April 2020 Newsletter - Dynamics GP and COVID-19

Micro Force - Velosio Newsletter

APRIL 2020

Greetings!

Due to the Covid-19 virus, we are all dealing with a “new normal”. Not sure about you, but I never thought we would be restricted to working from our homes in my lifetime. But I know that we're all in this together, and I have a feeling we're going to come out on the other side of the current pandemic stronger as a whole. But in the meantime, there's no escaping the reality that at best, we are all dealing with significant change in how we work. Changes that often require improvements to how we use to perform tasks in our offices, due to our social distancing as well as our desire to keep each other safe.

Since we have the privilege of servicing so many clients like yourself, I thought it may be comforting to hear that every one of our clients that we have spoken with in the past month is experiencing many of the same challenges. This newsletter is devoted to sharing what has been working for our Dynamics GP users who have been displaced from their offices.

What If the Pandemic Took Place 10 Years Ago?

It was only a month ago that the Covid-19 virus displaced and disrupted every business. But thanks to the incredible technological advancements in the past decade, most of us can access the same data from home as we did from our offices. But what if this took place in 2010? Not only were businesses not even considering moving their systems to the “cloud” at that time, but no one was even using Office 365, which was introduced in June 2011. Today, not only do many of us use the cloud to access our Microsoft Dynamics GP system, but we can also integrate our GP system with Office 365 to do the following:

Email our vendor remittances or customer statements
Generate Word merged docs with our GP vendors to request updated W-9 forms or capture EFT info
Permit a staff member who is not even a Great Plains user to view your GP data just by opening an Excel worksheet from their laptop or smartphone.

If your GP system is not already in the cloud, we can assist in transitioning your on-premise software to Microsoft Azure or another hosting provider. Just email sales@micro-force.com to initiate this inquiry.

Implement Safeguards As Well As Streamline Your Purchase & AP Process

If you already process GP transactions in the following manner – congrats! But if you do not, consider implementing the following to not only streamline processes but also support social distancing for your staff! Most of these tasks can be done fairly quickly. To initiate services, please email your request to support@micro-force.com .

Scanning of vendor invoices in GP – could I get a copy of a vendor’s invoice in my GP system before approving payment? Or even before creating a purchase order? There are many options to choose from.
You can replace the manual task of printing and signing checks by making payments electronically through your bank using a built-in feature named EFT.
When electronic payments to certain vendors are not possible – use digital signatures. Why expose management by having them sign checks when it can be done digitally? For GP users who already own the check printing enhancement from Mekorma, no software investment will be necessary to put this in place.
Vendors can email you their invoices via a PDF attachment. There are enhancements that use OCR technology that can be setup to automatically read the PDF invoice and immediately create the AP vouchers in Great Plains. A user just reviews the vouchers that were created in GP and posts them, either individually or in a batch. There is even functionality to automatically post the batch of AP vouchers, if desired.

Management Reporter Resources

Thanks to those of you who were able to attend our Management Reporter Lunch N Learn session earlier this month. We received many complements on the content. David Hobbs did a wonderful job of demonstrating the many basic as well as advanced features that you can begin to use. These include adding comments or graphs to financial reports. Or using the built-in wizard or other row creation features to create reports from scratch.

Since we recorded this session, feel free to view it using this link: MR Lunch'n'Learn

AR Customer Payment & Statements

As we have shared in the past, all Great Plains users have over 40 “modules” available at no additional licensing costs to them. One of these modules is named “Lockbox”, which is an enhancement to integrate bank deposits to your GP system. Here is a link to learn more about it – GP Lockbox .

Emailing AR statements functionality is included in GP systems since 2016. But if the AR statement forms do not meet your needs, or if you would want to fully automate this process, there is an enhancement named Liason Messenger. A GP user can start the process and this solution then automates this entire routine. It can attach a pdf each of the open invoices that were listed on their AR statement, and email each open invoice along with their AR statement as pdfs. This process can be run for one or hundreds of clients at the same time. For further info including pricing or a demo for this solution, please email sales@micro-force.com .

Support For Your Dynamics GP Version

As we started sharing last summer, Microsoft was ending support for GP 2015 and GP 2015 R2 in April 2020. So if you have not already scheduled your upgrade project, please email sales@micro-force.com to schedule a call to begin this discussion.

The following is a re-print of the article from August 2019 about this topic:

As a Great Plains user who is current on your Microsoft annual maintenance plan, you are entitled to the latest version of your business software system for no additional licensing cost. The most recent version of GP is GP 2018 R2, that was released in December 2018. The next version of GP is due to be released in December 2019 and is named GP 2019.

You can see the version of GP that you are using when you either start GP on your PC or when you click on ? (Help) in the top right corner of your screen and choose the last option on the dropdown menu that is named About GP .

Which of these versions are you currently using? Your only cost for an upgrade would be our Micro Force services to assist you in getting the latest version of your Microsoft business software system in place. Feel free to reach out to your primary contact or sales@micro-force.com to begin this process.

For more info about your GP system and business software in general, visit our blog site at https://www.micro-force.com/blog

Thank you once again for choosing Micro Force, we truly value our partnership together and the opportunity to serve your business solution needs!

Sincerely,

Jim McCann

Partner, Senior Sales Analyst and Software Consultant

Micro Force, A Velosio Affilate

Phone: (631) 421-1030 x 302 / (212) 777-7029 x 302

Email: jmccann@micro-force.com