Thank you for registering for our Jan. 21 webinar — What’s New In GP for 2021.  You will receive an email confirmation shortly.

We recommend that you add this event to your calendar now:

The webinar will occur Thursday Jan. 21 at 11am.

How To Join The Webinar

When it’s time to join the webinar, click here or go to:
http://bit.ly/3s0zWXP

If you have problems joining the webinar, please call 570-524-4424 for assistance.

Assigning a GP SmartList Favorite Password

One of the new features added in Dynamics GP 2018 is the ability to assign a password to a SmartList Favorite. Maybe you’ve created a new list and you want another Dynamics GP user to be able to view the list but not make changes. If he or she doesn’t know the password, they won’t be able to save changes. Use the Add or Remove Favorites window to make password adjustments.

Need more help with Smartlists in GP?

• SmartList builder
• SmartList designer
• Setting default SmartList
• SmartList Options window

CSSI is here to help! Contact us for GP technical support.

Need to Back Out GP General Journal Entries?

If you have a general journal entry that was posted incorrectly, either with a wrong posting date or wrong GL account numbers or amounts, did you know that you can easily back out a Dynamics GP general journal entry and post a correcting entry without having to re-key the entire transaction manually?

Here’s how to back out GP General Journal Entries

1. Go to Financial > Transactions > General
2. Click on the Correct button
3. Click on the Action down arrow to select whether you want to just back out an entry or back out a journal entry and create a correcting entry
4. Select the Year
5. Enter the number of the general journal entry to be corrected
6. Click on OK
7. The window will fill in with the entry to be backed out (original entry reversed)
8. Leave as is and click on Post
9. If you selected the “back out a GL entry and create a correcting entry” action, then a second journal entry will be created. This contains the date, accounts and amounts from the original journal entry. Make any necessary changes then Post.

Need help with Dynamics GP? CSSI provides technical support and training with our team of experienced GP pros! Contact us today.

Creating GP Fiscal Periods

Because the year end is fast approaching, here’s a reminder on how to create a new fiscal year in GP.  Go to Microsoft Dynamics GP > Tools > Setup > Company > Fiscal Periods.  Type in the new year.  Verify that the First Day, Last Day and Number of Periods are all correct then click on Calculate.  Click on OK when finished.

It’s also recommended that you go into this window to close individual periods once you’ve printed financial statements for that period.  You don’t want users posting back to prior periods! 

Contact CSSI for further GP training or technical support.

Are your vendor, customer or employee ID’s alphanumeric and based on the name?  What happens when a name gets changed?  You’re stuck with an ID that doesn’t match the name.  Well, not if you use the GP Modifier tool!  This tool can be used to change master ID’s (Vendor ID, Customer ID, Employee ID or Item Number).  The Vendor and Customer tools are located under Utilities on the Purchasing and Sales pages.  The Employee and Inventory tools are accessed thruogh the PSTL (Professional Services Toolkit Library).

On the other hand, the GP Combiner tool will let you combine master records.  For instance, maybe you have a vendor that was created twice, under two different ID’s, and you’d like to combine them into one.

To use the Vendor Combiner and Modifier tool:

1. You must be logged into GP as the ‘sa’ user
2. All other users must be logged out of GP
3. Go to Purchasing > Utilities > Vendor Combiner and Modifier
4. Choose which tool you’d like to use (Combiner or Modifer)
5. Enter a Source Vendor ID and a Destination Vendor ID
6. Click on Process
7. A report will print showing where or not the process was successful

It is strongly recommended that you have a current database backup prior to running these tools in case you accidentally enter an incorrect ID or if you have any hardware issues during the process.
If you have a large number of ID’s that need combined or modified, they can be imported into the tool from an Excel spreadsheet that has been saved as a .csv file.

Need GP help or support? Contact CSSI for expert guidance.

If you subscribe to our monthly newsletter, you’ll know that we’ve previously discussed Fixed and Variable Allocation Accounts.  Another category of account you can create is GP Unit Accounts.  This type of account keeps track of non-financial information, such as number of employees per department or square footage per department/division.

To create a Unit Account, go to Financial > Cards > Financial > Unit Account.

Unit Accounts are treated like Balance Sheet accounts.  During the GL year-end close process, the balance will be carried forward to the new year unless you check the box to “Clear Balance During Year-End Close”.  (This checkbox was a new feature added in GP 2013.)

You post to unit accounts with by creating a general journal entry.  Debit the account to increase the balance and credit the account to decrease the balance.  This is the only time you can post an out-of-balance journal entry. Budget information can also be added for Unit Accounts. Unit accounts can be added to your financial statements and used in calculations.
  
Send a message to users in GP
You can send a message to other users within GP.
Go to Administration > Utilities > System > Send Users Message.  Check the box beside User ID to send a message to all users.  Or, check individual users.  Type in a message.

You can send a message as a Notification Message, which means a message box will pop up on that user’s GP screen (as shown below).  Only users currently logged will receive this message.

Or, you can send a message as a Task with Reminder.  However, this message will only be seen if the user is displaying Tasks on their GP Home Page.

You can also filter your user selection by clicking on the down arrow to the left of View All Users.  This way you can narrow the list down to only users currently logged in.  Or just those users logged into a particular company.

Interested in GP help or support? Contact the CSSI GP team today.

It’s hard to keep up with the big world of add-ons available for Dynamics GP. There are so many productive and time-saving tools out there, it can be impossible to stay abreast of the options. That’s why CSSI presented this special webinar, which is now available for your on-demand viewing. In this recording, the GP team is joined by Kim Peterson of Dynamics Connections, presenting “Rapid-fire: 36 ISVs in 45 minutes”. Kim has an extensive knowledge of the GP ecosystem, and gives you a quick summary of a wide swath of useful add-on products.

