in to our Audit Inquiry window. Now, this window is gonna look virtually identical for every single audit that you have in GP. Always, always have a date and a timestamp so you know exactly when that change took place, right down to the second. User is the person that was logged into GP and made the change. Workstation, we do show you that information unless you’re using a terminal or a Citrix environment, then it would indicate that was the location, but we’ll pull in that workstation piece for you. Company and database of the change affected, the type of audit it was. So we do offer multiple types, three different types. This was a table audit. Basically, it just means it happened from within GP itself. Another option is a SQL table audit. So if you have integrations that write direct to table in Integration Manager, Scribe, something like that, SmartConnect, all of those things, they can be tracked that are happening through the back end. Same with scripting. If you have a DBA that can, you know, write, insert, update, delete statements, things like that. Those are all things you can capture with a SQL table added. So we try to give you all sorts of ways of protecting your data.

Event types. We track three types of events. So adding a new record to the system, deleting an existing record, and editing an existing record. So this was just cluing me in that this was an existing record and it was changed after header initially then saved. And then our group ID is just the name of my audit, the product that we’re auditing. So again, if you’re using a dexterity based third-party product, you can totally use Auditor to keep track of that, too. The field that was changed, the table that field lives in, the record key. So in this case, the vendor that was modified, old value, new value, and then any notes that you are requiring. If you didn’t require a note like with those address changes, then this field would just stay blank.

We also give you a little more information in our Drillback. So this record key, ELECTRON0003, might not make sense to the end user as to what is that? Is that a vendor? Is that a customer? Is that gibberish? What is it? So if we drillback, we have our reference fields out here and these are basically just letting us know some additional information that I can set up when I’m creating those audits. Gets used a lot more at the transaction level. But this is just saying that this vendor ID is equal to this vendor’s name. So Hill’s Brokerage Service, I wouldn’t have probably looked under Hill’s Brokerage Service for ELECTRON0003, so that way if I need to go back and look at that record, I know where to go. So those can be customized. But this, in theory, is just a really great snapshot of what things were before and what they are now and who basically put that whole wheel in the motion.

So we try to make it really, really simple data to get out of here. Just like any other SmartList, send it to Word, send it to Excel or print it. You could also create Excel refreshable reports here if you wanted to. And I’ll show you a couple other places that we will do some reporting from, as well. So I’m gonna close this guy out and I’m gonna go back to that vendor maintenance window.

Now when you install Auditor, we’re gonna add some additional items to your menu up top. So under your additional menu, you’re gonna see this View Related Audits added to every window across your system. If we open this up and we’ve got a vendor pulled up, this is gonna show me every single change that’s happened to this vendor’s record that I’ve been auditing for since I started auditing from this window. So I have only ever changed this vendor the one time today, but I’m able to see all of the changes that have happened to him or her. So it kinda helps you look for trends. If you’re seeing the same user, you know, making changes over and over again or if it’s the same change and it just kind of looks a little weird, this is a good place to look at that without even having to pull up that SmartList. You can drillback here, it’ll pull open that same information out of the Audit Inquiry window. You can also print this information. This is really handy at the transaction level. It comes pre-set-up on all of the master records, but if you wanna follow, say, an invoice through its life cycle and you wanna see this person added another line item, then this person changed an extended price, then this person did this to the invoice, that’s kind of a nice way to look at it because it’s gonna follow that invoice number through its history. So that’s kind of another option to use with this View Related Audits.

So that’s another place to do some reporting. And then I’m gonna show you guys a couple of the new features and then we’ll jump over to Toolbox. Under our inquiry, we’ve got Auditor, Journal Voucher Roadmap and our Transaction Lifecycle. So this we put into the product last year, right before GPUG Summit. This just got added. These are windows that users and auditors kind of came to us and said, ”Hey, we’d really like to be able to show our auditors or to see from our clients when there’s some conflicts within the segregation of duties, transaction specific.” So what this one does, this is specific to the General Ledger to post the journal entries. So I can come in and I can search. If I wanted to plug SmartFill in here, I could, but I could search by a certain person to create a journal entry, to approve it or to post it, or I could plug in a journal entry number or a whole range of journal entries.

