Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 R1 was released in early May 2016; this post contains the series index for the Hands on series of posts as I install 2016 R1 into my test environment.
I plan to follow the installation posts with ones looking at some of the new features, so keep checking back for new posts.
The previous feature of the day introduced the OData Service installation. This one gives a brief overview of how the service works:
The main features of the OData service are:
Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 R1 is seeing the introduction of a new complimentary product: an OData service which will allow reports on Dynamics GP data using any reporting tool (such as PoweBI) to be created:
The main features of are:
In February 2014 Microsoft launched PowerBI for Office 265 and are now bringing it to the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 R1 home page (but only the home page of the desktop client):
The main features of are:
I’m not entirely sure how to feel about the addition of PowerBI to Dynamics GP; it almost feels like a scatter gun approach is being used for reporting with Dynamics GP. There are standard reports, Metrics, Excel Reports, SSRS Reports (which for most clients replace the Metrics to the extent I had to lookup the name of Metrics), Management Reporter (with an unknown roadmap/future) reports and now PowerBI reports.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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?