What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 (Webinar)

Transcript:

Okay. We’re gonna be going through this really, really quickly because we’re a bit behind and I hope that if you do have to drop off, we are recording this session. Therefore, it’s all gonna be good.

All right. So let’s get started. Still a bit about Encore. Most of you have been working with us for many years, but here is our mission statement. Again, that’s working with you, not just the software but working with you in your organization.

Upgrading, it’s a great time to upgrade and this session is about the new features and Dynamics GP, not just in Dynamics GP 2016 R2, but talking about the main updates in 2015, 2015 R2, 2016, and 2016 R2.

Now most of you, if not all of you, are on your annual maintenance with Dynamics GP, therefore, you’re entitled to that new release. It’s great to take advantage of that, and taking advantage of all that functionality and features that add value to your organization. We’re gonna try and touch on those main ones today.

Also, do the upgrade when it makes sense for you. We’re not saying that, you know, you wanna do it when you’re gonna be doing your year end. That’s probably not a good time to be doing your upgrade. But start planning now. You know, work with our team and start planning that.

Always mentioning the MS Connect or connect.microsoft.com where you can actually put in your own product suggestions and it is a full cycle feedback. If you put in a recommendation or something you’d like to see and they actually use it, they’ll let you know and they’ll also let you know if they’re not going to be able to use it in the new release. But they’ll make sure that they keep that in mind, and you can vote. When you go there, you can see other people’s suggestions and voting.

A quick look at the support life cycle. Again, if you are on 2013 SP2 that mainstream support ends. Then 2018, if you’re on 2010, that support has ended for mainstream support. Just looking at that mainstream support.

For Dynamics GP 2016 and 2016 R2, what’s happening there? Well, we’ve got some great web client enhancements. Part of BI Reports right on your desktop, and be able to [sounds like 00:02:22] scan multiple pages. For those of you who have used the Document Attach, there was…you can only scan one page at a time and they have to be separate attachments. Now we can scan multiple documents and make it one record, to put into the application.

The Word templates for batch approval workflow. That’s, if I’m going to, for example, do a general journal batch and I wanna have approval. I can have that Word template with the content of that batch come along with that.

So, if the person who’s the approver is on their mobile device, they can actually see that information from their mobile device. If they’re using it from their iPad or their Android phone, and they wanna look at the information, they can see that.

Also if you’re using Project Accounting, you can do the document attachments for your project expenses or your expense entries. Oh, and this one. Export numbers to Excel so it’s actually coming out as numbers now and we’ll go through that and show you that in this presentation today, and a bunch of import exception reports. Again, if you have people who are uploading budgets and the GL account doesn’t exist, we’ll give you an exception report and allow you to go and create that GL account if you need to.

Let’s go ahead and I’m gonna switch over and make sure that you can see this screen, and I see that you are seeing my screen here. This is Dynamics GP. I’ve already logged into the system. One of the first things I wanna look at is talking about some of the improvements. When we talk about the BI improvements specifically around a smart list. So, all of us are familiar with smart lists. I’m sure we’re all using them and if we’re not, we should be using them.

Let’s say, for example, I’ve created this great smart list that I use all the time and I’m actually gonna be using it as one of my favorites. There’s protection now for your favorites so that someone else can’t just come in and then override what you’ve already created.

For example, when I’m looking at this and I’ve got certain columns in here and I’ve gone in and maybe I’ve added some columns from the table and I have it in the order that I wanna look at, or I’m going to go do, I’m searching for a particular type of record. I’ve got that information there. Now, there’s a password that I can have to protect that so that someone doesn’t go and update or change or remove that.

I’m just gonna pop out here just for a second. Let’s say for example I go in to look at vendors and I’m gonna filter and look from my filtered list from my lookup. You can see here that this automatically went and filtered and if I hit the down arrow here, you can see that it’s my favorite. It’s actually a smart list. We look at this and it says “Tracy’s list.” Well if I go back over into Smart List itself, you’ll see that under my vendors. If I go to Purchasing and I go to Vendors, I have made a filtered list here.

In having that filtered list, I can then go and save that as my favorite. It can come in handy when there are specific vendors or customers or inventory items or even GL accounts that I wanna work with. When I’m hitting that lookup, I don’t have to see the entire list of all of my master records. I can look at that filtered list. Makes the ability to get to my data a lot easier.

Exporting the numbers are now numbers. We’ll just go in here and have a quick look at that. We’ll go and look at a financial list that I have here, Account Transactions and we’ll just quickly go look at this. When I go and dump that out to Excel, before they were coming out in the same format as everything else.