So let’s just go, 3,452 in this case, hit Redisplay. This was gonna tell me who created, who approved and who posted a General Ledger journal entry. So I’ve got all of this information in one spot that I’m able to look at in summary or in detail view. So this will show me debit and credits, accounts that were hit, things like that. But it’ll let me know whether or not I have people that are doing functions that they shouldn’t be. So here it was created by “sa.” I don’t have approvals turned on, but ultimately it was posted by Sarah. Now If I wanted to look at some other ones or do a big range, I could filter based on this User Compare and see, okay, if there was a journal entry that was originally created and posted by the same person, I wanna see that because that’s what my auditors care about. I could run that journal entry range or do a date range, have that filter out just those pieces and then I can export all of that to Excel. So I can hand them basically either a sampling of journal entries or it can give them that list.

So this piece is newly updated where we’ve added in the User Compare this year. And then the Transaction Lifecycle is very similar, only it’s gonna cover the submodules. So a Journal Voucher Roadmap, that is just for GL. The Transaction Lifecycle is for sales order processing, receivables, purchase order processing and payables. So we can kind of pick and choose, again, where do we wanna look? Let’s just say the sales one and we’ll do standard invoice and I think it was 777. I think I’m missing a “D” in there. “N” … already set up. This window does give me a little bit more detail because we’re looking straight down at the transaction. But I’ve got the document number, what type it was, what batch was it in? It was created by “sa.” It was posted by Ryan and it gives me all of this backstory on the transaction. What status is it in right now? Is it in history? Was it a payment? What was the document amount? What day did it get posted to GL? So I have all of this information in one place and, again, I still have that User Compare option. So if I needed to look at, you know, Created By equal Posted By, if we pull one more in here, I think this one was created by both, so I can see it was created by Ryan and posted by Ryan. So if I do that, it filters out my proper one, and now I’m just looking at that and I can still drillback into the transaction, too, if I needed to.

So that is how the Transaction Lifecycle works. Now a lot of people get a little worried, “Is Auditor super technical or hard to set up?” And the answer is absolutely not. It’s meant to be quick and easy. We do have videos out on our website as well as audits that you can download. We don’t ship the product with any preconfigured audits because we don’t know what modules you’re using or what fields are gonna be relevant to you. So you can certainly grab our test audits. You know, we don’t certify them as SOX compliant or anything like that, but they’re kind of a nice baseline to start with and then you can just kind of modify them from there, or our sales or our support team are always happy to help with that, too. And obviously, Encore would be most happy to assist you.

So that is our Auditor product and you guys have been hanging in tight. So I appreciate that. We’re gonna take a look at one more, again, around kind of that security piece. This is our Dynamics GP Toolbox, and I like to show Auditor and Toolbox together because they pair really nicely. A lot of what you can track from a security standpoint with Auditor, you can modify and change with our Toolbox. So we like to have that, you know, talking back and forth, even though they’re both our products, we can watch over both of our products at the same time. So this is just kind of an overview of the product. It comes with 27 different tools, so Toolbox in and of itself can take me over an hour to talk about and I’m just gonna show you guys a few of the ones that are more specific around that security piece. But when you purchase the product, you are getting all 27 tools and you get to pick and choose which ones do you wanna activate.

So I’m looking right now inside of our Toolbox, all the products with, our tools with the check marks are turned on, and the ones with the little “no smoking” sign, those are turned off. To turn a product off, you click on it, to turn it on, you click on it. So implementation is about as easy as a right click or a left click in this case.

All right, so I’m gonna start with a few of the big tools that we get a lot of calls on. Number one is Security Manager because nobody likes to manage GP security anymore. So we are looking at our Security Manager window and basically what this window does, it’s a grid-formatted window to be able to visually look at what your users can actually access in your system. Some of the lists that GP provides are a little cumbersome, they’re hard to read. You know, if you’re not very technical, they don’t make a whole lot of sense. So this seemed a heck of a lot easier. So we’re gonna pop out our legend. We like pictures, we get to pick a company. So if you have more than one company, again, this guy lives in the Dynamics database, so we’re able to show you all your companies. So we’ll look at Fabrikam. Then we’ll look at a filter and we do ship this with some preconfigured filters and those are what are gonna pull in down this left-hand side. So who has access to what roles in GP, what reports, what windows, what SmartLists, all of those are included. And then you can always create your own filters. So we’re looking role level here and it’s filtered down the left side.

