Tag: Plains

Great Plains Sales Commission Report – Highlights For Consultant

Microsoft Dynamics GP serves vide spectrum of industries, and likely that very large percentage of Great Plains customers deploy Sales Order Processing module, especially if they also carry Inventory control and need Invoice or Sales Order itemization. In out-of-the-box Dynamics GP you should be able to setup basic commission schema for your sales persons and even sales territories, however real life is often different and requires commissions to be accrued on very complex rules. We would like to come through some commission calculation formulas and give you technical highlights:

1. Credit Card related Sales commission calculations. As credit card processor has in turn its own commission, you likely are trying to discourage your sales reps to sell on credit card. Instead, you probably encourage your sales folks to incline customer to send overnight checks or do wire transfers. However in eCommerce scenarios credit cards are often the only way to work with walk in customers and you got to accept credit cards. Complications with credit card acceptance business might be related to the gradation on preferred and less desirable credit card networks. In this scenario you would like to build sales commission report with credit card fees subtracted from the sales amount, subject to commissions

2. Project completion commission schemas. These are when you are having your sales people to be responsible for the project delivery, including manufacturing overhead and associated purchases. In this scenario you would like to calculate commission for delivered projects, meaning invoices, which are not yet delivered in the sense of production orders and drop ship purchases should be placed on hold

3. Other sales commission schemas. These might be related to sales quota for the quarter or month, discounted items versus cash cow items differentiation, just to give your real life scenarios, which would be difficult to implement in standard Dynamics GP functionality

4. How commission logic might be implemented. In our opinion, Dynamics GP, being targeted for mid-size and smaller businesses makes it feasible to do commission on reporting level with following reports results data entry into either AP or Payroll module for commission disbursement

5. Technology insights. Commission reports should be based on complex commission calculation SQL stored procedure or view. Reporting tool might one of the industry standards: Crystal Reports, SQL Server Reporting Services, Excel, Microsoft Access, Great Plains Dexterity, C# or VB.Net report web publishing

Microsoft Great Plains Reporting – Overview for Developer

Looks like Microsoft Great Plains becomes more and more popular, partly because of Microsoft muscles behind it. Now it is targeted to the whole spectrum of horizontal and vertical market clientele. Small companies use Small Business Manager (which is based on the same technology – Great Plains Dexterity dictionary and runtime), Great Plains Standard on MSDE is for small to midsize clients, and then Great Plains serves the rest of the market up to big corporations. There are several reporting tools available and you definitely need to know which one to use for different types of reports.

If you are developer who is asked: how do we create report for Microsoft Great Plains – read this and you will have the clues on where to look further.

  1. Great Plains Report Writer (ReportWriter) – this is built-in reporting tool. All the original report in Great Plains are written in ReportWriter. ReportWriter itself is Dexterity module. You should use this tool if you would like to modify existing Great Plains reports, such as Blank Invoice Form – here you can place your company logo, change the positioning, fonts, colors, etc. ReportWriter will allow you also do new reports – simple option if you want to export all the records from one Great Plains table – use it. New report, however doesn’t have interface where you would enter parameters – so it is not useful for real custom reports. Another limitation of ReportWriter – you can not do cross-modules report – when you need sales and purchasing info on the same report for example.
  2. FRx. This is excellent tool when deal with financial reporting – it works on the General Ledger level (Balance sheet, P&L, Cash Flow Statement, etc.). It also allows you to do multiple companies consolidation – when you do consolidated Balance Sheet (with inter-companies transactions elimination).
  3. Smart List – Export to Excel – this is nice feature in Great Plains – you could create a list with simple criteria and then export it to Excel.
  4. Crystal Reports. It gives you unlimited functionality. Obviously flexibility requires you to know Great Plains table structure: Launch Great Plains and go to Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Find the table in the proper series. If you are looking for the customers – it should be RM00101 – customer master file. If you need historical Sales Order Processing documents – they are in SOP30200 – Sales History Header file, etc. Create ODBC connection to GP Company database. Use the same technique as when you create standard ODBC connection for GP workstation – but change default database to targeted company database. Create SQL Query to probe the data – we always recommend tuning your query and see that you are getting adequate results – in any case – Crystal Report is just a nice tool to show the results of your query.
  5. Direct Web Publishing off Great Plains databases – yes – it is easy now with Visual Studio.Net and you can hire good programmers. This is good – Microsoft Business Solutions products: Great Plains, Solomon, Navision and Axapta will be integrated into so called Microsoft Business Portal – which will have web interface – you can get the idea if you look at Microsoft CRM web client – so direct web publishing is good taste.
  6. SQL Queries. If you have SQL background – this is great field for you. You know – with properly formatted SQL query you can realize simple EDI export/import for the integration with legacy systems.

Happy designing! If you want us to do the job – give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

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