Speeding Up Lookups with Advanced Lookups in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Dynamics GP provides a very robust functionality in lookup windows for finding data such as accounts, vendors, customers, items, and more. Various fields can be used for sorting or searching and some additional fields are always provided by default. However, if all of that is not enough, Dynamics GP provides an option for administrators to add additional fields to lookups. This recipe demonstrates how to accomplish that.

Before using Advanced Lookups they need to be set up. Up to four custom lookups can be created for each type in the system. We will do this as follows:

• Select Administration on the Navigation Pane, and under the Company heading select Advanced Lookups.
• On the Advanced Lookups Setup window use the drop-down menu to select a Lookup Name.
• For our example, select Customers. In the first Sort by Field drop-down menu scroll down and select Zip.
• Change the Description to Zip Code.
• Click on Save to save the lookup and close the window.

These setup steps add a lookup based on zip code to any place where Customers are selected in the system:

Once an advanced lookup has been set up, let's look at how to use it by completing the following steps:

Select Sales from the Navigation Pane on the left. Select Customer on the Sales Area Page.
In the Customer ID field click on the lookup button (indicated by a magnifying glass) and click on the arrow next to Additional Sorts. A predefined set of lookups is shown at the top of the drop-down menu and customer lookups are at the bottom. In the middle is the Zip Code lookup created previously.
Click on Zip Code and the Zip codes will appear on the right-hand side of the window. The search box at the top also changes to allow searching by selected lookup. In this case, will be Zip code:

Administrators get the chance to set up four extra lookups for each of the lookup options.  Lookup options include:

• Accounts
• Addresses
• Customers
• Employees
• Items
• Open documents
• Open Payables documents
• Prospects
• Purchase orders
• Sales Document Numbers
• Sales documents
• Vendor addresses
• Vendors
• Vouchers

This provides users with more opportunities to ensure that they are selecting the right information with a minimum amount of work.