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June 23, 2005

The Pricing Link is Gone

I've taken down the pricing link. Microsoft Great Plains was very unhappy with it there. They asked me to take it down and I complied.

For now, at least, if you want to know how much Great Plains will cost you, please contact me and I’ll respond.

I may well put the pages back up, only without the prices. This way, at least you’ll know what modules are available.

As the man said, “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

Posted by Ted at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Just a Few Changes

I’ve had the home page updated, but you probably don’t notice any difference. I’ve also upgraded to Movable Type 3.17. All this work has been done by Chad Everett at Everitz Consulting. Chad does very nice work – clean and thorough.

Thank you Chad!

Posted by Ted at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2005

A Little Renovation Going On

I'm in the process of taking the frames out of this site. For a few days you may encounter links that either don't work or give you spurious results. Please be patient. We'll clean these up as best we can.

Posted by Ted at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

Office Small Business Accounting 2006

It seems the new Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting is getting closer to shipping. If you'd like to get a demo, of sorts, click here. It's due out the Fall of 2005 and does a seemless link to ADP for payroll services.

It does a seemless link to Outlook, Word, and Excel 2003. I can't tell if it can be networked or not.

Microsoft is trying to position this new product as one it's Great Plains dealers should take on. I am dubious. I can't see someone paying me $150 an hour to help them with a product that only costs $200.

Posted by Ted at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

How to do Poor Man's MRP in Great Plains

I did a Crystal report for a client that they use to determine what to order. It took us quite a bit to develop this report, but it has proven to be very handy. It uses historical sales data as well as inventory availability to recommend what to buy.

The report had one drawback. They use the Bill of Material module to do some very simple assembly. The report did not reflect those requirements. It now does.

We set the vendor for all the BOM items to the client. That way they can run the reorder report to determine what they need to assemble.

They then put Bills into Microsoft Great Plains Assembly Entry. Those assemblies are saved as “Not Released.” Those pending production batches are treated as On Order quantities by the re-order report so they don’t plan more than they need.

The report also summarized the components used in those production batches and includes them as requirements along with other inventory availability.

Now they can run the report to decide what to make, enter what they plan on assembling, and then run the report for the components to see what they need to buy.

I call it a “Poor Man’s MRP System.” However, if their manufacturing requirements were more than just simple, they would need to purchase the full manufacturing suite.

Posted by Ted at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2005

Update Client Financial Statements

One client is running several companies in their Microsoft Great Plains. I spent some time with them formatting their financial statement. They then wanted to copy those financial statement formats from the one copy to the others.

I queried Microsoft’s Tech Support and they identified the following tables that I needed to update: AF40100, AF40101, AF40102, AF40103, AF40104, AF40105, AF40106, AF40107, AF40108, AF40109, AF40110, AF40200, and AF40201.

I made sure there were not financial statements set up in the other companies. Then I used the SQL DTS (Data Transformation Services) function to copy the data from the one company to the others.

It worked very smoothly.

I know I could have set them up with FRx. It does a very nice job of formatting financial statements. But I find that for clients with simple financial statement needs, the Advanced Financial report writer in Microsoft Great Plains seems easier for them to understand.

My more technically savvy users take to FRx quite nicely.

Posted by Ted at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

Price Lists Updated

I have just downloaded the most recent price lists from Microsoft and posted them in the links at the left. I don't know what, if anything changed.

That said the caveat remains. Use the prices for illustrative purposes only. When you're ready to buy contact me so I can confirm the pricing with Microsoft.

Posted by Ted at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2005

Client Replaces Server

My client that had their office broken into last month got their new server from Dell. The hardware guy set it up and I set up Great Plains on it, backed up Great Plains on their old server, copied the backups to the new server, restored the backups, and ran the script that Microsoft provides for changing to a new server.

Since this was a controlled transfer, I was able to run a script that captures users’ passwords before the transfer. Thus, users never saw any difference – except Great Plains probably now runs a lot faster.

The new server is a Dell PowerEdge 2800. Their previous server was a 2600, but that model has been discontinued. It was dual SCSI hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration, dual 2.8GHz Xeon processors and about 3.25 GB of RAM. I cranked SQL back to about 1GB. They don’t bang on it too hard and they should do fine with these settings.

All I have to do now is to make sure my SQL backups run and set up the SQL maintenance to run every night.

Posted by Ted at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

No Internet Explorer 7 for Windows 2000

It seems that Windows 2000 will not be getting the new Internet Explorer 7.0. IE 7 is due out in Beta form shortly and it will only run on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. If you haven't upgraded to XP, I would suggest you do it soon. Windows 2000 is rapidly becoming a dinosaur.

Posted by Ted at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)