Next I get to pick my users. So that’s what’s filtering in across the top. This is gonna give me a list of everybody that’s set up as a user in GP and I get to pick, do I wanna look at one user’s security? Do I need to compare a couple? Do I need to pull in a whole department? What do I need to see? So you can just start pulling in your users across the top. Then lastly, you get to pick how much detail do you want this window to show? The cool thing with this is that everything you’re doing in this window is dynamic and it can be printed into a report. So if you need to show your auditors every window, every report and every role that a person has access to in GP, I can do that by just pulling in that user and looking at this in the highest detail, so roles, tasks and details, or I can go really high level or a little bit less, more in depth. So we’re looking at it as high as it goes and I can just basically come to the intersection of a role and a user to see whether or not they have security to that particular role in GP.

So it looks like Ryan is the odd man out here. Sarah and Tammy and “sa” can get to this accounting manager role and do those functions. But if these two were on vacation and he had to fill in, I would be able to right click here and flip him from no to yes and then give him access to that role, whether it be temporarily or permanently. That would in turn update all of the bracketed pieces. So these are the windows that he can access through that role and the reports, they’re currently set to no. We can’t change that because it has to be done at the role level, the way that GP is coded, but it gives me that opportunity to see everything that he’s going to get access to. If I look here, he does have access to this quick journal. That just basically means that that’s living in another role somewhere in GP.

So if I need to look and see what else does he maybe have access to, I can look and see that that’s underneath this particular card or task and that that task rolls up into these three roles. So even though he’s not the accounting manager, he must be either a bookkeeper or a certified accountant. And if I wanted to find out exactly what he has access to it from, well, there it is. I can look at which company he’s in and see that he has access to that bookkeeper role, not these two. If I wanted to, I could double click on the stop sign and I could give him access right from here, as well. So it’s kind of a backwards way of seeing the security, but that’s just another way to see how do I give someone security to that particular window.

So again, all of this can be printed into a really awesome report. If it’s easier, you can even export all of this to Excel. So if you wanna make changes out in Excel or you’re setting up a new company’s security and you just wanna change a few things, you could export all this, make your changes and then import the sheet and then that would update your security. And on the flip side, all of that can be tracked with Auditor. So when you’re setting those auto, you know, auto audits or security, all of these types of changes would be captured for you and you could report on them. Even looking up into this little pound sign, that is indicating that there is a conflict within a segregation of duties. So if I needed to see what was going on there, I could view Conflicts and there’s basically some setups that I can do in Auditor to say, “This is a conflicting role. Users shouldn’t have access to both of these.” So I can look in here and see. It looks like she shouldn’t be having access to this PM vendors group. So, couple of other ways how the two interact together.

So that’s our Security Manager. The next one I’ll show you is our Inactivity Timeout. So this one is kind of a system admin’s dream because, number one, it’s still making sure that things are secure at your workstations, that you haven’t left your system open, but it’s also saving your system administrators the headache of having to go in and kick your users out that are hogging licenses or that have been logged in for days on end and they’re not doing anything. This basically allows you to turn it on, enable it, and then say, “Okay, after this many minutes I wanna log users out that are not currently doing anything in the system and haven’t been doing anything in the system for this number of minutes.” Now you can set a default number of minutes, but then you can create individual user groups and change those limits.

