Wednesday, March 20, 2013

What if...I went to Dale Carnegie training?

So, yesterday I took advantage of the Leadership track at Convergence 2013 here in BEAUTIFUL SUNNY New Orleans, and I attended a Dale Carnegie session on building trust. The presenter was awesome, very dynamic and raised some interesting points.  My coworker and I left with lots of great ideas about how to make our team better, and cultivate greater trust with our clients.

Number one item, we decided to hold each other to a No Complaints, Criticism, or Condemnation clause.  Feedback is fine, but not in the typical "gripe" way.  My task this weekend is to find a jar for us to start a quarter jar for anytime one of us falls back in to the old complain, criticize, and condemn way of talking.

I wanted to share the following video with you all, which was part of the session.  Really made me think about how we all contribute to our team and project dynamics.  Watch it and let me know what you think!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue3hCVHtZZY

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Predicting Payments Based on Average Days to Pay

Had a great time today, and finished the day at the geography-based roundtables for GPUG.  I was sitting at the IA, KS, MO table, and we had a full group.  A lot of different topics of discussion- the upcoming regional chapter meeting on April 17th, everyone's background and experience in GP, the future of manufacturing and project accounting in GP, and reporting dilemmas.  One user at the table asked for ideas on forecasting cash flow....so the conversation shifted to the Cash Flow module and then on to forecasting cash flow for AR based on average days to pay. We were wondering aloud about views or reports that might be available for that, and I thought a view would not be hard at all.  So here it is, a view to determine the estimated pay date (EST_PAYDATE) based on average days to pay. 

GO
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
CREATE VIEW [dbo].[PredictPayDate]
AS
SELECT dbo.RM00103.CUSTNMBR, dbo.RM00103.AVDTPLIF, dbo.RM20101.DOCNUMBR, dbo.RM20101.RMDTYPAL, dbo.RM20101.DOCDATE,
dbo.RM20101.DOCDATE + dbo.RM00103.AVDTPLIF AS EST_PAYDATE, dbo.RM20101.DUEDATE, dbo.RM20101.CURTRXAM, dbo.RM20101.VOIDSTTS
FROM dbo.RM00103 INNER JOIN
dbo.RM20101 ON dbo.RM00103.CUSTNMBR = dbo.RM20101.CUSTNMBR
WHERE (dbo.RM20101.VOIDSTTS = 0) AND (dbo.RM20101.CURTRXAM > 0) AND (dbo.RM20101.RMDTYPAL < 7)
GO

Obviously can be expanded to include more information, or used in a SQL report to summarize predicted cash income by month.

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.

Convergence 2013!

Convergence 2013 here in New Orleans marks the first conference in quite a while where I am actually going to enjoy the conference.  I am not working in a both, staffing the labs, or presenting.  Just going to see old friends, hopefully make some new ones, soak up the great energy and information, and eat a few fabulous meals here in New Orleans.  Yesterday, I spent some time at the GP Partner Connections PreGame event.  I have said it before, and will say it again, I just love opportunities for partners to get together in a collaborative environment!  Saw lots of old friends, famous-GP-world faces, and got to learn more about GP 2013 demo tools and RapidStart.  Very good day.

Today is late start day, but I am going to challenge myself to blog each day this week with something I have learned.  I don't promise anything too profound, but today will be the first day of this challenge! Let's see what I have to share this evening :)

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.

Updating Records with Excel

Recently, I have had to update 1099 information for a set of vendors that was inadvertently cleared out.  In that case, I retreated back to one of the simplest ways that I approach updating groups of records using Excel.  In this case, I had a backup of the information, so I first ran the following script to pull the information I needed to restore:

--select vendor 1099 information
select VENDORID, TEN99BOXNUMBER, TEN99TYPE, TXIDNMBR from PM00200   Now, of course, you could put a where clause on this if you like, to further restrict the information.  Then when I have my results, I copy/paste them in to Excel like this...    


  Next, I add a column to the right and create a CONCATENATE formula to build my SQL script.  Yes, yes, yes, I know this is borderline silly...but it is quick, easy, and allows you to store (with accuracy) what you changed and how you determined it.  Here is my concatenate formula that combines static text like UPDATE PM00200 with the different fields in the spreadsheet:   =CONCATENATE("UPDATE PM00200 SET TEN99BOXNUMBER=",B2,","," TEN99TYPE=",C2,",","TXIDNMBR='",D2,"' WHERE VENDORID='",A2,"'")   The result is a column of SQL statements to perform my update:  



Note the complete SQL script that is a result of the CONCATENATE formula I created.  I then cut/paste the column of scripts in to SQL Server Management Studio to run my update.  And then I save the spreadsheet as a record of what I updated and the source data I used.  Hope this is a helpful little trick for others of you who need to update data and want to do so in a controlled way.

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a supervising consultant with BKD Technologies, providing training, support, and project management services to new and existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. This blog represents her views only, not those of her employer.