Microsoft Dynamics SL

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

If you attended our Dynamics GP or Dynamics SL events (the 2 events attracted almost 100 people) last month here in Minneapolis, you already learned these things.  You might still like the refresher course or having these items documented for you rather than “in one ear …”.  Before the session, many of the attendees were concerned about having to move from the comfort of FRx to the newness of Management Reporter.From a user’s perspective, there are big technical improvements and nice features such as the long awaited “undo” capability, but for the most part the rows, columns and trees are the same.  Catalogs with FRx are now called Report Definitions with MR. That’s not a change that anyone is going to have a hard time … [Read more...] about Comparing FRx to Management Reporter

I selected this title because I felt a bit out of touch when I read this morning that 96% of people under 50 (I’m 49) have Facebook accounts that have been used in the past month.  I don’t have one.Ok, my wife Kate reminds me that I’m a little uptight even by accountant standards-but are there that many people really wasting that much time?You can’t reclaim time spent so why is everyone goofing off so much?  I have to admit that I cringe when I see my kids on Facebook.  Really-you have nothing better to do than look at pictures of your friends and post “updates”?Perhaps managing a professional services firm, where our main asset is time, makes me sensitive about this.  In a good post by Synergy Business Solutions in Seattle, Michael … [Read more...] about Time, Time, Time is on My Side (Yes it is)

When would you opt for Dynamics GP, rather than Dynamics AX?  What about Dynamics SL?  What features and capabilities does that product have making it a better fit?  Is Dynamics NAV sometimes a better fit?Full disclosure, our business sells and supports both Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL.  Not only do we sell and support those products,  we love them.For Dynamics SL, this product still has lots of capabilities that the other 3 have some of but not with the depth and ease of use that SL can deliver.  Most of these capabilities are in the project series.For example, a Dynamics SL user can enter a sales order for product that is part of a project and have the lines on the sales order go to different tasks on a … [Read more...] about Comparing Dynamics Products

ZDNet published an interesting post on a blog that is linked here toward the bottom of this post.The article is about how some IT Professionals see Microsoft providing them less “love”, that is free services, convenient user interfaces, free software, etc.As Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL partners and consultants, our MSDN memberships and Gold Status have not changed in ways that favor our developers more than our infrastructure support person for these platforms.  Here in Minneapolis, not much has changed in terms of how Microsoft treats us perhaps in part because we have developers and an IT Professional to support our Dynamics products.The argument is that Microsoft sees the cloud as a development platform and is beginning to court … [Read more...] about Software as a Service and IT Professionals

If you make bad backups for 6 consecutive months and your system doesn’t crash-are you lucky? …or does it depend on whether or not you learn that you’ve been making bad back ups and change your behavior?As Dynamics Consultants based here in Minneapolis, we try to check clients’ SQL backups each time we go out. It’s not always possible. Sometimes the list of things clients need help with doesn’t fit in the time for ensuring clients are getting a good backup.More often than we would like to admit, our Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL consultants learn the database maintenance plan has stopped running for a variety of reasons, for example: ran out of disk space, the owner of the backup job had a password change, a configuration change in SQL … [Read more...] about Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL-Making and Testing Backups