Here is the slide deck for the presentation:

The GP add-ons included in the 36 ISVs in 45 Minutes session include:

To learn more about any of the GP add-ons covered in this presentation, click here to contact CSSI.

Imagine if you could have a robust set of interactive, easy-to-distribute, colorful reports and dashboards pulling data from your Microsoft Dynamics GP accounting system? Now you can, courtesy of Power BI and the Power BI Report Pack available through CSSI. See the pre-recorded webinar below for a detailed walk-through of this game-changing product.

Microsoft Power BI is Microsoft’s flagship, Data Analytics, and AI Reporting platform. Using this platform, we have created the Power BI REPORT PACK for Dynamics GP. The REPORT PACK is a suite of 100+ PRE-BUILT, turnkey, interactive dashboard reports for surfacing and analyzing all of your GP data. (GL, AR, AP, Sales Analysis, Forecasting, Budgets, Bank Recon, Inventory, Purchasing, Project Accounting, and Trend Analysis)

* Also features Multi-Year analysis, contrast and comparison.

The Report Pack features stunning interactive graphs, actionable Data Insights, AI Analytics, Forecasting (predictive analytics) and drill through detail reports giving you an unprecedented 360-degree view of your data allowing you to make quicker and more informed decisions. You have never seen your data like this before.

Let’s face it – nobody likes doing Expense Reports! But it is a necessary function of today’s increasingly mobile workforce. If you would like to remove the hassle from processing expense reports, check out this on-demand webinar:

In the video, CSSI introduces experts from Gorilla Expense, a GP add-on which is an automated, end-to-end Expense Management solution. In the webinar, we’ll talk about Gorilla Expense and show off features such as:

• Submitting expense reports with electronic receipts from the mobile app
• Creating and submitting an expense report on the web
• Approving the expense report as a manager
• Sending the data to GP with Gorilla Expense’s unique ‘1-click’ integration

Interested in learning more about Gorilla Expense today? Contact CSSI today to learn how we can take the pain out of expense reports.

Like many people, you may be currently home-bound due to the COVID-19 crisis. Perhaps it’s the first time you are working from home with GP, and contending with problems and issues. Thankfully, Microsoft has prepared a Q&A to assist with some of the most common issues.

Problems You May Be Encountering Working From Home With GP

#1 Are you being kicked out of GP in the middle of a session?

Potential causes may be:

• If using RemoteApp or Citrix sessions, does the issue occur if you remove these and login to Dynamics GP directly from the server or workstation, or RDP to the machine, not using RemoteApp or Citrix?
• Damaged or corrupted FORM.DIC / REPORT.DIC dictionary files

#2 Is GP crashing on the terminal server?

Potential causes:

• The use of a P2P/WAN configuration – Microsoft Dynamics GP isn’t designed to work in and is not supported in a WAN environment.
• Installation/Configuration issues

How to deploy Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Business Solutions – Great Plains in a Terminal Server environment 

• Damaged or corrupted FORM.DIC / REPORT.DIC dictionary files

#3 Are you experiencing performance issues with GP on a terminal server environment?

Potential causes:

• Some of the files GP is using, is not located on the Terminal Server. Put the Dynamics.set file and all dictionary files that are listed in the Dynamics.set file onto the server that is running Terminal Server.Troubleshooting Dynamics GP in Terminal Server

#4 Is Dynamics GP crashing?

Potential causes:

• Reboot the server or workstation Microsoft Dynamics GP is installed onto.
• Damaged or corrupted FORM.DIC / REPORT.DIC dictionary files
• Antivirus application doesn’t have exclusion for Dynamics GP directory, shared folders holding GP dictionary files, nor the Dynamics.exe file itself.
• We also recommend exclusions on these file types:
  .cnk – File is used when service packs or product is installed. These files should not be in the directory for a significant time.
  .dic and .chm – Files are the Help files for Microsoft Dynamics GP.
  .set – Is the start file for Dynamics GP and Utilities, the files store information of what and where products are installed.
  .ini – Is the configuration files. These files hold information about which user logged on most recently, what data source is used, and the path.
  .dat – These files are ctree .dat files that are used with an SQL database.
  .idx – These files are ctree index files that are used with an SQL database.
  .vba – Files are used if there are Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) modifications for Microsoft Dynamics GP.
  .log – This file type used if you use a Dexsql.log file to troubleshoot an error message.

• Add Dynamics.exe as an exclusion in DEP.

1. Log into the Windows Server as an administrator 
2. Browse to the Control Panel and click on ‘System and Security’. 
3. Click on ‘System’, then click on ‘Advanced system settings’ on the left-hand side of the window. 
4. In the ‘System Properties’ window that opens, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab, then click on ‘Settings’ in the Performance section. 
5. In the ‘Performance Options’ window, click the ‘Data Execution Prevention’ tab. 
6. Select the ‘Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select’ option, then click the ‘Add…’ button and browse to the Microsoft Dynamics GP directory and select the Dynamics.exe file, click Open. 
7. Click Apply to save your changes and then click OK to close the window. 
8. Have users log out and back into Dynamics GP and verify whether they continue to see the issue with the freezing occur or not after this change is made.

• If Microsoft Dynamics GP is ‘crashing’ randomly not related to user- or machine-specific processes, it could be due to SQL connectivity issues: SQL Connectivity Errors seen in Microsoft Dynamics GP
• Third party products and features installed on Microsoft Dynamics GP, to include RemoteApp and Citrix sessions.

#5 Does GP crash or close when emailing?

 —Microsoft Dynamics GP crashes/closes when emailing after Office update 

Are you experiencing issues not covered here? Contact CSSI’s GP support team for help.