Features

Management Reporter provides a tool that natively connects with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP General Ledger and allows business users to create reports without any IT intervention. The tool will replace the two reporting solutions in place: FRx which is used for financial reports and Enterprise Reporting which is also used for financial reports but typically when you need multi-company consolidation. In essence what Management Reporter does is provide a single solution for both Management Reporting and Consolidation. That certainly is a step up from where things are today.

The core components of the solution include the following

1. Management Reporter Designer:A power user tool where you can define the report elements and what the report will look like and how it will work. The report designer provides for Report Definitions, Row and Column definitions, support formulas, and financial dimensions and allows you to format the report elements. For example, the figure below shows a Row definition for an Income Statement Report. Notice that in the drop down you can include the type of Row e.g. TOT is a Total of other Rows, CAL is a complex calculation, DES is a Description such as the Row Code 130 called Revenue here etc. Column J here lists the link to financial dimensions which can include the GL Account or other dimensions such as Department, Cost Center, Division, Line of Business etc. There is native support for wild cards. For example my Sales Row in this example is the sum of All my GL accounts that start with 41 minus 4109. So the formula is written as +Natural=[41??]-Natural=[4109]. The ?? are the wild cards so any GL account that starts with 41 will be included in this calculation. The Natural reflects that I am referring to the Natural GL Account. If I was referring to another Dimension say DEPARTMENT then I would use that instead.

   Figure 1. Microsoft Dynamics Management Reporter Row Definitions for an Income Statement Report

   These Row definitions can be used across Multiple Report Definitions so once I define an Income Statement Row Definition I can use it in several reports such as Divisional Income Statements, Income Statement Month by Month, Income Statement Rolling Quarter etc. I do not need to create the same Row definition again. All I would do is change the column definition I use for these reports (provided I am showing the same row lines as on this report).

   This combination of which Report uses which Row and Column Definition is defined in a Report Definition. For example, the screen below shows multiple Report definitions in the left navigation bar for Balance Sheet Reports, Cash Flow Reports, Consolidation Reports, Trial Balance Reports, and Income Statement Reports.

   

   Figure 2 Report Definition Folders for different types of reports

   Expanding the Income Statement Reports shows several Income Statements (IS) such as a Consolidated Side by Side comparing two divisions, Income Statement, Income Statement 12 month Period Trend, etc. The report definition open is an Income Statement Rolling Quarter by Department that combines the Row Definition that we had above – Income Statement Detail with the Column Definition that supports  the rolling quarter format. This Row Definition is also used in the IS 12 month Period trend report and in the Income Statement Side by Side that compares two departments.

   

   Figure 3. Dynamics Report Definition of an Income Statement Rolling Quarter by Department

2. Report Library:Quite simply, this is a library of all the reports that users can view. However it is a lot more than that. Reports can be setup with a Reporting Tree that I touched upon in the Management Report Designer section. As an example, the report below is an Income Statement that I can see at a company level, or a Region level or a Division within that region level. For example the report shows Fabrikam Works at the company level, San Francisco Region and Denver Region below that and then the respective Sales and Service Divisions below it .e.g. San Francisco Sales Division and San Francisco Service Division. I also have a node in this tree that takes it one level further which is the Retail and Wholesale within Sales and similarly Lab and Studio within Service. The first question that comes to mind is whether the hierarchy has to be straight jacketed with one definition. Fortunately, it doesn’t you can pull reports via multiple hierarchies and reporting trees. The level of flexibility is quite good and the product team has definitely done good work in putting this together.

   Figure 4. Reporting Tree in Management Reporter showing 4 levels of Company, Region, Division and Sub-division

   I’ve also included some sample additional reports here just to show what all else is possible. Below is an example of a Income statement using the row definition you saw in the Report designer section of this blow with a column definition that supports a monthly trend.

   

   Figure 5. Income Statement from Microsoft Dynamics ERP showing a Monthly Trend using the Row definition from Figure 1

   This row definition is again used in the report below but this time shows a 12 month Income statement with Actual Vs Budget and highlighting whether it is a favorable change Vs Unfavorable change. I thought that last piece was really cool because most reporting tools can show a net change and the percentage change but Management reporter goes one step further to actually color code it as favorable or unfavorable. For example, Sales were higher than budget so the change is shown as favorable but Sales returns are also higher than budget but this is shown as unfavorable. So the tool is more than a report writer – it also has a certain amount of Business Intelligence (BI) capability built in it. This is quite simply done by marking whether the typical entry is a Credit and Debit. It’s quite simple but I’ve seen other ERP and reporting systems stumble on this so it is refreshing to see Microsoft get this right.

