Dynamics GP provides a number of features to better organize the overall system and improve its usefulness for all users; these recipes are designed for the use of administrators rather than typical users. This chapter is designed to demonstrate how to implement and fine-tune these features to provide the most benefit.

As organizations grow up, the chart of accounts tends to grow larger and more complex as well. Companies want to segment their business by departments, locations, or divisions; all of this means that more and more accounts get added to the chart and, as the chart of accounts grows, it gets more difficult to select the right account. Dynamics GP provides the Account Alias feature as a way to quickly select the right account. Account aliases provide a way to create shortcuts to specific accounts, which can dramatically speed up the process of selecting the correct account. We'll look at how that works in this recipe.

A consequence of company growth is that the chart of accounts grows and account lookups can get clogged up by the number of accounts on the system. While the general ledger will stop showing an account in a lookup when the account is made inactive, other modules will continue to show these inactive codes.

However, Dynamics GP does contain a feature which can be used to remove inactive account from lookups; this same feature can also be used to remove accounts from lookups in series where the account should not be used, such as a sales account in the purchasing or inventory series.

A consequence of company growth is that not only does the chart of accounts grow larger and less intuitive, but the actual length of account numbers tends to grow longer as well. Companies want to be able to report by account, department, location, and so on, which results in a proliferation of segments added to the main account number and can create very long accounts. Dynamics GP can accommodate an account number as long as 66 characters. The longest I've seen used in practice was 27 characters and even that was unwieldy. Most users only need a portion of that length for their day-to-day work.

This presents a problem because very long account numbers won't fit into the account number field on most screens. For this recipe, we'll look at how Dynamics GP provides a solution to this in the User Preferences area.

Management of vendor payments is a critical activity for any firm; it's even more critical in difficult economic times. Companies need to understand and control payments and a key component of this is prioritizing vendors. Every firm has both critical and expendable vendors. Paying critical vendors on time is a key business driver.

For example, a newspaper that doesn't pay their newsprint supplier won't be in business long. However, they can safely delay payments to their janitorial vendor without worrying about going under.

Dynamics GP provides a mechanism to prioritize vendors and apply those priorities when selecting which checks to print. That is the focus of this recipe.

Throughout Dynamics GP, maintenance cards typically include at least two user-defined fields. User-defined fields can be renamed in the setup screen for the related module. This provides a great mechanism to add in special information. We'll take a look at a typical use of a user defined field in this recipe.