If we go ahead and look at that, if I click on here, I can see that that’s a date. I can see that that’s general, this is general. Now when I look at this, it is now a number. So that has been improved in the newer release.

Let me go and walk through Smart List Designer. So, for those of you who are not familiar, there’s a Smart List Designer that comes with Smart List now, and I could go in and go and create from scratch my own smart list. For example, I could click in here and it’ll bring up my smart list designer which I can go and build from scratch. You can see all the different products that you have access to, all of the tables in the fields.

Let’s go and have a look at one that I’ve built. So I’ll just quickly close over here. And this is a really interesting one. Sometimes, security can be challenging, in how we look at that information. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to build a report or review the way that you’d like to see it.

I actually built this in the smart list designer. We’re gonna go over it. There’s the data, you can see I’ve got my user IDs, what role they’re in, which company they are at the security [sounds like 00:07:16], task, the name, and the description.

For example, when I see that security task ID, maybe I wanna see what that actually can do. I’m just gonna quickly take you through how I built that. We’re gonna go click back on there.

There we go. Click on the folder then “Modify” lights up. I can go click into “Modify” and now I am in the Smart List Designer. So let’s go have a look at where I found these tables and these fields from.

If I go into Dynamics GP, I’m gonna click on “Tables” and I’m gonna click on “Company.” Then I’m gonna scroll down here. You can see some of these items that I’ve selected. I think I picked the wrong one. This should just be “System,” pardon me.

I’m going to go into System and I scroll down. You can see there I use some of the fields from Company Master but I’m also gonna scroll down here just to show you down here. Here are the different security task IDs. That is that field name that I pulled in here.

As you are building out your report, you’re inserting them here. We’ll just go ahead and click that one. You can see now that got highlighted and added it into my view. If I don’t want that, I can remove it. As I’m building those selected fields, you can then go do an auto-link if you want which will then go and try and make those links between tables, as I’ve used more than one table. Or I can do it manually, myself, by hitting the down arrow.

You can go ahead and execute your query, and it will show you the data down here. Again, as you’re building that report and you wanna make sure you’re getting the data that you require, you’ve got that little bit of a preview.

Really simple and I encourage you, if you haven’t have the opportunity to play around with Smart List Designer that you go ahead and do that. Actually from here, I can do filtering. For example, I wanna filter in certain things for that list. Or if I wanna create a “Go-to.” How I use go-tos and smart lists. I’m gonna go ahead and close out of here and go back here.

Those are some of the improvements just from a smart list perspective. Now I’m gonna go over and look at, for those of you that are-, you might be aware of it, you might not be. Now in our financial area, we can directly link into our Management report or reports [sounds like 00:09:46].

Unfortunately in my image, I don’t have any reports, but they would be listed here, should I have them. Then by simply double-clicking on that report, it will go ahead and launch MR. Again, you’ve got that ability to not have to go into a second application but actually access it within the application itself.

I’m gonna jump back here to my home page. Another BI improvement is this ability to have Power BI right there on the desktop. You can see here, I’ve got my total revenue and my gross margin right there on my desktop because those are some of the things that I’m really interested in seeing.

If I want to go ahead and drill down on that, I will bring that up and it will actually bring my Power BI dashboard up for me to have a look at. So again, I’ve got lots of great information here.

You have here that ability to have that on the desktop as well as go into Power BI and that’s looking directly at my Dynamics data. For those of you that are interested in that, there’s lots of great functionality with Power BI and the ability to share all that information internally.

Let me just pop over now to some of the system-wide improvements. For those of you who are not familiar or haven’t used it yet is the Web Client. I’m gonna go ahead and jump over to my web client.

You can see that it has the same functionality, a little bit different look and feel to my desktop client. But again, if you’re familiar with navigating the desktop client, you’d pretty much be able to find your way around here as well.

One of the things that I really, really think is cool about this application, the web client, is I have the ability to search. For example, I wanna find out…I can’t remember how to get to the Vendor Maintenance screen.

When I start typing, of course, up pops the windows that I’m looking for. I can go and click on that, and it actually tells me the navigation, “Oh, I would go to Cards and then Purchasing Cards.” That’s how I would get to Vendor Maintenance. I can go ahead and click on that.

Well, we don’t want that happening. Okay. I’m gonna back into here, let’s go… That never happens, does it? Some I’ll go ahead and log back in again. Back into the web client and I’m gonna go log in.

