Nifty Freebies

Sometimes I get questions that make me ask myself, "Why hasn't someone asked me that before?". Of course, in these cases, the resulting answer is never as simple as "there is a setting for that". But I have learned over the years that although something is not an option directly in Dynamics GP that I may be lucky enough to find out that there is a free Professional Services Tool to provide the functionality I need.

For those of you that are not familiar with them, the Professonal Services team is a fabulous group of folks who offer a wide range of services and tools to customers and partners.

For partners, check them out at... https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/resources/support/supportinformation/msdy_winwithexpressconsulting.htm

For customers, you can get similar info at...
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/serviceplans/professionalservices

As you might be able to tell already, I am a big fan of this team. They are great folks, and also crazy smart when it comes to finding creative solutions to issues.

But, back to the freebie tools. Some great examples of these follow, paraphrased/borrowed from the PSTL documentation:

Default Add Item for POP/SOP

• Changes the Add Item option to default as marked in Sales Transaction Entry, Purchase Order Entry, POP Receivings Entry, and Purchasing Invoice Entry. A must have for companies that do not want to allow non inventory items, or want to "opt in" to non-inventory items as opposed to assuming that anything keyed incorrectly is non-inventory.

IV Post To GL

• Changes Inventory batch functionality so it looks at the Posting Setup to determine if the batch should update the General Ledger. I love this one, because it prevents the confusion that inevitably comes from having to select/deselect this option every time.

SOP Default Site per Line

• Affects how a site defaults on sales order line items. Instead of using the default site from the SOP window, it uses the default site assigned to the item under Cards>>Inventory>>Quantities/Sites. I love this one, because it addresses the needs of companies with multiple warehouses the stock different items.

Payables Select Checks Combiner

• Consolidates checks to the same vendor when adding to an existing check batch. This is great tool when users build batches by different ranges, and repeatedly add to the same batch.

And just one more...

Toolkit

• Rebuild the GL00105 without a SQL query tool, turn on/off the dexsql.log, rebuild indexes, and recreate dex procs and tables. This is a great resource for internal IT support to perform many common support tasks.

A reminder from fellow blogger David Musgrave, to not forget about the Support Debugging Tool, another fabulous freebie that partners can use to increase their efficiency in solving issues. Here is a link to David's blog post on it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2009/06/05/support-debugging-tool-build-11-released.aspx

Please feel free to share your favorite Professional Services Toolkit items, free or otherwise. I will update the post with additional suggestions :) Have a great week!