   

   Figure 6. Example of an Actual Vs Budget Income Statement in the Management Reporter using the Row definition from Figure 1

   Another report output example is a Detailed Trial Balance report showing both the YTD and the numbers for the relevant period.

   

   Figure 7. Example of a Trial Balance Report in the Management Reporter for Microsoft Dynamics

   Finally – this report takes the cake. Management Reporter bring true consolidation capability. This report shows USA and Canada and then the Consolidated numbers. From what I understand the one limitation right now is that the multi-currency conversion is not yet there but will be there in the next version.

   

   Figure 8. Native Consolidation Capability in Management Reporter for Microsoft Dynamics

3. Security Framework:Authentication is supported by Windows Authentication so there is native integration with Active Directory. Authorization is supported within the tool. Security can be defined at a report level, folder level or the tree/node level. Security is defined in the Management Report Designer and you can differentiate which users need Report Library access (view access) as opposed to those that need Report Designer access (design access). The screen shot below shows how permissions can be assigned at a folder or node level or you can expand that to assign permissions at the individual report level. Permissions can be inherited from top level folders.

   Figure 9. Reporting Permissions can be set up at a folder, node or Report level in Management Reporter

Why choose Management Reporter?

So a natural question is why choose Management Reporter. Other than Microsoft stating that it is the reporting roadmap for Microsoft Dynamics and is putting its dollars for reporting in the Management Reporter – there are several other reasons too. I’ve listed my top 10 with the most valuable at the end.

1. Easy to use: Management Reports works and looks a lot like FRx – so for those that are used to FRx will not have a tough time using the tool. Finally like the rest of Microsoft Dynamics, it uses the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook with a left navigation bar (the “magic bar”) and a point and click that is easy to understand work with.
2. Multi-lingual support: Management Reporter supports multiple languages. Not a biggie for us folks in the USA but I can see it being big in French speaking Canada our neighbors further south and certainly in most of Europe.
3. Architecture: The product was not a band-aid from a legacy product but was completely rewritten using .NET and C#. This provides a very high degree of flexibility and the tool can scale for your data as your organization grows.
4. 64-bit compatibility: Anyone that has tried to install FRx on an 64-bit OS will know why this is important. Today’s server OS have moved to 64-bit but today’s reporting tools have not. Management reporter glides on 64-bit and is built for it. It dances and sings on a 64-bit OS. I saw at least about a 30% improvement in performance of reports if not more over FRx – that’s significant!
5. Report Customizability: I really liked the amount of flexibility that the Management Reporter offers. It allows you to gain total control and generate reports in minutes as well as personalize reports for things like company logo, set column and page breaks and apply format over-rides. Page breaks – yes! So basic yet missing in so many reporting tools but it’s here and again well implemented
6. Out of the box integration with Microsoft Dynamics: Pre-defined financial logic to tie to the GL filters for Microsoft Dynamics ERP. However, it seems like Management Reporter is being built broader than just for Microsoft Dynamics so that other ERP vendors can build out their own adapters to allow for Management Reporter to become pervasive just like FRx did.
7. Integration with Dimensions: Yes! Dimension filters – can use a range or set of dimensions to support things like divisional reporting.
8. Native XBRL Support: Why is this a big deal you ask? See this link on the SEC website to understand the adoption of XBRL in the financial community for filings and to see a preview of XBRL in action. Management Reporter provides native XBRL support with tagging for XBRL prior to report generation – note the word prior here. You do NOT need to generate the report before you can do the XBRL tagging. Seems such a simple requirement yet 95% of the reporting tools that do support XBRL (most don’t even support that) ask for the XBRL tagging after the report is generated – which means you have to tag the report every time you generate it. Management Reporter lets you do the tagging before and get done with it. If you are a public company paying or planning to pay a lot of money to an outside service like Bowne this will hit home. Also the recent initiatives suggest while XBRL is voluntary – in a few years this may become mandatory for public companies. So you want a solution that can support this natively.
9. Active Directory Integration: I always found the additional login for FRx inconvenient. Management Reporter integrates natively with Active directory allowing you to open the reports without an additional login.
10. Native Multi-company and Multi-source Consolidation: Yes – this is the big one. Having native multi-company consolidation is very nice. Also Management Reporter provides multisource consolidation with flexible top down analysis so if you are one of those organizations that use multiple ERP systems for some reasons this will be a great tool for you to get rid of the excel consolidation.

