Microsoft Dynamics GP

Dynamics SL is known for its Multi-Company and Project Accounting capabilities.  Dynamics GP is known for its strong financial modules and integration tools. Still the fact is that many of our clients on both sides simply buy and use General Ledger, FRx or Management Reporter for Financial Statement creation, and then Accounts Payable.  Many add Accounts Payable EFT to get out of the writing checks tedium, but still…more than half of our clients on both sides are using these Microsoft products for their financial capabilities,  not their distribution or project capabilities. Which begs the question…”What about AP Automation?”  Isn’t there more we can do to eliminate the effort involved in having someone key in invoices for us to pay when … [Read more...] about AP Automation

Steven Bragg is the author of “Fast Close” and 18 other accounting books including one of the most best read accounting books in the U.S.-“Accounting Best Practices”.Some of you may be thinking that you would prefer to watch a Minnesota Twins game where the club makes their annual come back from a slow start into an exciting pennant contender.  If you are more consumed with getting the books closed faster, this post is for you.Each year it seems there is more and more pressure to close quickly with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and organizations eagerness to find out early how they performed due to the economy.Some of the bullets from Bragg’s book on closing your books more quickly are the following:Shifting the timing of closing … [Read more...] about Closing The Month Faster with Dynamics SL and GP

Here are Minneapolis-based experiences so far “in the cloud” as a Microsoft Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP partner, and conclusions from this experience.First, it doesn’t matter how you define “The Cloud”.  People have defined the cloud in 3 different ways that I’ve heard recently.  First, some think that SaaS (Software as a Service) is the cloud.  Second, some think that anything running in a browser whether on premise or off-site is the cloud.  Third, some think that the cloud is simply moving any legacy program to having it hosted elsewhere-regardless of how this is deployed.Does it matter for small to medium sized businesses how the cloud is defined?  I used to think that it does matter.  But does it?  … [Read more...] about What’s Really Happening “In the Cloud” ERP-Wise?

  Three years ago a large national medical association here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota, USA) shared with us that they had been running Dynamics SL in a virtual environment for the past year. We were surprised. That environment was not supported by Microsoft, yet here they were running in this environment for a year, without incident, and casually mentioned that this was working fine on their SAN. Since then, we’ve had many Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL clients running our products on virtualized environments. Mostly people have chosen VMWare, but occasionally we run into Hyper-V as well. Most picked VMWare because they were the leaders in the market, the “standard” option for virtualization. Microsoft just came on the market with … [Read more...] about Virtualizing Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL

My mother was very smart because she was smart about things that mattered.  Oh, she could do the hard math, the Latin, and the pain-in-the-neck late night questions from the high school kids (my sisters and I) without complaining, but mainly she knew how to have success at most endeavors.She used to say “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” a lot.While she was no where near as entertaining or flamboyant as my father, she always pushed us to have small successes first in any larger undertaking.  …and it usually made a difference.It works at home too. I have one child that has an amazing backhand in tennis. She is more tentative with her forehand.   If we start with nothing but backhands for her (instant success), the rest of the … [Read more...] about “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” in ERP Implementations