Document Your Microsoft Dynamics GP and SL Custom Reports to Avoid a Painful Upgrade

What issues are your Microsoft Dynamics GP or SL custom reports causing right now? If you are not in the process of an upgrade, then hopefully there are no issues.  But when it comes time to upgrade, can you handle the inevitable headaches?  What will you find when you go back to those report customizations and look under the hood for some answers?

When it comes to maintaining customizations-reports and screens, documentation and source code comments, are a must.  If you wait until the upgrade to document the purpose and ancillary tools you used to build the report, then it's too late. You typically can't recall enough about the purpose of the report or the details of the report to remember what's truly useful for an upgrade. Sure, the report itself is still upgradeable, but it can take a lot more effort to upgrade the report should any part of it not work- after the upgrade is complete.

How can you protect against the headaches caused by upgrading custom reports? Know the risk factors and learn the reasons for some of the best practices employed by any good partner and you'll have a better than average chance of a smooth upgrade that delivers your users the reports they really need.

Write reports the right way

Some people (programmer's mostly) create accounting software reports using complex SQL queries. Still others create easy to understand, short, and useful SQL queries in their reports. Some people (often consultants) write reports straight from tables while other report writers create useful views that make reports run faster and help avoid table joins that can slow down a report.

When writing a report, it is useful to speak to a business ...