Finally, I believe Management Reporter can save you some license dollars. If you are running reports in the ERP you can have your financial users use the Management Reporter tool and only require the light license as opposed to the full ERP license. That’s always a nice thing!

Sandeep Walia is the President & CEO of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 18 Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Sandeep was ranked in 2010 in the Microsoft Dynamics Top 100 Most Influential People List by DynamicsWorld.

by Ignify, A Northern California Microsoft Dynamics Partner

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Why can’t it be easier?  Why… why… why?

OK, so maybe the dream of completely eliminating the need and costs of managing your own inventory isn’t completely realistic.  However, what if you are able to reduce the dependence on this need?  Here’s how Dynamics GP 2010 can help.

LET DYNAMICS GP HELP AUTOMATE YOUR DROP SHIP BUSINESS

Drop shipping allows you to fulfill your customer orders by having your suppliers send the goods directly to your customer rather than sending them to you and then you fulfilling and shipping to your customer.  This skips a step in the procurement / fulfillment process (you, the middle man) and is a pretty efficient way to fulfill customer demand while reducing the overhead mentioned above.

Recently Ignify worked closely with a high volume e-tailer to help automate their drop ship business processes while at the same time improving sales and margin reporting.  We enhanced the integration between their proprietary eCommerce engine and Dynamics GP and improved their drop ship processes.  Here’s what we did:

1. Customer places an order on one of the client’s web sites.  A drop ship sales order is then integrated into GP via web services and eConnect (integration tools).
2. Customer’s procurement engine places drop ship orders to suppliers.
3. When the supplier provides the tracking numbers for the drop shipment to the customer we create an integration to integrate these drop ship purchase orders into GP.
4. We create a link between the drop ship PO and the drop ship sales order.   
5. We integrate a drop ship PO Invoice with the true vendor cost against the drop ship PO.
6. We set up a nightly process to automatically post the drop ship PO’s. 
7. The sales orders are then automatically updated with the true vendor cost and they automatically are fulfilled, billed and the invoices posted.

There are more steps but I’ll stop here to make a couple of points.  One of the keys here is that we were able to automate this process so that very little manual effort was required.  Another key is that the sales order was updated with the true vendor cost, therefore enhancing our ability for effective sales margin reporting.  Add in a dose of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to provide METRICS reporting (sales, margin, net profit, etc.) and we have ourselves an effective drop ship engine.

By Tod Heath, Dynamics ERP Team Lead, Ignify –  California Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partner

Contact Ignify at gpblog@ignify.com – an Inner Circle 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Partner – offering Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Microsoft CRM customers low-cost high value services.  Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, and Seattle.

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The What of Landed Cost

Landed cost is not that big an issue while dealing with vendors who charge a consolidated value to leave the goods at your door. Life would be too easy if it were that simple, wouldn’t it? We ask vendors to charge our account with a carrier when shipping because we have negotiated better rates with the freight carrier. Vendors do not have control over import duties such as customs and excise.  So we need to find handling agencies that take care of paper work and get the goods out of the yard. Or we pay the government and handle it ourselves.

The Why of Landed Cost

Guess what, all these are additional costs paid on top of the bill paid to vendor for the item. We need to add all these up to get the true cost of inventory, so we can get to know the real margin. Some businesses simply expense out the cost because they don’t have the facility in their system and it is too much overhead for them to track it manually. Well, Dynamics GP customers can use the  Landed Cost module to track landed cost with ease.

Dynamics GP provides true ability to handle third party landed costs

So if your Vendor charged your UPS account for the freight, log an approximate value of freight in landed cost onthe purchase receipt. When you receive the freight bill from UPS

• Match the UPS invoice to the landed cost recorded on shipment from Vendor. The variance between the approximate value and this actual value can be applied to inventory or recorded in a Purchase Price Variance account.
•  GP provides ability to record the third party vendor landed cost invoice, match it to actual landed cost and update variance to inventory or to a variance account.

Oh, what did you say, the UPS invoice has several lines each pointing to shipments for multiple items or multiple shipments for the same item. Don’t worry, Dynamics GP provides ability to record a third party vendor invoice and match each line to different shipments.