So I have a light user group created. I’ve plugged in three or four users into this group. And I’ve only given them 30 minutes of inactivity before I’m gonna gracefully log them out. And basically what that means is we’re looking for a push or a pull of data from your tables to be considered an activity. So having 15 windows open and not doing anything doesn’t count as an activity, wiggling your mouse around does not count as an activity. So you’ll be logged out in those cases. But if you are maybe running a report that takes an hour to generate or you’re posting a batch with 5,000 transactions and it’s gonna take more than 30 minutes, something like that. Maybe you’re midway through entering in a purchase order and you have 50 lines on there and you’re not quite done yet. Those are things that we consider activities and we’re not gonna log you out in the middle of those processes. But if you have all of these other things going on and you’re not doing anything, we’re not even giving a warning. Once that 30 minutes has timed up, we’re gonna close all those windows individually and shut GP down. And it will be a complete logout so that that user license is freed up. You’re removed from the activity table and that license is freed up for someone else to get into the system.

So we hear a lot from customers that this ends up saving them that extra $3,000 for a GP user license because they didn’t have to go buy another license. This actually met the requirement they needed to free up enough licenses so people could get in when they were actually active. Another way to see that is to turn on our schedules, so you could say Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, that’s the busiest time of the office work week. I want my inactivity turned on for that particular time period, but starting at 5:01 on Friday, shut it off and shut it off until Monday morning. So if people are running between a soccer practice and picking up their laundry, they can still stay in the system as long as they want for this particular user group, we won’t log them out in that case.

This is just an extra feature you can mark. I always do. It’s clearing stranded activity records, so if for some reason maybe you get stuck in a web client session or, you know, your whole computer decides it’s gonna just die and you’re stuck in GP, this will go through and it’ll look for those orphaned activity records that might be sitting out there even though they were kind of active and it’s gonna clear them out. So it’s just kind of periodically going through and flushing out any orphaned records. So that is Inactivity Timeout. Very, very, very popular tool.

We’ve got time for a couple more here before we stop and see if there’s any questions and let you guys have the rest of your afternoon back. But, let’s run up now and look at Password Policy Options. Now this one is specific to your GP login password. So when you’re logging in as, you know, enduser@company.com or whatever your user login is, this is how strict do you want that login password to be. It’s not directly linked to active directory, but it allows you to put out those same kind of rules and regulations around those passwords. So you can change the password length. Maybe it needs to be a minimum of eight characters with at least one number, one symbol and it’s gonna be forced case and your password is gonna expire every 30 days. That’s pretty standard. You can set all that up, you can enforce that with requiring that change to happen. You can require the system password or the system administrator password to be just as strong. You know, you could also get really mean in here and make the password change every two days and it’s got to be 24 characters long and have four numbers and two special characters and you have no grace period and you can’t use the same password ever again. You could force all of those rules. Your users would all hate you, but you could do that if you wanted to. So we’ve, let you get pretty strict with your passwords, with password policy options.

System Lockouts, kind of similar to our Inactivity Timeout, but this is allowing you to actually lock down your GP system or your GP companies. So this is great for if you are installing a service pack, running an upgrade, doing your year-end close, maybe you’re adding some tax stuff, tax updates. Any of those types of things, that’s a good time when you’re going to kick those users out and you’re gonna make sure that they stay out and they don’t muck anything up. So you can enable an immediate system lockout where it’s basically going to employ the rules of the Inactivity Timeout. Are they currently in the middle of posting something, running a report or in the middle of a transaction? If not, we’re going to log you out. You can customize a message for this option telling your users why they’re being logged out and how long it’ll be till they’re logged out. Or you can do this immediate lockout. You can select one company or all your companies. You also have the option to do a timeframe. So if this is gonna be a service pack update over the weekend, you might wanna plug in here, you know, it’s gonna start Friday at 5:30 PM and it’ll be done Sunday at 9:00 AM. Once that time’s elapsed, GP will automatically unlock itself and everybody can get back in.

You can also do this one by user group. So maybe you only want, you know, your system administrators to be allowed in here and a couple other people, you could unlock it for those groups, as well. So it’s completely up to you, again, with those user groups, we try to give you a little more flexibility. You do have the option, again, for a recurring lockout, so if you have a lockout on a schedule, maybe you’re closed, closed for real, closed over the weekend, and you don’t want people logging in working on the weekends. Good for you if that’s the company you’re working at. But if you want your system locked down over the weekend, you could set this recurring lockout and then it would automatically lock GP down over the weekend every weekend. So that is the System Lockout. You wanna make sure at least one person is excluded or you will have effectively locked yourself out of your companies, too. That’s a little tip that I learned.

