Inside Scoop: When Does a Microsoft Dynamics GP Support Incident Become a Consulting Engagement?

You have seen it on the newsgroups and heard it from Microsoft support professionals, but still, it is not too clear when certain support incidents become what folks at Microsoft call a consulting engagement. In this article, I explain some of the guidelines used by my friends in support to establish whether you will be paying or not for that innocent Report Writer question, that SmartList Builder or SQL Server query implementation.

Report Writer: pesky Report Writer! In its core, I find Report Writer to be a relatively easy-to-use tool, unless, of course, you need to move tables around or change things like sorting or restrictions. Microsoft Dynamics GP Support will help you with simple things such as setting up a table link for a report, creating a calculated field or even adding an additional report header or footer.

However, if you need to remove a temporary table from a report to rearrange how data is retrieved and displayed on the report, then get ready to pay some consulting dollars.  Since temporary tables are populated via Dexterity SanScript code, the removal of such tables from the report can significantly increase the complexity of how report tables need to be linked to adjust to your specific requirements.

Also, if you have a question about a report you are working on, and the support engineer establishes it is going to take more than thirty minutes to provide you with an answer (and you thought you would get away by calling every ten minutes, ah!), chances are, you will almost always end up paying for a consulting engagement.

If you find ...