Other real time applications of landed cost are adding the freight cost when moving items between warehouses.

Have you ever had to move goods from one warehouse to another? What happened to the cost incurred in moving stuff from one warehouse to another? Use the landed cost feature the ‘In Transit Transfer’ window. This is a very useful feature, especially when you want to obtain the true cost for an item in the warehouse.

Nice to haves:

It would be nice to get a feature similar to landed cost in SOP module, so we can record an approximate freight charge. When we get a real invoice from a carrier, we can either charge the excess or return the balance by way of a credit memo or debit memo.

This post is written by Raja S L N. Raja is a Manager in the Microsoft Dynamics GP Practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics ERP for RetailDistribution, Manufacturing and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com

by Ignify, a Northern California Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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First of all, the manufacturing paradigm in North America has changed.  With a few exceptions, Manufacturers are no longer doing heavy manufacturing.  Most of the manufacturing work is now done with subcontract vendors in China, SE Asia etc.  So the manufacturing challenge is less about managing the shop floor but more about managing the supply chain and optimizing inventory either in the warehouse, with the vendor, on the water. This is, in fact, really important because the new paradigm means that lead times have shifted and become longer with a 60- 90 day lead time to get product being not uncommon.  That requires better forecasting, demand planning, purchase planning and better tracking of critical inventory items.

Not surprisingly, manufacturers have not yet made that paradigm shift completely.  When I do a site visit at a manufacturing site I find the focus still very much  on production planning and shop floor control even though now the manufacturer is just doing warehousing and light manufacturing at best.  There is very little focus on the planning, forecasting, warehouse management and supply chain management aspects which burden the cost significantly.  As an example of a cost burden, I surveyed a manufacturer that builds heavy engineering products often finding themselves with gating parts – i.e. parts that are not available and hold up the completion of the item.  The net effect was about 6 weeks added to the production cycle. Doesn’t seem expensive? Check out the math below.

Average sales price of item: $2 million (this is a complex end product)

Cost of capital to manufacturer: 10%

Cost of 6 weeks of capital: $23,000 (2 million * 6 weeks/ 52 weeks * 10%)

Cost of delay on 100 shipments: $2,300,000

$2.3 million dollars in cost of gating parts!  Now this is a $200 million manufacturer that has a net profit of $2.5 million (which by the way is a pretty good number for most manufacturers).  The net impact of eliminating the gating with better inventory optimization would be to double the manufacturer’s net profit.  Before you say – this is not me because you don’t do $2 million type products – change the numbers a bit.  It could be 10,000 shipments of $20,000 type product going out or 100,000 shipments of $2,000 type product etc and you’d still have the same cost of capital of $2+ million dollars.  Even if you can only shave off a couple of weeks and not 6 weeks and if your volume is lower remember that you are still talking at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in savings by optimizing your inventory and supply chain with better planning.  No small change by any standards.

The reality for manufacturers is that the management now has to be on the supply chain and inventory optimization and not just production planning and shop floor control.  So how can you do this?  Fortunately most of the newer generation ERPs provide functionality to do this out of the box . I’m going to take the example of Microsoft Dynamics ERP – a next generation ERP from Microsoft – as a solution to this and show some quick and easy things to enable functionality that can help you get there.

One of the more important things to do in getting to a stable replenishment mode is to use automated replenishment to the extent possible: Dynamics ERP has the ability to automatically spit out planned purchase orders by looking at a variety of things

• Safety Stock levels
• Forecast
• Sales Orders
• Purchase Order
• Inventory that is Available to Promise
• Vendor Lead times

For a human being, to take into account all of these parameters and provide a planned purchase forecast manually is just impossible – even if you just have under 200 Finished good SKUs.  If anyone tells you otherwise they are kidding you or pulling wool over your eyes.  No individual buyer or group of buyers is going to be able to do a multi-parametric calculation that involves six parameters and create a planned timeline for all your SKUs for each vendor without doing some rough (and dirty) ballparks.  You need a fairly sophisticated automated process to do this right.  And why shouldn’t you – you will cut labor costs, you will reduce your inventory stocks outs as well as lower your cost of carrying inventory.  And you should leverage the ERP to do that.

How do you do a forecast ?  For that you can use a demand forecasting system if you have a complex web of customers with changing patterns or you can get quite basic and track it in excel as a starting point and improve from there on.  Dynamics ERP provides you the ability to load forecasts by customers, customer group or at a total level.

