Microsoft Dynamics GP is an ERP software with accounting capabilities. It includes various packs for customizability and features tailored to specific industries’ needs. GP is offered as a perpetual license or subscription.
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Microsoft Dynamics SL
Score 5.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Dynamics SL is one of the ERP products in the Dynamics family.
This product was acquired from Solomon 2000.
The product is typically used by SMBs, particularly in project-based businesses (e.g. construction). It has strong accounting and project management capabilities.
We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great …
It does accounting really well, it does payroll not so well. I say this because when you get into states that have complicated payroll laws like California, overtime calculations are hard to setup and get right. Same goes for other states when they do out of the normal pay structure like piece rate pay. It does HR, A/P and A/R really well and we have had no issues on that side; just payroll when it comes to certain states and how we do anything that is not salary or hourly.
In the service series, there is a weakness in applying revenue recognition concepts which are a strong point of the project series. It is difficult to get a period sensitive WIP that could be recreated at any time for a point in time (fiscal period).
Able to be extended into multiple areas of your business
One feature we have been using for a few years is EFT for payables - it has significantly reduced the time spent paying vendors and reduced our check printing and mailing costs. It is very easy to setup and use.
Ability to add companies, and sub-accounts on the fly allows for the growth of the system without conversions, and flexible reporting allows for the quick utilization of the data.
Multi-Company allows for easy and automated data entry and reporting across multiple legal entities and business segments.
Multi-Company also allows for easy centralization of business processes (AP check writing and Fixed Assets for example), while spreading data entry across the enterprise.
Ability to Copy/Paste into Dynamics SL has always been a strength- especially from Excel. The additional power of being able to use Excel for a myriad of calculations, including complex allocations, and formatting the result into a JE to paste directly into the Journal Entry Screen has saved countless hours in data-entry, and made re-use of complex items very easy.
Having an integration between Project Accounting and Field Service would be amazing! There are so many companies that have service technicians that perform work on a customer's contract but also have a need for project accounting functionality within that customer's contract. Right now those modules are separate so you either need to use one or duplicate some efforts if you need to use both.
Microsoft Dynamics GP could do a better job documenting their new enhancements to the product. They realize great enhancements but the documentation about them, or new products, is lacking so it is difficult as a consultant to know everything a new feature can do for me and my customers.
They could enhance their forecasting capabilities with a new forecasting tool within Management Reporter.
When we have a lot of invoices rather than just a few large invoices, we can be frustrated by how long it takes Flexible Billings to generate a lot of invoices
It would be nice if Dynamics SL had an easy integration to some of the nicer salestax tools such as Avalara and CCH.
It would be nice if the fixed assets module and electronic banking were not third party.
Due the economic challenges that Puerto Rico is having, the company has had to merge some companies in order to be more efficient. It has been easy in GP to process those merges, even thought we had to spend days to accomplish that the process was smooth and accurate. In addition we were able to streamline the purchasing and sales process and the organization is confident to keep renewing GP for the future versions.
Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.
Overall usability of the older model is not quite so user friendly for the basic bookeeper, but at an accountants level we can generate all the necessary reports and create Sales Orders, Purchase orders and invoices - though it is a bit redundant to enter the sales and purchase orders separately instead of being able to convert a sales order directly to a puchase order by applying a price book like the newer versions can.
SL itself is relatively easy to use and most of the Help Files documentation is well kept and outstanding in the amount of information that is given. Most end users pick up the functions quickly and are off and running after some limited training. There will always be questions and research to be done, but overall SL is relatively easy to follow for a seasoned user
We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.
Many times support will tell you that your issue is an identified bug and will be scheduled in the future to be fixed in a future release. The knowledgebase has gotten worse in recent years and much more difficult to use. many times you can't find the error during the search
Basically the challenge with this implementation was the Business Portal, too many errors and even the aplication is up and running the users are still having issues. We will start planning the migraton to GP 2015 soon.
Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!
Because GP doesn't do CRM we have looked at D365 Customer Engagement for our field service, and F&O as a replacement. Vaporware, no direct upgrade path, and if you want to continue with GP for your back office and just use Field Service it's an insanely complex integration import/export. D365 F&O is a huge implementation cost, and without a direct migration path every bit of data has to be custom imported. There really is no straightforward way to stack up GP against these programs currently. Again, the future of GP is in some doubt.
We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great Plains and Peachtree (now Sage 50) and we discovered that they were rather complicated for our users. They were not as easy to maneuver and manipulate as SL and we felt that SL was much more "user friendly" and simplified, but still able to produce the same results.
If implemented properly, the product can save many hours of data entry time - specifically by setting up integrations of large data sets.
Many times the underlying business process must be adjusted to accommodate software limitations. By being flexible, a company can leverage their users' skills in combination with GP to make data entry faster and more efficient. I have seen many companies eliminate the need for data entry personnel as well as reallocate employee hours to more skilled positions such as reporting and analytics.
Poor implementations, on the other hand, can cause employees to hate their jobs and the software. This isn't specific to GP but to the software industry in general.
