Microsoft Dynamics GP

Steven Bragg is the author of “Fast Close” and 18 other accounting books including one of the most best read accounting books in the U.S.-“Accounting Best Practices”.Some of you may be thinking that you would prefer to watch a Minnesota Twins game where the club makes their annual come back from a slow start into an exciting pennant contender.  If you are more consumed with getting the books closed faster, this post is for you.Each year it seems there is more and more pressure to close quickly with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and organizations eagerness to find out early how they performed due to the economy.Some of the bullets from Bragg’s book on closing your books more quickly are the following:Shifting the timing of closing … [Read more...] about Closing The Month Faster with Dynamics SL and GP

Here are Minneapolis-based experiences so far “in the cloud” as a Microsoft Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP partner, and conclusions from this experience.First, it doesn’t matter how you define “The Cloud”.  People have defined the cloud in 3 different ways that I’ve heard recently.  First, some think that SaaS (Software as a Service) is the cloud.  Second, some think that anything running in a browser whether on premise or off-site is the cloud.  Third, some think that the cloud is simply moving any legacy program to having it hosted elsewhere-regardless of how this is deployed.Does it matter for small to medium sized businesses how the cloud is defined?  I used to think that it does matter.  But does it?  … [Read more...] about What’s Really Happening “In the Cloud” ERP-Wise?

  Three years ago a large national medical association here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota, USA) shared with us that they had been running Dynamics SL in a virtual environment for the past year. We were surprised. That environment was not supported by Microsoft, yet here they were running in this environment for a year, without incident, and casually mentioned that this was working fine on their SAN. Since then, we’ve had many Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL clients running our products on virtualized environments. Mostly people have chosen VMWare, but occasionally we run into Hyper-V as well. Most picked VMWare because they were the leaders in the market, the “standard” option for virtualization. Microsoft just came on the market with … [Read more...] about Virtualizing Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL

My mother was very smart because she was smart about things that mattered.  Oh, she could do the hard math, the Latin, and the pain-in-the-neck late night questions from the high school kids (my sisters and I) without complaining, but mainly she knew how to have success at most endeavors.She used to say “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” a lot.While she was no where near as entertaining or flamboyant as my father, she always pushed us to have small successes first in any larger undertaking.  …and it usually made a difference.It works at home too. I have one child that has an amazing backhand in tennis. She is more tentative with her forehand.   If we start with nothing but backhands for her (instant success), the rest of the … [Read more...] about “Nothing Succeeds Like Success” in ERP Implementations

The challenge for most organizations in upgrading or improving their accounting software or ERP platform is that they do this kind of thing so rarely that they don’t have the experience to ask themselves the right questions.The purpose of this blog post is to help you if you are in this position and want to actively do things that will help ensure your success with this change.1. Ask yourself “Should we change or simply upgrade?”  Currently there is a lot of good debate about moving to the cloud.  Some vendors that do not have true cloud solutions are defining the cloud as “hosting” the software at another site.  For many, what makes a change worthwhile are substantive changes such as better features that you can not get with … [Read more...] about Accounting Software Change Questions to Ask

When consulting with Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP, we often find ourselves in the position of being asked to setup certain modules on a fixed fee or fixed price basis.  From the user’s standpoint, this is extremely understandable.  They want to know what they are going to pay.  They don’t want to pay more than what they have agreed to-kind of like a purchase order where the client is in control of how much is spent. There are lots of good things about fixed price engagements.  They make the consultant give the higher part of the estimate-should you be doing business with someone you don’t know.  After all, if we give the client a low number, they are still going to hold us to that, so we have no … [Read more...] about The Fixed Fee Engagement