There we go, back onto the web client, back onto my home page. I’m gonna go ahead and try that again. We’ll have that looking up from that search functionality and I want to go to my Vendor Maintenance screen, and that should pop up my Vendor Maintenance card. There we go. That’s what we’re looking for. Again, depending on which vendor I wanna work with, I can go ahead and hit the lookup there and see all of my vendors. Again, it has remembered my filtered favorite list even though I’m on the web client. It’s the same, knowing me as a user and logging on and I’m able to find that really quickly.

A couple of things about new improvements on the web client. Able to use at multiple devices, so including iPad and Android tablets, supported browsers include Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Chrome. Again, being product agnostic or device agnostic as well as browser agnostic, allowing you to be able to view all of that information there. So for those of you who are interested, you can deploy the web client.

I wanna make a quick note about that because I get asked this question often, is the types of users. So users in Dynamics GP are full use, limited use, and employee self-service.

A full use user can go onto the desktop client or onto the web client. The web client is not just for a limited-use user or just for an employee self-service user. The user type can go into either the desktop or the web client. If you have any questions, you can certainly reach out to any one of us on the team, if you have further questions about the user types and which application that can go into.

Now I’m gonna go over and have a look at the document attach. This is not my day, everyone. I’m having all these technical challenges. Let’s go back here. I will log in again. Okay. Go back into our test company. Great. Okay. Let’s see where they have this go up to.

Now, I know what I’ve done wrong. I’m back here. Here we go. “Scan document.” All right. We’re gonna go ahead and look at our last voucher…I’m in the Payables Transaction entry, and you can see as soon as I come to this window, I’ve got this visual cue here.

If I go here to a different record, you can see that I don’t have a visual cue there. It’s just got a paperclip. But now I’ve got this visual cue that I’ve got something here. I can click on here and open up that Document Attachment management window. In here, I’ve got an invoice. I actually did go ahead and attach an invoice here already.

You can see here I’ve got an image of that invoice here. It’s not a very good image but anyways, it is there. I’ve scanned and attached that. Now I’m not hooked up to a printer, but if I had EP invoices or contracts or any type of documentation, I could scan that directly to this record.

Again, I can scan and attach that and I can put parameters around this actual image and it gets backed up, and saved every time I save my SQL database. I can also instruct it whether it can travel with this [inaudible 00:16:02] if it was attached to an inventory item. Do I want that image to go the invoice? Do I want it to go out as a purchase order? And also, am I able to send this attachment in an email?

If I was emailing out something that I’d want that attachment to go with that as well. There’s a lot of functionality even though the document attachment did come out in an earlier release. With each release, there’s more and more functionality and improvements, and you can set a sun-setting period on there as well. For example, if you only wanted to keep that document in the database for a year, it can automatically delete after that time. So lots of great, rich functionality there in the Document Attach.

Now, I’m gonna go ahead and look at Workflow. When I open this up and just kind of walk you through at a high level about Workflow. In Workflow, we have various types of workflow, there’s Financial, Sales, Purchasing, Project Administration.

Again in each one of these, they have the ability to build out different workflows. For example here, I’ve got a GL batch workflow and I’ve put a condition on here.

We’ll open up this condition editor and I’ve said, if in the batch header comment, I have typed “urgent,” it needs to go to the CFO for approval. Again, something really simple that I’m allowed to go and do that, you can see all of the fields within the batch itself, the batch header, and you can also look at the extended field list as well.

Again, I’m putting a kind of a parameter around that. Now, it didn’t do a dollar value, you could. I was just doing more of, if I needed the CFO to approve this batch, I would put “urgent” in there and then off it would go to them.

You can also have a condition as well, and this is a new feature in the Workflow, is the ability to say, “Oh, if this step doesn’t get done, can this workflow continue or does it have to stop?” So you’ve got that ability to do that as well.

I’ve assigned it to my direct manager and it has to be done in eight hours or else it’s gonna go ahead and remind them again, that it hasn’t been done in that amount of time. You can also send messages with it and Word templates, and again, different completion policies.

There’s a lot of richness within this PO-, or sorry, in within this workflow. Why I say PO is that’s where normally people do wanna have that workflow. But again, you can have Purchase Requisition Workflow, Purchase Order Workflow, and then Payables Transactions.

If you go and look at an AP transaction, here is, I’ve got…and again, they’re kind of multiple steps. I made it very simple. I just put one step on there. I said that this, if the PM transaction document amount is greater than \$100,000, that it would have to go for a workflow approval.

