The Dynamics GP Commandments: Know Thy Self, and Thy Spending Patterns

In my previous life as a Controller, and later as a CFO, I devised a series of internal metrics based on data in Dynamics GP to better understand both the company and the accounting and finance function. We were experiencing a period of tremendous growth in a small organization and it was important to try to understand how many people we needed to meet the business requirements without over-hiring.

We built a series of reports showing the number of AP transactions and checks we processed on a weekly basis, to give us a sense of how many transactions and checks an individual could process. The dollar amount didn't matter, since processing a one-dollar transaction takes about as much work as a $100,000 entry.

We did the same thing with Purchase Orders and P.O. Lines, with the idea that both of those numbers together gave us a good sense of the volume in the purchasing group. We later added Accounts Receivable, Inventory and Purchasing Receiving metrics. All of this we tied together with our observations of how busy people were.

Admittedly our observations could be flawed, but over time you got a sense of who was working hard to get things done by Friday and who wasn't.

The data enabled us, first, to observe the peaks and valleys of work throughout the month. In particular, the AP function showed dramatic swings week to week, because many people mail bills near the first of the month. This allowed us to reconfigure the timing of other work for the AP group to fall in the less busy weeks. We discovered similar patterns in Purchasing and Inventory and we were able to adjust work patterns to better spread the load. All of this allowed us ...