Have you had time to check out the great new budgeting features in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010? 

I have been showing quite a few customers how the new budgeting feature in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 will be a time saver in the accounting department.  Many customers have different departments within their organization that create their respective budgets. Then someone has to combine all of those budgets into one. With the new feature, they can just import multiple budgets to combine them. 

Combine multiple General Ledger budgets into a single master budget 

You can combine multiple General Ledger budgets into a single master budget, one budget at a time. The master budget can be completely new and have its own budget ID, or it can be one of the original budgets. This feature is helpful when multiple departments in your organization create their own budgets, which must then be consolidated. The new “Combine Budgets” window simplifies this process. 

Visit the Sherwood Systems website to download your complimentary copy of How to Budget the Cost of ERP Software Implementation Services.  And if you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, there are more resources on the Sherwood Systems website.  If you’re located in the Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining a ERP or CRM software upgrade can help your organization better serve your customers’ needs. (877) 943-9696

Linda Krawiecki, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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I came across this interesting report from industry analyst, Forrester, which talked about the backlog of upgrades for ERP, CRM and industry-specific software waiting to take place in 2010. Efficiency and cost-cutting are still high priorities as we all watch our pennies and look for ways to make technology work harder for us.

2010 will be the year of the upgrade. A Forrester survey of over 2,000 IT executives and technology decision makers across North America and Europe found that 2009′s economic uncertainty has left a backlog of upgrades that will likely happen this year. According the study,

• “Forty-one percent of enterprises and 21 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade existing finance and accounting software
• 48 percent of enterprises and 19 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade their customer relationship management (CRM) applications
• 52 percent of enterprises and 18 percent of SMBs plan to upgrade industry-specific software

In addition, more than 20 percent of all SMBs have concrete plans to implement CRM or information and knowledge management (I&KM) software in 2010 or later, representing the fastest-growing SMB software markets in 2010.”…..Source: Tekrati Research News…link

Visit the Sherwood Systems website to download your complimentary copy of  How to Budget the Cost of ERP Software Implementation Services. And if you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, there are more resources on the Sherwood Systems website. If you’re located in the Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining a ERP or CRM software upgrade can help your organization better serve your customers’ needs. (877) 943-9696

Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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We often are asked by customers to write reports from the data in Microsoft Dynamics GP.  While there are a number of reporting tools that can be used (Crystal, SQL Reporting Services, and Excel), regardless of the tool, we always develop the report logic in a SQL server stored procedure and simply return a “flat” results set.  The benefit is that we take the complexity of data assembly away from the reporting tool – the reporting tool is simply used to format the results, which look to the reporting tool like a single table, regardless of the complexity of the data assembly.  

This approach provides the “best of both worlds”.  In SQL logic, we can easily assemble data from the “Work-Open-History” movement of records in Microsoft Dynamics GP; we can easily join Receivables back to Sales Order Processing (a challenge because the “Type” value is not the same); and we can quickly develop, debug, and test the queries and logic.  Then the reporting exercise is simply formatting – grouping, sorting, and subtotaling – just organizing the results and making them look “pretty”. 

Another benefit of this approach is that the SQL stored procedures are generally unaffected by Microsoft Dynamics GP upgrades.  Because the queries are written off specific tables and columns – unless the column or table goes away – these stored procedures do not even require recompilation following an upgrade.  They really withstand the test of time. 

And as different reporting tools have come onto the scene, we still use the same stored procedures developed years ago to return results.  We have customers with reports that use the same stored procedure that were originally used with Crystal, but now also are called by Excel and SRS front-ends. Even the logic is simple – using a SQL stored procedure with your favorite reporting tool can make reporting on Microsoft Dynamics GP data a breeze and we can help with our custom development services! 

If your organization is located in the Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

By Sherwood Systems – Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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No getting around it. People are passionately divided on the issue. And if you’re a business owner, large or small, it will probably have some affect on you. I read a good article at Manta today about it and was somewhat relieved it wouldn’t go into effect until 2014. A couple of key things I learned: 

Requirement to provide health care coverage:  While employers won’t technically be required to provide health care coverage, organizations with 50 or more employees that don’t offer health care coverage will be subject to a tax penalty of $2,000 per employee. 

Small business provisions: The PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ) will require the creation of state-operated exchanges that would permit self-employed workers, small businesses and people without health care coverage to shop for coverage. By 2014, states are to set up Small Business Health Options Programs, or “SHOP Exchanges,” which will allow small businesses to create pools to buy health care plans. Small businesses are those with up to 100 employees.

Tax Credit Helps Small Employers Provide Health Insurance Coverage: In general, the credit is available to small employers that pay at least half the cost of single coverage for their employees. The maximum credit is 35% of premiums paid in 2010 by eligible small business employers and 25% of premiums paid by eligible employers that are tax-exempt organizations. In 2014, this maximum credit increases to 50% of premiums paid by eligible small business employers and 35% of premiums paid by eligible employers that are tax-exempt organizations. 