The above figure shows the forecast in Dynamics ERP by different customer groups.  For example, the first line shows the forecast of 5000 units for all major customers and 6,000 units for a particular item for Retail customers.  Dynamics ERP splits them out based on an Item allocation key based on month (or any other time period relevant to you).  By defining such item allocation keys you can take into account seasonality or business cycles.

Loading a forecast is however, optional.  You can run planning just based on current open transactions including sales orders, purchase orders and inventory.  The figure below shows planned purchase orders and planned production orders created using the MRP functionality for multiple release dates for multiple items with the quantity to be ordered and the desired delivery date. The delivery date ties to your need of the product and the order date factors in the vendor lead time.

The end result is a stable automated planned cycle that happens every day, week or month depending on the frequency of inventory churn and volume of orders in your business.

Now should you do this for every single SKU in your item master or just for some SKUs? ; my answer is your top % of SKUs by some measure. This measure could be sales quantity, Sales $, and most typically for manufacturers inventory carrying cost (which is determined by inventory value.)  Typically you would classify your items as ABCs and plan for the As and Bs and just ensure the Cs are always there and typically overstocked since they have a low inventory carrying cost.  The ideal way to do it is again to have the ERP actually calculate the ABC classification for you. For example, in the example shown below I asked Dynamics ERP to rank the top 25% of items by revenue as an A, Next 30% as a B and the rest as Cs. I may choose to  now do weekly planning on my As, monthly on my Bs and do no planning and use an auto-fill mechanism on my Cs.

This is simplifying it a bit but the point is that I don’t need to go through a lot of grunt work to get this done. The system will do 90% of my work of loading forecasts, generating purchased orders and even deciding which items get planned for with the appropriate configuration. The end-result: you’ve saved yourself a boat load of work and enough dollars to make this a high and fast ROI project.

Want more – email us at dynamics@ignify.com to get on our email list for valuable tips or to ask us any questions in general.

Sandeep Walia is the President & CEO of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions for manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Ignify is a Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 18 Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

by Ignify, a Northern California Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Though GP offers a wide array of integrating modules and third party solutions, there are times when you will definitely gain advantages by creating a custom integration with one of your important systems that may not currently talk to GP. 

An example is a client of mine that wanted to integrate GP to a warehouse management system (WMS).  The client wanted to turn off the Multi-Bin functionality in GP and let the WMS system do the heavy lifting of managing warehouse movements, tracking and managing of inventory, staging, and fulfillment.

Therefore a decision was made to leverage Microsoft’s Developer Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics GP to create this integration.  Now don’t get me wrong, performing an integration of this magnitude was not easy, but once we finished it, it was well worth it. 

We utilized these tools to accomplish this integration:

• eConnect – Lets you automate the integration of fields and data and adds data validation specific to GP.
• XML files – This is a universal convention for passing data between two different systems.
• Web Services – A web interface for third party integration applications.  It provides different methods for transmitting different XML payloads between the two systems.
• Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) – Provides guaranteed message delivery, efficient routing, security, and priority-based messaging.
• SQL Stored Procedures – There were a small number of data integration points that were not supported by eConnect so we created stored procedures to update the data.

Steps taken to successfully achieve this integration were as follows:

1. Reviewed the requirements and agreed upon a design.
2. Mapped required data between the two systems via Excel mapping tables.
3. Agreed upon the XML file formats.
4. Created the Web Services.
5. Set up MSMQ to facilitate the transfer of data.
6. Configured the different eConnect integrations.
7. Worked closely with a couple of developers on the WMS side so that they could accept GP data and GP could accept their data in acceptable XML payload format.

  Information passed from GP to the WMS:

• Sales orders
• RMA’s – These were sent over to the WMS as a special type of Purchase Order to facilitate receiving of returned parts into the WMS.
• Purchase Orders
• Inventory Transfers – Created a PO in the WMS if parts were being transferred into the WMS location and created sales orders if parts were being shipped out to a different location.
• Items – GP was the owner of the item database and passed new items and updates to the WMS.
• Vendors

Information passed back from the WMS to GP:

• Sales Order Fulfillment – Once an order was shipped then the WMS would send back to GP the fulfillment notification and it would automatically update the Quantity Fulfilled on the sales order line item as well as updating the tracking number.  Once a line on a sales order was fulfilled it would then automatically invoice, speeding up revenue recognition.
• Inventory movements – Though there are several different WMS movement types, we only integrated movements in/out of quarantine locations (unsellable locations).
• Inventory Adjustments – WMS Cycle counts and standard adjustments updated GP.
• Purchase Order Receipts – Parts received in the warehouse would automatically create PO Receipts in GP.
• RMA Receipts – When returned parts were received in the WMS it would create RMA Receipts in GP.

