55 of the 56 attendees answered “Yes” to the question “Was your time investment in the event worthwhile?”. The other response was “Yes and No”-but with positive comments to the other questions.
Many of the surveys enjoyed how prepared Jon Augdahl, Erik Vigesaa, and Tim Jones were. Most commented that they enjoyed the open-ended question and answer format for the event.
20 of the surveys mentioned that “Quick Query” is a big improvement. 15 pointed out that they enjoyed learning about Management Reporter’s replacing FRx and the many enhancements this upgrade will provide.
Several commented that they liked the paper saving options such as being able to publish any report to a Sharepoint site as well as the ability to attach documents to any screen at the batch, document and transaction levels.
Some attendees wrote that they liked the ability to print the results of any screen with one click as well as dump the contents of any grid to Excel and open Excel with one click.
Several said that they liked the ability to reverse a journal transaction as well as the option to reverse and correct.
Two consultants in the audience shared that they liked the option for setting up projects and tasks automatically from the sales order screen so the user can continue with the sales order without having to save it, and then enter the project and tasks before returning to the original sales order.
Both consultants also liked being able to invoice serialized items from a sales order and timecards from a project (with expense report reimbursements) onto one invoice from the project series.
No one commented on the new web services added for projects and customers but there was only one programmer in the audience and he shared that he was impressed with being given the option of being able to create his own web services with any screen-standard or created by his firm.
Lunch was paid for by our sponsor for the day-Avalara software. I told the group our story of moving a former Peachtree user from 4 hours a day for 1,000 line sales orders down to 15 minutes per order by importing the sales order then letting the Avalara web service compute the salestaxes on the different lines.
It surprised me that more people did not express interest in Avalara’s web service. I think I made too big a deal of the fact that we had to do programming work to make it work specifically for this non-Minnepolis-based client mentioned above. That client is saving massive money from the savings in time and improved accuracy. Yes, they had to pay us something for our time, but the benefits have been substantial.
For our Dynamics GP clients, there was much more interest in the Avalara web service but the integration with Dynamics GP is available in more screens. Incidentally more people on the GP side were also interested in the Avalara product that simplifies sales tax exemptions processing.
The only thing I think we did poorly was fail to test the performance of the software on an older VPC image. The software was a bit slow and so even though Dynamics SL 2011 will run faster than version 7, some may have been left with the false impression that it will be slower.
We got a lot of questions and were able to answer 46 of 50. We will be posting the questions and answers to the www.boyerassoc.com website and emailing the link to the attendees.
If you would like the 4 questions we could not answer and their researched answers, make a comment on this post with your email and I will send them to you. We will be putting the presentation materials up on our website as well.
