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Revision as of 21:10, 26 January 2007

Article Rewrite

Please post any idea's on how the modules section could be improved. It is original text, but I understand the issue with it sounding like a sales pitch. I have more documents I wish to upload to wikipedia and would appreciate some help in getting it right, but I can only spend a little time rewriting them.

Many Thanks,

M4 Systems 16:07, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Criticisms

I have moved a large amount of criticisms into this section and deleted them from the article. In addition to being unreferenced, they are almost completely false.

• Compared to a number of other accounting packages, the effort necessary to make simple entries is at least triple. For instance, the computer doesn't default to 00 cents, you must press the period. The user must use the mouse extensively for address lookup, vendor look up, account look up, currency lookup, distribution look up etc.

Not true. Transactions are entered the same way anybody would at an ATM. The cents are automatically placed for you. The UI was built with the mouse in mind, but there are keyboard shortcuts for many of the windows.

• Month end tie out with payables is difficult. Reconciliation between the aging schedules and the GL must be done by hand, unless no description is entered in the distribution of the invoice. If the description is left empty, GP will automatically enter accounts payable in the description which makes it easy to identify the entries in the aging that flowed to the GL.

Month end is well documented and is straightforward. Reconciliation is not a manual process as indicated above.

• The account numbers have to be specified perfectly to cut income statements with FRX. This makes importing new GLS through acquisition difficult. There is a way to group account numbers into categories, but they may only be grouped into one set of categories. Thus only one style of financial reporting can be accommodated.

FRx is a seperate product from GP. Adding new general ledgers does require work and training, but that is the case of any system merger, and is not unique to Dynamics GP

• Don't try this in foreign countries. GP was never meant to go out of the U.S.

MS has over 50,000 installations of this software worldwide. Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, even alot of installs in Japan.

• There is a transaction linking function that lets you keep track of fixes in the GL. So many windows and manipulations are necessary to use it that it's not worth it.

Transaction linking is itself a complicated process. The question of whether it is "worth" it or not comes down to the requirements of the company using it.

• Project costing is possible through multidimensional analysis. However, each transaction has to be done individually, requiring more expensive accountants.

Project costing should be handled through the project accouting module. Multidimensional analysis is a poor substitute.

• The aging schedule is class and database specific, not company specific. Thus a vendor that services more than one company in a database will mess up the aging. The only solution: make many vendors that are really the same vendor and assign one to each company.

This provides a level of granularity in that each company's relationship with the vendor may be different and should not be considered one master record.

• Multiple currencies are supported by GP, but they are comparatively harder to use. Also, integrating transactions with multiple currencies that default to the exchange rate lookup table requires going into the batch and clicking in and out of three windows without entering anything for the exchange rate to be entered in to the transaction.

"Comparatively harder to use" - Compared to what? Multicurrency consideration are difficult for any account in any accounting program. GP provides all the tools necessary, but as anyone that has dealt with this knows, it is something that requires precision and care.