While there is much more to the PPACA than the few provisions I mention above, it’s definitely something to think about in the (quickly passing) years between now and 2014. How will you (and I) react today to ensure we can adapt to the new rules? How will we streamline our business processes, our payroll, and our reporting to ensure we save dollars today – and tomorrow? I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be one of those businesses making decisions in haste and regretting the fact that I’m in a desperate situation. Today’s accounting and financial management software, Microsoft Dynamics GP, can help you prepare your business to take ADVANTAGE of business changes. It’s that tried-and-true business principle of being proactive as opposed to reactive. 

Visit the website to download your complimentary copy of How to Budget the Cost of ERP Software Implementation Services.  And if you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the other resources on the Sherwood Systems website.  If you’re located in the Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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It’s that time of year again, you may be looking at how to best administer your unique and complex PTO (paid time off) Plan without spending weeks sifting through data, and the costs and time involved for the payroll team to manage manual PTO recordkeeping.

There is a way to enable your staff to manage complex and changing payroll situations quickly and accurately. Some of the features included within the PTO Manager module are:

• Easy and quick setup:  sets up accrual schedules  using the Employee Setup window to configure the accrual and maximum settings.  Appropriate accrual schedules are assigned to eligible employees.
• PTO policies setup:  ensures fair and consistent policy enforcement by incorporating your existing policies, including Use it or Lose It policies.
• Automate manual processes:  set up PTO plans for defined groups, replacing time-consuming manual processes and making maintenance and upkeep easy.

If you would like to see more information about PTO Manager for Microsoft Dynamics GP visit our website for the brochure.

If you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the resources on the Sherwood Systems website.  And if you’re located in Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

by Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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A powerful capability of Microsoft Dynamics GP is the ability to integrate data from other sources into GP.   Microsoft offers a couple technology solutions; some ISVs have leveraged those to provide tools with more sophisticated front-ends.   Microsoft tools for importing data into GP include: the Integration Manager, eConnect, and Web Services. 

The Integration Manager (IM) is offered as a separate application from GP and is used to import data into GP. IM is a graphical application and is designed to be easy to use. Programming skills are not required to define data integrations.  IM might be considered a “power user” tool (specifically when designing and mapping integrations), although any user can run integrations that have been defined. 

eConnect is a set of files, tools, and services that allow applications to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP data.  eConnect contains a special set of SQL stored procedures that are installed in each GP company database.  These stored procedures enforce the business rules and logic in GP to ensure that only valid data is imported.  Other data integration options, such as Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP and Integration Manager, use eConnect to provide their core capabilities.  Several standard programming interfaces are included with eConnect: eConnect .NET Assembly (the .NET interface used to interact with eConnect), BizTalk Adapter (the interface that allows eConnect to be accessed by Biz Talk), Message Queueing (MSMQ) (provides a loosely-coupled, message-based interface for eConnect), and SQL Stored Procedures (the stored procs defined by eConnect which can be accessed directly). 

Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP provides a standard Web service interface to access data in GP. Web services use standard Internet transport protocols such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and standard XML-based document formats such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to exchange information. ASP .NET is used as the foundation to implement the Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP. The GP Web services use eConnect to provide access to the GP data. 

ISVs such as Scribe Software and eOne Solutions have developed integration tools (Scribe and SmartConnect) that leverage eConnect and provide “friendlier” interfaces and better error reporting (without coding) versus working directly with eConnect. 

If you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the resources on the Sherwood Systems website. And if you’re located in Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

by Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Microsoft Dynamics GP is built around Microsoft’s SQL Server database platform.  What does that really mean and why is it significant?    

Microsoft Dynamics GP implements multiple levels of security.  First, the application itself requires a SQL Server login.  This is a user account created with the GP application with an encrypted password that can only be decrypted by the GP application.  What this means is that this user id / password combination cannot be used outside the GP application.  In addition, all the GP database objects are accessible and manipulated only by the DYNGRP role.  So unless a DBA has made another SQL user a member of this role or explicitly granted permission to specific objects, the GP data is not accessible to just anyone – even if they have access to the database in a guest or public role.  In using SQL Server, you not only have the security built into the GP application, you also have the security built into the SQL Server database. 

A main reason Microsoft GP (and many other applications) use SQL Server is for the reliability, fault tolerance and high availability of SQL Server.  Besides the need for an application, such as Microsoft Dynamics GP, to be developed with very few crashes coming out of the released product, the database that manages all that data for the application must be highly stable and reliable – which SQL Server is.  SQL Server is a “mature” software product that very rarely crashes.  So users expect the database to be up and running and available for use.  While everyone understands the need for backing up their data, it is possible (and may be required in environments that operate around-the-clock) to back up SQL Server while users are in the application.  Although this is not the most desirable scenario, there are many situations where it’s the only option.  In addition,  the SQL concept of “transaction logging” (a complete topic by itself) ensures that all “units of work” complete successfully together.  For example, when posting a Payables voucher, not only must the open payables be updated, but the outstanding vendor totals along with the General Ledger account distributions must be updated as well.  All these together are considered a single “unit of work”.   If for some reason they all do not update successfully, this “transaction” is “rolled back” to its unposted state as if the posting never started.  In addition, between database backups and transaction log backups, it is possible to restore data to a specific point in time.  For example, if a database is backed up at midnight and the transaction log files backed up every hour, should the system crash at 3:15pm, it would be possible to restore the database backup from midnight and apply each of the hourly logs to bring the database back to the way it appeared at 3pm.  This reliability and high availability is obviously very desirable in a critical “run-your-business” application such as Microsoft Dynamics GP. 

