Copy Workflow Steps
I’m very much into the workflow side of things; I’ve blogged quite a bit about it, written two books on it, and Microsoft invited me to write a guest post on workflow as part of the Feature of the Day series for the launch of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018. So, for me, the best new feature was one that I actually requested: the ability to copy workflow steps.
You can’t use parentheses in step conditions, so you can’t easily define multiple conditions. If you have several steps which were mainly the same, you had to duplicate them manually, which was unnecessarily time to consume. Now, however, you can easily copy your step, including child steps, which cuts down the effort of creating workflow steps quite a lot. This saves your staff a lot of their working time – and that inevitably means your business is saving money.
Enhancements to the Web Client
Although GP used to be just a desktop client, it can now also be hosted on Azure or on-premise and you get access to the web client version, on any device you want. That means you don’t have to be in the office or on the network, you can fire up your web browser and go to the webpage, log on and there’s GP on your tablet or laptop.
This greatly increases the accessibility of GP as your employees can work on the go. You’re getting the most out of there time. Business is becoming increasingly mobile and it’s great that people can use GP whilst traveling on the train, out of office hours or even on their own devices.
New Password Protected SmartList Favourites
SmartList is an ad hoc reporting tool that lets you take control of your data by customizing reports with the columns and search criteria that you want. You’re able to save a favorite that will remember your search criteria and column selection. In this new update, you can now password protect these favorites, meaning other users cannot delete or modify your SmartLists without the password.
Now, your report configuration is so much more secure. This change is something clients always ask me about so I know this will be quite a significant feature, saving both time and effort for many users.
Improvements to the document attachment function
This handy module on GP provides the ability to scan or attach Word documents, PDFs or Excel sheets to records in GP. They’ve made this feature easily accessible on the action pane, and that saves people time for routine tasks. It means if, for example, when you get a quote through from your supplier, you can now simply attach it to purchase requisition than send it through a workflow for approval. That attachment will be emailed to the approver as well – and they don’t even need to be a GP user, which saves on licensing costs.
It’s a more organized way of bringing together and electronically storing important historic documents in a centralized repository. You can see when and by who documents have been attached to a record as well as recalling the document to view, instead of needing to trawl through an archive of printed documents. Your business can really benefit from such effortless efficiency.
Changes to the purchasing system
GP has traditionally been very American-centric, and because of this everything has been about cheque payments. However, especially in the UK, everyone does electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments. This might sound like a relatively small thing, wording changes, but I know it’s been frustrating for UK users. In response to this Microsoft have now renamed all windows containing the word “cheques” to use the word “payment” instead; so “Select Cheques” has become “Build Payment Batch”.
It just makes much more sense and it’s updating the system for the type of payments people actually do in the system. Making these changes shows Microsoft’s commitment to improving the usability of the platform for UK users – we are just as important as the USA.