Benefits of the integration:

• Two separate systems now talk to each other efficiently.
• The WMS is a real time extension of GP to help manage fulfillment, inventory management and purchasing.
• Items, vendors and item quantities are synced up between the two systems.
• Revenue recognition is enhanced.
• Produced a happy client (most important of all).

Sometimes the thought of integrating GP to another system of yours might seem out of reach, but really it’s not.  It just requires planning, coordination, and possibly some assistance.  Contact Ignify – an Inner Circle 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Partner – as we have real life experience assisting customers with simple and complex integrations.

By Tod Heath of Ignify – Northern California Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Support Extended by 12 Months for Currently Supported Service Packs

This update applies to all the service packs that are currently supported (as of June 8, 2009), for the above-listed Microsoft Dynamics products. As per this change, the expiration dates for the currently supported service packs, listed below, will now be extended by another 12 months.

Support for Select Out-of-Support Service Packs Now Reactivated

Additionally, per the new policy, support will also be reactivated for select service packs for which support has expired under the previous 12-month policy, but for which support would have continued under the new 24-month policy. The retired service packs for which support will now be reactivated, as per this update, are listed below:

No Impact to Mainstream Support and Extended Support Dates

This update has no impact on the Mainstream Support and Extended Support dates for these products. Mainstream Support for these products will continue, as per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy, for five years from the date of general availability of the products, and Extended Support for another five years after the end of Mainstream Support.

Note: Both Mainstream Support and Extended Support are available ONLY at the product’s supported service pack level.

by Ignify – Northern California Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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Each day I would pull out the pile of collection ledger cards from a collections box.  This was pretty clunky and didn’t offer much flexibility.  With Collections Management I could have created and saved different electronic queries of my customers based on what I needed to focus on that day.  For example, I could have pulled up a list of all the customers that were 60+ days past due, that were past due more than $1000.00.  I could then have acted upon that list one by one by opening up a GP Collections window that had all the important customer information on an easy to read window.  This would have made my job of follow-up much easier and given me the best bang for my buck that day.  Or, I could have pulled up other queries that met my needs.

Next I would take one ledger card and read the prior notes which were in various collectors’ scribble.  I would call and speak with the customer, write my notes on the ledger card, and then put the card back in the collections box.  It was hard to keep track of all my activities and required follow-ups.  Collections Management would have allowed me to automate this process by writing electronic notes tracked by date and collector.  Plus, I could have assigned a follow-up date and action which would have prompted me with a GP reminder when I needed to follow-up.  This would have made me much more efficient and I wouldn’t forget to follow-up with the customer.

There was a day when I wanted to write a bunch of letters to those customers that were 30 days past due.  That was not an easy task as it was largely manual.  Collections Management would have allowed me to pull up all customers in my “30 days past due” query and automatically perform a mail merge into an effective letter I had created previously.  Then it would have automatically assigned another follow-up date so I could automatically be “tickled” (GP Reminder) to follow up when needed.

I used to spend more time managing the process with the ledger cards and it reduced my collections effectiveness.  If you are using a manual collections process like I was, look at this module closely – it offers great functionality to automate your collections, catch any notes, promise to pays – all of which could help your company’s cash flow significantly. I’ve listed some of the more useful features of Dynamics GP Collections Management below.

- Automated Customized Collection Notices: Create overdue notices and collection reminder templates with Word which can be automatically populated for the correct set of customers the letter is targeted for with information from Dynamics GP.

- Tie-in to Receivables management: Integration with A/R removes customers who have paid and adds any customers that have any newly overdue invoices.

- Credit and Collections Team:  The collections responsibility can be distributed among several credit and collection agents and managers by assigning different customers to them.

- Track A/R by Credit Manager/ Collections Team:  Excel Reports are available that help track accounts receivable by Credit manager (in addition to by customer) to be able assess performance of your various collections agents/ teams.

If you want to know more about Collections Management, email Ignify – a top notch, Gold Certified Microsoft Dynamics GP partner at GPBlog@ignify.com

By Tod Heath of Ignify – Northern California Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner

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