Back to Basics: Purchase Order Posting Flow

Sometimes it helps to just get back to the basics of how things flow in GP.  And a client question this week gave me an opportunity this week to do just that.  To understand how purchase order processing works in Dynamics GP, a basic posting flow is helpful to illustrate where accounts come from.

It lays out the source of transactions and the corresponding default account locations. Hope you all find this useful!

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a director 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 Email File Formats in SQL

The best laid plans...  Word templates are not my favorite thing.  There I said it.  It is not because I don't think are pretty and functional and allow for more flexibility than report writer reports.  It's just that they can be time consuming in a way that clients don't expect.  Modifications that might be worth 1-2 hours of effort end up taking double or triple due to the quirks of word templates. 


I have found that this disconnect happens most frequently with clients who already have modified report writer reports.  The process to recreate a word template that looks like the report writer report can be challenging and time consuming.  So in those cases, I try to use HTML for email delivery.  That way clients can keep using the report writer report, and the cost to implement email delivery can be quite low.


Sometimes, though, you get stuck.  HTML doesn't work well with complicated layouts, and can be unpredictable in terms of how it displays for different recipients.  So then we have to use the word templates and send in PDF.  This is fine, except if you have already set up customers for emailing.  So now you have to change the format in Cards-Sales-Customer-Email Settings.

For that purpose, you can use the script below.  Keep in mind that EmailDocumentID (in this case it is set to Sales Invoice) and EmailSeriesID (in this case it is set to Sales)  would vary for different modules and documents.  The EmailDocumentFormat is the field you want to update.  It is the same as the dropdown (1-docx, 2-html, 3-pdf, 4-xps).

--Update sales invoice email settings for all customers to use PDF
update SY04905 set EmailDocumentFormat=3 where EMAILSeriesID=3 and EmailDocumentID=3 and MODULE1=11 and EmailDocumentEnabled=1

As always, test first and always back up your data!

Christina Phillips is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified Professional. She is a director 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.

Dynamics 365 Financials vs. Dynamics GP: Payment Terms

By Steve Endow

In my post yesterday summarizing my Day 2 training, I said that the D365 Financials Payment Terms window looked disappointingly simple, as I expected it to be more configurable.

Well, it turns out that it is quite a bit more configurable than I thought based on my first glance, but you wouldn't realize it unless you knew about the Secret Codes.

What are the Secret Codes, and why exactly are they secret?  Good questions.

First, they are secret because they are apparently not documented yet.  The D365 Financials help web pages do not currently have any reference to Payment Terms.  And they are Secret Codes because unless you know what they are and how to use them, you would never know that they exist, or that you could wield their power in the Payment Terms window.

So...

Dynamics 365 Financials Training - Day 3 - Payables and Inventory

By Steve Endow

Today I attended day 3 of the Dynamics 365 Financials training class organized by Liberty Grove.

http://libertygrove.com/services/training/dynamics-365-for-financials-training-ndpm/

While I'm starting to get a little more familiar with the UI and navigation, there are a lot of nooks and crannies in Dynamics 365 Financials and very different names and concepts, so the training still seems very fast paced as I try and digest all of the new material.

Here are some observations from Day 3.

1. UI updates.

Menus are dead. Other than the few 'area page' links/buttons you can access from your Role Center (home page), there aren't really any menus in the application.  You interact with actions on your Role Center, the Ribbon above a window, or use the Global Search feature to locate things.

Dynamics 365 Financials Training - Day 2: Dimensions, more Setup, and Financial Reporting

By Steve Endow

Today I attended day 2 of the Dynamics 365 Financials training class organized by Liberty Grove.

http://libertygrove.com/services/training/dynamics-365-for-financials-training-ndpm/


Training day 2 summary: Brain overload

Here are my observations from Day 2:

1.  UI updates.  The user interface is nice, but the web interface does have a few minor quirks.  Sometimes the web site is very responsive, sometimes it pauses or lags when you perform an action, and other times there are multi-second delays.  And the responsiveness varies by user.  My UI was generally very responsive, but the instructor has had several 10-15 second delays on steps where I had no delay.  The inconsistency is strange, but I'm guessing Microsoft is doing tuning on the back end.

A few additional UI observations.

When you have multiple 'windows' open, you can only see the one on top.  You can click the X in the upper right to close the top window, or you can press the Esc key to close it.  Today I found that you can click anywhere on the gray bar on the left to close the top window.  So if you are a keyboard person, you can use Esc. If you are a mouse person, it's quicker and easier to click the gray bar than click on the X.  I am finding the gray bar to be the most convenient, as you can easily click multiple times to close several windows.

Dynamics GP vs. Dynamics 365 Financials: Do users really need access to transaction distributions?

By Steve Endow

UPDATE: As James Crowter notes in the tweet shown below, D365 Financials has been updated to allow entry of GL accounts on transactions, similar to the full Dynamics NAV product.  As a result, some of the discussion in my post below isn't relevant anymore, but the discussion of philosophy around access to GL distributions on transactions is timeless!

https://twitter.com/JamesCrowter/status/864529798642663424

In my last post on Dynamics 365 Financials training, I mentioned that in the first day, one difference I noticed was that D365 Financials does not allow access to transaction distributions during transaction entry, and that users cannot change distribution accounts directly on a transaction.  Dynamics 365 Financials (NAV) uses a different design involving "Posting Groups" that control the GL account assignments for transactions.

As someone who has worked with Dynamics GP for a long time, this seemed like a big difference to me.  In the GP world, Distributions are a pretty big deal.  When certain transactions are entered in GP, you often have to verify the distributions.  And some customers have processes that require users to change the distributions.

For example, some customers may manually code revenue accounts on a sales invoice, while other customers may code expense accounts on a vendor invoice.  In the GP world, Distributions are a thing, and they're an important thing.  When transactions fail to post, we sometimes ask customers to check the posting journal or Edit List to see if the distributions might have an issue.  When importing transactions using eConnect, I have to make sure that the correct distributions are imported.  We're so used to dealing with Distributions that it's second nature for us in the GP world.

Dynamics 365 Financials Training - Day 1: Navigation, Company Setup, and Posting Groups

By Steve Endow

Today I attended the first day of the Dynamics 365 Financials training class organized by Liberty Grove.

http://libertygrove.com/services/training/dynamics-365-for-financials-training-ndpm/


Each day I'll try and share a few observations from the training, primarily from the perspective of Dynamics 365 Financials vs. Dynamics GP.

Overall, the training was excellent.  There was a lot of content covered in four hours, but the trainer, Kerry Rosvold, was able to get through all of the content while answering dozens of questions along the way.

Here are my observations from Day 1:

1. Beautiful user interface.  The Dynamics 365 user interface just looks fantastic.  The look, feel and visual cues are really impressive.  There are definitely elements to the UI design that aren't obvious or intuitive, and have some complexity that you have to figure out (like any complex application), but I think the design is gorgeous, and it's really amazing how much functionality they were able to put into a web client.