Okay. A couple more and then we’re gonna be wrapping it up. Security What If. This is new, again, last year. Again, pick your company. Which company do you want to see? This is kind of like an edit list. Before you make a security change and it’s official and it’s going in that audit report and everywhere else, you can come in here and you can run an edit. So you can see what security are you going to give or take away from someone if you make a change. So in this case, I’m looking at Tammy and my Fabrikam company and I’m looking at, I’m gonna grant her some new security. This is gonna pull up every role that I have in my company. So customer roles, default roles, everything. And let’s say I want to grab my bookkeeper here, I’m gonna hit Redisplay. This is gonna go through and it’s gonna look at all the security she currently has. And without giving the overlap, it’s gonna show me every new window report, SmartList, any kind of list that she’s gonna get access to with this new role. So these are all new pieces that she’s gonna get, all new windows. She’ll be able to see, here’s some new reports and there’s some additional SmartLists as well as just lists-lists.

Once I’ve printed this out, I can look through it, make sure it’s good, check with everybody, make sure I’m not giving her something she shouldn’t see and then as long as that’s all good to go, I can just hit Grant Access and then this will update her security roles, give her access to this new role, update my Security Manager and if I’m using Auditor, put a record in Auditor letting me know that this role was just added. So it’s all encompassing and making sure that everybody knows what’s going on. On the flip side, if you were revoking, you’d see what you’re taking away and this would turn into a Revoke button.

All right, last tool I’ll show you guys is Task Builder and this is basically a one-off task building dream. So if you have maybe a new third-party product that comes along and you just wanna give a few users access to just a couple of new windows, this is done with a wizard rather than trying to figure it out with GP security, which can be challenging. So you’re just gonna click Next. Give it a name, so we’ll call this Encore, we’ll say it’s a sales task, hit Next. Once I’m in this Task Builder window, I can browse any window across the system so it doesn’t matter what it is. Let’s just say we’re going to the kits. I can hit Add. Now I’ve added this, Item Kit Maintenance. Now maybe I need to also add a payroll tax. This is gonna give me a error. I forgot I don’t have payroll taxes in here yet. Maybe it’s the address. Add a pop-up on that. Okay. I wanna add the address window and I can just keep adding windows until this task is built the way I want it to be. Hit Done. And then I can apply this Encore task to any role in GP that I want. So it’s just kind of a quick, dirty way of doing your task building without having to figure it out through Microsoft GP. So very, very easy. You can add as many windows as you’d like and then give that security to your users that way. Just another kind of quick tip for using the Toolbox.

All right, with that, I think I’m gonna wrap it up here. I’ll just pull up some contact information so you guys kind of know how to reach out. Obviously, reach out to Encore. But if any of these products kind of piqued your interest and it’s something you want to see more of or play with, we do offer free 30-day trials of all of our solutions so you can download them right off our website or reach out to myself or our sales team. It’ll give you access to the full product that you can use in your test or your live companies. So if you wanna see how is performance really gonna be handled with Auditor in your own system, absolutely test it out. Make sure you like it. We don’t want you to buy something you don’t want or need. So I will say that of us.

Melissa: That’s great.

Alicia: If you guys have any other questions, reach out to Encore and they’ll put you in the right direction.

Melissa: Absolutely. Well, thanks very much, Alicia. That was great. I’m just having a look here if there’s any questions or not. I don’t see any coming in right now. I think you’ve covered a lot of ground, so that’s great. Yeah, I don’t have any other questions coming in, but we’ve, I’m glad you got your contact information up there and, of course, people can contact us as well with any questions and I will be emailing everybody else with this recording today.

Alicia: Great.

Melissa: Okay. Great.

Alicia: Well, thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate it. Have a good rest of your day.

Melissa: Yes, thanks very much. Okay, you have a good day.

Alicia: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Melissa: Bye, everybody. Bye.