Article

Clean Out Your Dynamics GP Closet—Tips for Building on the Initial Implementation

by Mark Polino
Director of Client Services, Fastpath, Integrated Business Group

It's time to do a little spring cleaning. Sure, you're still digging out from the latest deep freeze, but your year-end process is completed, and you've got a little break before the end of the next quarter. Now is the perfect time to take a look at your Dynamics GP infrastructure and give it a good spring cleaning.

Too many folks make it through an initial implementation and then stop improving. Things work, so they decide to leave well enough alone.  They stop growing. The elusive Phase 2 dies a quiet death of neglect.

Well, spring is coming and it's time to grow again. It's time for the rebirth of that Phase 2. Here are some simple suggestions to  get you started:

  • If you're not using Fixed and Variable allocation accounts, you probably should be. If you ever allocate costs across more than one segment of your business, you can save a lot of time and errors with allocation accounts.
  • Learn the ins and outs of Smartlists. This ad hoc reporting tool is drop-dead simple to learn, so at least get the basics. If you're an advanced user, dig deeper into the Excel export capabilities. There are some huge productivity gains hiding in there and I dare say that less than one per cent of users ever harvest those gains.
  • Use Shortcuts to manage steps. Until you move to full-blown workflow in Microsoft Dynamics GP 10, you can still have your users build shortcuts for each step in a process. Then, bundle them all together in a shortcut folder so it's out of the way until you need it. I recently did this for someone for their month-end AR process. We built a shortcut folder with AR Aging, Finance Charges, Finance ...

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About Mark Polino

Mark Polino is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a former Microsoft MVP (2007-2018) for Business Solutions. He is the author or coauthor of 5 books related to Microsoft Dynamics GP.  Mark also maintains the Dynamics GP focused website DynamicAccounting.net. He speaks and writes regularly about ERP related topics. Mark has been a controller and CFO for a division of a publicly traded company and he has  worked as a consultant implementing ERP solutions. Mark holds additional certifications including Certified Information Technology Professional (CITP), Certified in Financial Forensics (CFF) , Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA). Dynamics Credentialed Professional for Dynamics GP 2015 (Core Install and Core Financials), Xero Certified. He holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from Rollins College. Mark lives with his family in Florida.

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