Tens of thousands of Microsoft Dynamics GP users keep the accounting functions of their firms running day in and day out. They ensure that vendors get paid, customer payments are tracked, and the financial statements balance at the end of the month. In short, they provide the information critical to corporate decision making.
Of the many tens of thousands of people using Dynamics GP, the majority of them only ever use a small subset of the available functionality. They may get basic training when Dynamics GP is implemented, or when they join the company, and learn enough to do their job but never look beyond this set of skills for ways to improve processes and become more efficient.
On top of this, many users start working with a particular version of Dynamics GP and continue to use the system in the same way as the years pass and upgrades are installed with many new features available.
The work gets done but good employees are left with a nagging feeling, an itch, that there must be a better way. This book is designed for those people who want to scratch the itch and learn how to get more out of Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Many of the ways to get more from Dynamics GP do not require extensive knowledge of the system, merely a desire to learn and make Dynamics GP easier, faster, and simpler. These features, tips, and techniques have been compiled into a set of recipes designed to let Dynamics GP users cook up solutions to their problems.
Like any good cookbook, the recipes are laid out into simple, sequential, steps optimized for quick application and be easy to follow and get right on the first attempt. This easy gratification is designed to draw users deeper into the recipes with the goal of improving efficiency, allowing the time saved to be put back into other finance activities, or the simple pleasure of wrapping up the day and going home early.
Chapter 1, Personalizing Dynamics GP, includes recipes designed to enhance the usefulness of Microsoft Dynamics GP by personalizing the look and feel of the application.
Chapter 2, New in Dynamics GP 2013, includes recipes demonstrating some of the key new features of Dynamics GP 2013 from the Financial and Supply Chain Management series.
Chapter 3, Organizing Dynamics GP, includes recipes that are designed to help administrators get more out of Dynamics GP for their users by changing the way Dynamics GP is organized.
Chapter 4, Automating Dynamics GP, includes recipes that focus on efficiency and automation, and are designed to be time savers across the system.
Chapter 5, Harnessing the Power of SmartLists, includes recipes to harness the power of Dynamics GP's ad hoc reporting tool and ways to leverage the reporting power of SmartLists.
Chapter 6, Connecting Dynamics GP to Microsoft Office 2013, includes recipes that help to connect Dynamics GP with Microsoft Office 2013 and ways to use Office to improve processes in Dynamics GP.
Chapter 7, Exposing Hidden Features in Dynamics GP, includes recipes on techniques that are often well-known to consultants but missed by users. It contains hidden settings that can help save a lot of time.
Chapter 8, Improving Dynamics GP with Hacks, includes recipes that are used to hack existing features in Dynamics GP so as to improve.
Chapter 9, Preventing Errors in Dynamics GP, includes recipes for administrators and users to help prevent errors in Dynamics GP. It also includes ways to fix erroneous transactions that managed to make it to the general ledger.
Chapter 10, Maintaining Dynamics GP, includes recipes for an administrator or power user to help maintain Dynamics GP.
Chapter 11, Extending Dynamics GP with the Support Debugging Tool, includes recipes that make use of the Support Debugging Tool to improve efficiency and error tracing in Dynamics GP.
Chapter 12, Extending Dynamics GP Professional Services Tools Library, includes recipes which use PSTL to ease company and data setup and to modify data in an existing Dynamics GP implementation.
You will require the following software for this book:
Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 with the Fabrikam, Inc. sample company deployed and a second company without any configuration completed
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (or SQL Server 2008 R2)
Microsoft Office 2013
Windows Server 2012 (or Windows Server 2008 R2) with a domain controller available
This book is for Dynamics GP users and Microsoft Dynamics GP partners and is primarily focused on delivering time-proven application modifications. This book assumes that you have a basic understanding of business management systems and basic knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics GP. All of these recipes are real-world tested and designed to be used immediately.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Save the sheet to the desktop as Segment3Import."
A block of code is set as follows:
Delete from SY01401 where coDefaultType = 13
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Redisplay to run the inquiry."
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