With Microsoft GP entering the end of its lifecycle, businesses operating on the platform are facing many choices: how and when to upgrade to a new platform, which platform to choose, and how to get the most out of GP in the time it has remaining.
In a recent webinar, Enavate GP experts gave tips and tricks to survive and thrive in your remaining time on GP and position yourself for the best future when platform support finally ends.
Perhaps the most vital suggestion experts have to offer is simple—keep your GP system up-to-date for as long as you intend to stay on the platform. Microsoft has already discontinued support and updates to GP systems that were not on the Modern Lifecycle, so if your business is not operating on the Modern Lifecycle, upgrading should be item number one on your agenda.
Microsoft provides yearly updates with hotfixes dropping throughout the year, which are vital to retaining system security, as well as compliance with changing tax laws for payroll.
Many integrations do not test their updates against previous versions of platforms such as GP, meaning if your system is not up-to-date, issues can arise when integrations update, making them unusable, disrupting your workflow.
Additionally, maintaining an up-to-date platform is a key piece of insurance against potential disasters and downtime. If businesses are out of date, they are at a higher risk of incomplete or corrupted backups, meaning any sort of system issue, whether the result of a system malfunction or some sort of natural disaster causing damage to the servers, could cause downtime while the GP platform is rebuilt.
In addition to keeping GP on the most current iteration, another way to get the most out of the platform is to lift it from a legacy on-site server to the Enavate Cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure. This approach allows businesses to reap the rewards of the Enavate Cloud, such as increased security and protection against downtime, while maintaining the comfortability of their current GP operation.
System downtime is the bane of every business’s existence. While system downtime can have a number of different causes, one of the most common for legacy, on-site systems is server malfunction, often because of power outage, flooding, or other natural disaster. By lifting your GP platform into the Enavate Cloud, businesses can guard against this all-too-common occurrence. Powered by Microsoft Azure, the Cloud has no one server-farm, rather multiple locations around the world, meaning no one natural disaster will be able to knock out an entire platform.
Additionally, Microsoft invests over a billion dollars annually into cyber-security, with a large percentage of that going towards Azure, meaning that businesses operating on the Enavate cloud have access to the same cyber-security tools as the largest, multi-national corporations, regardless of their size or industry.
GP is a platform renowned for its ability to integrate with a wide variety of apps, workflows, and platforms. Many businesses manually set up and manage these integrations, which can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Experts suggest using a product to help with this burden. Historically, one of the most popular of these was called Scribe Insight. However, that product was retired over two years ago. SmartConnect is its logical successor, and the product Enavate experts recommend.
SmartConnect allows businesses to implement and manage integrations from disparate sources ranging from ERP platforms to document editing software, external websites, or other ERP platforms. SmartConnect features “out of the box” connections for the majority of the most common platforms, modules, and products such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE and Salesforce.
SmartConnect is heralded by experts because of its intuitive interface makes managing and implementing integrations a more accessible, less technically demanding process for users. It also features an Excel add-on, allowing users to connect to Excel for basic functions without having to give them full SmartConnect access.
The final point in SmartConnect’s favor is that most of the integrations set up within SmartConnect will be transferable to whatever platform the business upgrades to when they eventually move away from GP, meaning they won’t have to reintegrate after upgrading.
Businesses who have issues balancing their sub-ledgers with their general ledger would benefit from the under-used “Historical Inventory Trial Balance” feature, which is a simple process that helps users easily identify problem spots in their inventory and balances. By navigating to the “reports” tab in the manufacturing module of GP, then “Inventory- Activity”. This will populate a drop-down menu where users can select “Historical Inventory Trial Balance”.
Using this report to compare against the balances in the general ledger is a quick and easy way to see where and when mistakes may have popped up that threw off the balance. Some common issues are “zero inventory” being entered with a balance, or an inventory value entered in with zero cost. This can be easily addressed with the “adjust cost” tool in GP.
Another tip for preventing variances popping up in the data in GP is to close out manufacturing orders in a timely manner. Costs of items, inventory, or labor can change over time, and keeping the manufacturing order marked as “open”, even once it has been complete, invites the possibility for those cost changes to throw off the balance of your ledger.
A big time-saver for manufacturing and distribution businesses is the ability to easily create an item copy, then edit it to fit the details of your new item. This can save a surprising amount of hours of product input, particularly for businesses that deal in things like chairs or other equipment that tend to be similar to each other, with minor differences such as item description or color.
Under “Item Maintenance” you can select the item you wish to duplicate, then click “Item copy”. This will populate a screen where you can enter the changes that differentiate the new item from the previous one, such as the description, or any of the material or categories in GP, as well as name the new item. Once your details are correct, you click “Create Copy” and GP will handle the rest.
Another underutilized section of GP is its ability to offer fixed asset management. GP allows for a wide array of management options for products and inventory, both currently stocked and retired. Businesses sometimes fail to use this key technology that could save them both time and stress.
A major time saver that many overlook is the ability to set up asset classes and account groups, which can drastically reduce both account or entry setup time as well as the possibility of human error in setup. Account rules can be set up for different classes of items, such as vehicles or office equipment, to ensure that each account group auto-populates its rules correctly instead of having to manually enter each rule for each new item.
Physical inventory integration is another under-used aspect of GP’s management capabilities. Many businesses manually match physical inventory to their system data, instead of importing the data directly into GP. GP offers tools such as barcode scanning to directly link physical counts and management to the data system, making it simpler and quicker to isolate discrepancies. This is a powerful tool to help audit trails and reporting by keeping cleaner records, all within the primary data system. Physical inventory is a built-in module for GP, requiring no integrations or add-ons, and is often underutilized in favor of manual cross-checking and messy divisions of labor.
A final fixed assets tip is to use the retirement/transfer workflow to track items that have been discontinued, moved to other departments or locations, or otherwise faded from use. This workflow ensures proper audit tracking for discontinued items by marking items as retired rather than removing them from the system entirely. Removing them from GP affects historical data, such as order history and ledgers, so using the retirement/transfer workflow is vital to ensuring that system records are accurately maintained. Failing to use this workflow could lead to costly audit mistakes and tedious and intensive sessions manually correcting past transaction data. This feature is also useful for tracking and recording item movement from location to location, ensuring accurate inventory history.
With GP’s end-of-life already underway, many companies are making business-changing decisions about their future, and are looking for ways to get the most out of their current GP platform while they still can.
By partnering with the GP experts at Enavate to keep your platform up to date and lift it to the Azure cloud, these businesses can focus on making the right decision for the future, rather than worrying about the present state of your platform. By utilizing overlooked features and expert tips in fixed asset management, Manufacturing and Distribution, and utilizing SmartConnect to handle integrations, you can maximize the efficiency and power of your GP platform short term, while you make long-term plans for your successful future.
Learn more by watching the GP Survival Guide webinar on-demand!