There’s Approval but there’s also Task. For example, let’s do a jump over and look at Vendor Approval. I haven’t created one but in Vendor Approval, that task would be very important. For example, I can say I’m gonna add a new vendor but it has to be approved, and maybe one of the tasks is that I make sure I attached a contract to the Vendor Maintenance card.

Again, it’s not just Approvals, it can also be a task where you assign a task for someone to complete. So lots of great improvements in Workflow. Again, those Word templates for batch approval workflow.

The Document Attach for the Workflow email. Again, you can have that attachment in that workflow so that people can see that. For example, the AP invoice. I’ve scanned the AP invoice and I want that ability for it to be attached to that workflow approval. That workflow approval could be sent on in an email to the person’s phone. Again, that person who’s approving doesn’t have to be Dynamics GP user. They could approve it from their mobile device. Lots of great improvements there.

One thing, it’s a small thing I wanted to show and I thought it is a very interesting thing, an improvement that I’ve been working with GP for a very, very long time and I’m like, I’m so glad this is now part of our solution.

But turn on Automatically Post Cash Deposits. For those of you that have used Cash Receipts before, you come into “Company Setup” and go to “Options.” You’ll see down here, we have something called “Automatically Post Cash Receipt Deposits.” Now, that’s quite a long sentence there. But let’s go ahead and go over to “Sales” and go into “Cash Receipts.”

I just realized I didn’t bring myself a glass of water. I’m gonna be talking and losing my voice. I’ve already started a batch and my batch is my GP demo, and I’ve got a few transactions here. Or maybe I haven’t had any transactions yet, maybe I didn’t. Let’s go ahead and enter some transactions and we’ll say, “Great. Got \$50 from this account.” We’ll go and do another one. We’ll say another customer here at Impark and he paid \$25.

Right now, we’ve got \$50 and \$25. We can kind of keep track of how much money we’ve got there. I’m gonna go ahead and do that and I wanna go ahead and wanna post that. I’m gonna go ahead and hit “Post.” That’s another new improvement is…Here we go. I’m not going to print all of those. We’ll just cancel those out for right now. I should turn that off.

Now my batch is going through. So now if I go into “Reconcile,” and those uptown trusts. I’m gonna go ahead and look at the transactions. You can see, that was the one that I…there’s a couple of them in here.

Oh, I guess I did have some other transactions there but now I don’t have to group those deposits before. Do you remember we used to come into here and we would go Bank Deposits and we group them together? Now we don’t have to do that anymore.

If I go into here and again, maybe I wanna look at that particular batch that we just did. I can drill back on that and you can see the information. There’s the \$25 and it had some other amounts in there, \$25 and \$50.

Again, making it easier, I no longer have to go and group all those individual cash receipts into a deposit. It’s grouping it for me automatically and doing that work for me. Although it might be a small thing, for those of you that do have to group deposits together to make a deposit in the bank reconciliation module, a great help there. I better talk faster.

All-in-one Document Viewer, this is awesome. Let’s go and click in here for those of you who have used it. If you haven’t used it, please check it out. I’m gonna go ahead and choose my Advance Office Systems, and you can see there, I wanna look at all vendors now not just my filtered list. I’m gonna go ahead and grab that. I know I’m looking at a particular PO. I’m gonna go ahead and look at PO that I happen to know the number out. I’m gonna go ahead and look at that and I say, Okay.

There we go, okay. You can see-, then I can see the PO for that. I can drill down on that and look at the PO itself. I can go ahead and look at my receipts for that particular PO, and I can also look at the invoice, and this particular one hasn’t been paid at the moment.

But again, you can look at everything that has to do with purchasing. Maybe you’re not using purchase orders but you’d have your invoice and your payments there. If I wanna go look at the next few records again, you can just flick through and scroll through those records.

Very powerful, that all-in-one document viewer. You can also get to it, for example, if I go and look at, go to “Sales” and if I go and look at “Customers.” We’re gonna get the same type of view and again, this can be accessed from many different places.

For example, if I wanted to look at Aaron Fitz [sounds like 00:25:16], I’ve got that ability to go ahead and see the all-in-one viewer right from there. Again, it takes me to the similar screen we looked at purchasing. But again, now I’m looking at Aaron Fitz and I can see all of his quotes, orders, invoices, cash receipts, and credits, and returns. Maybe I’m looking for a very specific one. I can then go and filter that information.

