Day: April 29, 2016

I was a little surprised to see Microsoft announce Display Duplicate G/L Accounts on Budget Exception Report as a separate feature of the day as it looks to be part of the Budget Import Exception Report which is a new feature in Dynamics GP 2016 R1 itself:

The original feature of showing accounts the budget which don’t exist in Dynamics GP is going to be fabulously well received; this one is a very good addition which I think may not be fully understood by some.

I have had to explain to a few clients that having the same account on the file more than once will result in only the final value ending up in Dynamics GP as it will overwrite the previous entries. If you want to load values in multiple times and have the cumulative values, you need to load multiple budgets and then use the Consolidate Budgets feature.

Document Attachment was introduced in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R1, was improved in subsequent versions and is being improved again in Dynamics GP 2016 R1 to allow attachments to be managed after they have flowed down to the transaction:

The main features are:

• Edit attachment information that flowed from master record.
• Enable Flow and email checkboxes for flow attachment options.

There are some feature of the days which I look at and think “so what?”. And then there are others I look at and know they are going to be very popular.

This feature is very much one of the latter (I have one client who would be willing to upgrade to just top get this one feature). It is the ability to have Cash Receipts automatically posted in Bank Reconciliation:.

The main features of are:

• When Automatically Post Cash Deposits is marked and you post a batch with cash receipts in it, one deposit will be created for all cash receipts in the batch.
• If you transaction level post, each transaction will create a separate deposit.

There is one downside to this feature; if you want your deposits to show as individual deposits in bank you have to post them separately in Receivables Management. Doing one transaction per batch (transaction level posting would result in manual posting being required of the resulting GL batches) will not be as time consuming as doing all of the deposits manually, but is moving an element of the work from one part of Dynamics GP to another (and possibly from one team to another).

The client I references at the start of this post runs a number of visitor centres so will have a lot of cash receipt transactions being imported into the system, but the majority of them would hit the bank as a single deposit. I’m onsite with them soon to help integrate their new EPOS system into GP so can work with them to make sure transactions are brought into Dynamics GP in the way necessary for them to benefit most from this feature.

There have already been a few feature of the days I have been a little puzzled by and this one is another of them. Support for named user licensing for the Self Service User Type has been added:

I would have sworn that this was not new, but was introduced in the last version. Unless it is showing on the User Summary window which is new.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 R1 has seen other enhancements to the Workflow 2.0 module (one useful one and one I don’t understand) and this one looks to be useful.

Workflow 2.0 has been enhanced to allow email notifications to be sent when a Workflow is reassigned:

Email notifications can be sent to the new approver for:

• Delegation
• Escalation
• Alternate Approval

This looks like it should be a useful addition to Workflow 2.0 although when configuring email notifications you do need to make sure people aren’t going to be swamped with emails.

As mentioned in the last post, more functionality has been added to the base Workflow 2.0 module, adding more flexibility. This second enhancement has seen the addition of new workflow conditions:

Two new options for what happens when step conditions are not met:

• Continue to next step
• Reject

While it’s nice to see new features being added to Workflow 2.0, I’m not entirely sure of the use case for this addition, although it might become clear once I can get hands on with it.

My initial thought is if the condition isn’t met why would I want to continue to the next step? If I wanted that to happen then, surely, I would have had different conditions in the first place?

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 R1 reached Release to Manufacturing (RTM) yesterday. This means the product is ready to ship and Microsoft will, in the next few days, finalise the shipping process and make it available for download on the 1st May 2016.

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 includes a new HTML5 web client with cross-browser support (including iPad, Android, and Windows).

Key additions to the All in One Doc viewers; ODATA service for Power BI, new service based architecture entities and 35+ functionality features prioritized by customers; see my feature of the day posts for more details.

If you’re going to the Amplify conference in five weeks time you’ll get to see the highlights of the Dynamics GP 2016 R1.