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There are many articles that can be found detailing year-end processes in GP, but what about your month-end processes?  Dynamics GP uses a ‘soft’ close concept wherein periods are not required to be closed.  Further, periods can be reopened if needed.  However, performing a month-end is critical to ensuring you can move forward within your system without any fear of inaccuracies.

Prior to performing any special or unfamiliar processes, it is always recommended that users have a proper backup of the system.  Your system administrator should ensure backups are regularly scheduled and available if needed. 

It is recommended that the month-end process start with the POP and SOP modules.  One can think of both of these modules as feeder modules to Payables, Receivables, Fixed Assets, Bank Reconciliation and the General Ledger.  In these modules, you should ensure all batches are posted within Series Post.  Ensure all Customer Orders, Vendor Receipts and everything in between are posted.  Further, within Purchasing, one should print the Received Not Invoiced report via Reports > Analysis.  This report should tie to your accrued purchases. 

Once the above are reconciled, one should move onto the Payables and Receivables module.  For each, users should ensure all documents are properly applied, especially if multiple currencies are in use, as this will affect realized gain and loss entries.  Users can check for unapplied documents by navigating to Sales > Reports > Analysis > Unapplied Documents Report.  Further, users should also run the Reconcile to GL option within Financials in order to ensure these subledgers and GL match.  The same routine should be performed for the Inventory module.

Three common ways of making a payment using Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains are cash, credit and cheque payments. I’m not a pro-Dynamics GP user; I’ve always paid vendors using cash and cheque payments. I came across Victoria Yudin’s blog “Using credit cards to pay vendors in Dynamics GP”. I found her blog to be straightforward and informational.

She shows you how to set up a payables vendor for the credit card which is quick and easy to do.  With The three scenarios that were given, scenario 1 was the most common for me. “Scenario 1: You purchased non-inventory items from a vendor want to track and pay them with a credit card. You have not posted the invoice yet.”

She provides lots of pictures and a simple step by step process of how to complete each scenario.

To read “My interview with Victoria Yudin about Dynamics GP” click here.

Natalie Williams, Marketing Coordinator, WebSan Solutions Inc., a Canadian Certified Microsoft Dynamics Partner

I read an interesting article today from Aberdeen research. It went into great detail on what is really driving companies towards SaaS (Software as a Service)/Hosted ERP solutions vs. the traditional On-Premise solutions.

For the record, the number of companies installing On-Premise ERP solutions still far outweighs the number going live with a hosted solution, but that trend is slowly reversing itself.

The number one driver for implementing an ERP in the Small-to-Medium Business market is to reduce costs (no surprise there). Thus the number one impetus which would push a company to invest in ERP is finding an affordable solution at minimal risk. This is where the SaaS model fits in quite well.

SaaS total cost of ownership is less than On-Premise when you consider backups, hardware, IT staff, upgrades and service packs (bug fixes). A lot of companies are looking to outsource providers to host their ERP systems and take care of the "maintenance" of the system that their own staff would traditionally have to handle. The main cost considerations that drive the appeal of SaaS are :

• Lower total cost of ownership
• Reduces the cost and efforts of upgrades
• Lower up front costs
• Company has limited IT staff and no interest in hiring more
• Seeking the best fit solution to their business needs
• No emotional attachment to having it in-house
• Strategy to focus resources elsewhere

Because of these driving factors, the number of companies considering SaaS ERP has jumped 61% from 2009 to 2010 (source : Aberdeen SaaS ERP : Trends and Observations 2010).

The foundations of ERP are found in manufacturing resource planning, traditionally used by companies which produced tangible goods in factories. The adoption of ERP and MRP systems was initially quite slow – management were content with the status quo and saw no reason to change what seemed to be working. However, the recession experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced many companies to make a choice: Either find new ways of operating more efficiently and effectively, or go under. This created a massive boom in the ERP market, which lead to massive changes in the ways in which fundamental business operations were conducted, and those organizations that made it through the recession came out stronger.

North America is no longer the goods-producing collection of nations it once was and is instead dominated by service industries. However, many of the same problems that existed in manufacturing organizations twenty years ago still exist in these businesses: Lack of integration, inability to respond and take advantage of environmental change, time and money wasted on data entry and redundancies, and so on. Much like the recession twenty years ago, the economic downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis has forced many modern companies to find new ways of performing more effectively and efficiently.

This is the time to get ahead of the competition, and Microsoft Dynamics GP is the perfect solution for organizations looking for more than simple accounting and reporting features without high maintenance costs and complexity.

There was a great article published on cpatechnologyadvisor.com late in 2007 that's worth showing here.

Here's the link to the article.

Here's the reprint :