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.

The update to GP2018 was released in October of 2019, and we’ve now had time to digest the changes. One of the major (and perhaps confusing) changes is that GP has adopted Microsoft’s ‘Modern Lifecycle Policy’ and will no longer use version numbers. So the official latest version is known as just ‘Dynamics GP’.

For a detailed look at all that’s new in the most recent iteration of GP, please see our on-demand webinar:

Ready to upgrade? Contact CSSI to learn how we can make your upgrade painless.

Does your annual budgeting process give you headaches? Do you cobble together spreadsheets and constantly chase down errors? Consider Planning Maestro, an excellent budgeting add-on for GP which enables you to easily budget, forecast financial performance, analyze results, and share info throughout your business.

Planning Maestro is an excellent budgeting add-on for GP. It features:

• Planning – improve visibility within your business
• Budgeting – build your budget model in days, easily generate multiple scenarios
• Forecasting – see the impact of multiple scenarios
• Analytics & Reporting – build and delivery timely data with reports and dashboards

CSSI is an experienced GP parter as well as a partner of Planning Maestro. Contact CSSI today arrange your personal demo!

Does your company spend more than 4-hours a month working on bank or credit card reconciliations? If so, check out this pre-recorded webinar for a GP add-on which will be of interest to you. Watch ‘Automation Made Easy’ and see how Easy e-Bank Rec works symbiotically with Dynamics GP and offers automation, matching, recording bank transactions and reconciling to make month-end less stressful for everyone.

As inventory visibility and accuracy have become critical to your competitiveness as a business, the right WMS (warehouse management system) makes all the difference in supporting your team. As experts in both GP and barcoding/supply chain operations, we built WMS by CSSI to integrate with Dynamics GP, and to run on the latest generation of Android Mobile Devices. It’s a powerful, fast, customizable WMS which your business will love.

Watch the video above for the recording of our Sept. 5 webinar on WMS by CSSI. To learn more about our WMS, please complete the form at right.