Another advantage of using a SQL Server database for an application such as Microsoft Dynamics GP lies in the fact it’s a scalable backend.  Microsoft SQL Server is still the backend database for GP whether it’s licensed as a single-user application or for a couple of hundred users.   And Microsoft SQL Server databases are used to house many terabytes of data; we now see Microsoft Dynamics GP databases of over 100 gigabytes.  So whether the number of users to start with is small or the number of transactions is small, the application and database are capable of significant growth without requiring a change to the application or a change to the database. 

What all this really means to an organization is the choice of the Microsoft Dynamics GP application and Microsoft SQL Server database can fit a company for a long period of time since the platform is stable, reliable and highly scalable as a business grows in both the number of users processing data and the volume of data being processed.

If you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the resources on the Sherwood Systems website. And if you’re located in Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

by Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Microsoft Dynamics Software plus Services strategy is centered on offering customers a CHOICE.  One of Microsoft’s differentiators in the market is their ability to offer customers the choice of deploying on-premise (software world), hosting from the clouds (services world) or perhaps doing both. 

-          In the software world you have complete control: you get to customize it, you get to pay for it once and use it as long as you like and you have a perpetual license. A lot of these things you can’t do in the services world.

-          In the service world you get to try it before you buy it, all the infrastructure management headaches go up into the cloud and become somebody else’s problem and you often pay as you go.  

If you go down the software-only path or the service-only path, you’re could be trading one set of benefits for the other.  But Microsoft Dynamics Software Plus Services says that you shouldn’t have to trade off one versus the other.  It’s an idea that you should be able to have the best of both worlds: you should be able to have all the benefits of server side and client side software, running on-premise behind the firewall, combined with a lot of the benefits in the services world in terms of broad reach and the ability to consume software functionality without having to worry about a lot of the infrastructure management issues.  So find out today how you can combine online services with on-premise ERP or on-demand ERP to quickly increase your business capabilities.

If you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the resources on the Sherwood Systems website.  And if you’re located in Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696

by Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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As a customer or potential customer of ERP software (that’s why you’re reading this blog, right?) one of the informational resources that you may not know about is the Microsoft Dynamics Community page. If you don’t already know about it, the Microsoft Dynamics Community is an educational resource for prospects, customers and partners.  You can read blogs about sales, marketing and products. You can visit Forums, offer product suggestions and learn what the Microsoft executive team has to say.  Did you know the community site received 1,017,611 views in FY09?

It’s a great place to learn about the worldwide community of Microsoft Dynamics customers and partners as well as the solutions that have been created to serve specific customer needs.  Some might even be similar to yours!  You can also engage in communities specific to your role, such as Customer Service, Finance Professionals and Sales & Marketing Professionals. And if you’re looking for specific Microsoft Dynamics GP or CRM information, you can also check out the resources on the Sherwood Systems website.

Arizona or New Mexico area, contact Sherwood Systems for assistance in determining if a technology solution can help your organization better serve your business needs. (877) 943-9696Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

by Ed Bonaski, Sherwood Systems an Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Here are some down to earth “what you should watch for” implementation comments from one of our consultants with 15 year’s experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects. 

1. Evaluation: Be sure to use due diligence when evaluating the solution you choose. Your evaluation needs to include speaking with your end users of your current financial management software. They can tell you what they like and don’t like, what works and doesn’t work with the system currently in place. Information they provide will ensure that your new system solves issues for them instead of trading one set of problems for another. End user acceptance is vital and increases greatly if the user feels part of the decision making process. Include them in viewing demos as well as upper management and decision makers. This allows their concerns and questions to be dealt with.  
2. Time: Very important to factor in the amount of time you will need to spend getting the system implemented and to devote the proper resources to the project. Allow enough time for setting up the system, as well as enough time scheduled for training of end users. End user acceptance is greatly increased if the users feel fully trained on the new software before they go live.
3. Participation from Top to Bottom: Assign a Project Leader who has the time to participate and the authority to make decisions during the setup and implementation. The Project Leader should participate in every phase of the implementation, including training on each module being implemented. Someone in the company needs to know how all the pieces go together.

Of course there are many things to consider and areas that need time and attention when undertaking an implementation. But, if you have at least these three handled to the best of your ability, life will be a lot easier and your project will run much smoother.

If you are located in Arizona or the surrounding area, contact Sherwood Systems at (877) 943-9696 for assistance in determining how Microsoft Dynamics GP can help your organization. 

By Sherwood Systems – Arizona Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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