Really easy to navigate around and get to all of that information. I won’t go into the inventory one at this time but there is that for inventory as well. We’ll go into a couple of other things. I wanna look at these reports. Some of you may or may not be using all of your Excel refresh for reports [sounds like 00:25:58] but I wanted to let you know that there are some prebuilt dashboards that come with the Excel refresh for reports.

This one is a Financial Dashboard which gives us a variety of metrics there as well. There’s a financial one, a sales, and a purchasing dashboard. So again, this gives you some great ideas to start building off of information that you would like to have, and be able to share throughout your user community.

Again, these reports can be shared outside. They do not require a Dynamics GP license to access that information. Once you’ve generated it, you could email it or put on someone’s desktop and they’ll be able to access it.

One of the final things I’m gonna show before I go back to the PowerPoint is our copy and paste. Let’s go ahead and look at that for those of you who have not been exposed to it, but you create an Excel spreadsheet. Basically your description, your account numbers, your debits and credits. You can go ahead and I’m gonna copy that. Then I’m gonna come into my general journal entry. I’m gonna click on “Paste” and you can see that I now have that journal entry there ready for me to use.

It’s really, really helpful for getting the data in there when I’ve been using it maybe in Excel spreadsheet or other people are giving us information, and we can do a copy and paste there. So, super powerful.

We’ll jump back over to our PowerPoint and we’ll continue on just to, again, to recap some of the things we talked about, the web clients enhancements and remember that a full use, limited use, or employee self-service user can use all of those improvements as well, for the web client.

Any browser, device, and there’s an enhanced UI for us to use that search, so the ability to hit type in what you’re looking for and it’ll take you to that window or remind you of that navigation.

Power BI Reports, again, that new homepage, either in the web client or on your desktop client, and you can have your Power BI Reports there and linking out to the full screen. Scanning multiple pages. Again, this is what it would look like had I been hooked up to a scanner. On a record, I can go ahead and scan multiple pages and attach that to whatever master record or individual transaction that I want to.

Nice thing about that is if we saved our blogs in [sounds like 00:28:27] your SQL database so they’re backed up. Something, one of the things in the set up, it’ll say great, when you’re doing-, if, let’s say, you were looking out on your desktop for an app or a file, that when it’s copied in the SQL database, it’ll say, “do you wanna delete it from its origin?” Again, no point in keeping two copies of something. If the SQL database is gonna back it up, that’s great.

Okay. Workflow, Word templates for batch approval. Again, being able to then email that out and have that document so people can look at it outside of Dynamics GP. You don’t have to be a GP user, and they can approve that. Attachments, again, being able to have attachments as well. Again, maybe I’ve scanned the AP invoice and then I can have it attached to that workflow for the person who’s approving it.

Condition management, again, being able to say whether you want to continue on in the workflow steps or reject it. Reassignment Notifications. So again, what happens, you know, you go on vacation. You wanna be able to assign, get escalated over to someone or have an alternate approver, you’ve got that ability to do that now.

Again, you can either delegate, escalate or have an alternate approver. Great to see those, a number, exported numbers as numbers instead of general. Ability to do your employee expenses and your project accounting for Dynamics GP.

And that budget import, exception report. Again, it’ll allow you to…if someone that creates a GL account and it doesn’t exist in GP, that you can have that or if there are duplicates it’ll notify you of that.

We also now have a broader scope of the emailing of reports. When we’re generating, for example, purchase orders or sales orders, it now is encompassing some of those other forms that we used, this as well as the Word templates.

That concludes my quick overview and I apologize, apologize for starting so late.

Just a couple of other announcements. If you do have any questions, I’m happy to go over it. The other features I probably could talk for 17 hours about Dynamics.

One of the things, we are a cloud service provider as well. So again, if that interests you, that posing that question, never having to buy another server again, if that sounds very interesting to you, please reach out to us. We’d love to have that conversation with you about that.

Then we also have a new support offering for those of you who’ve checked it out on the website. But if that’s something that interests you as well, I’d love to have that chat with you about that.

I’m really talking fast and trying to wrap this up because I know we started very late. We’ve got great blogs up on our website if you wanna check them out. A whole section on programming for upgrades. We have a whole package of information that can help guide you through that.

If you’re not interested in upgrading today, or maybe you saw a piece of functionality that you’re really interested today, keep in mind with that new perpetual licensing, there’s a whole…lots and lots of capability that your application has, that you might not be taking advantage of.

When you’re getting the package and you’re looking through that capability guide see if there’s other things in Dynamics GP that you’re not leveraging right now that could add value to your business.