Chief Financial Officer
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Dynamics GP
We used Microsoft Dynamic GP to process our payables, track our expenses by entity, and run monthly and annual financial reports. We have eight different Tax IDs and eight different bank accounts which require us to have separate, distinct sets of books. GP is a great, easy-to-use tool that helps us keep track of each of our entities and run complete sets of financials for each one. We also have some very complicated allocations we have to do for our leasing company. This requires us to set up allocation accounts so each expense only has to be entered once, and the system will do the allocations behind the scenes. I've worked with several other GL packages, including QuickBooks, and none of them had the ability to perform complicated allocations.
Pros
- FRx is a very simple third party report writer that makes report running so easy and straight forward. But it can also use more advanced features such as reporting trees so multiple sets of financials can be chained together.
- The allocation accounts are a great feature of GP. It makes the process of allocating salaries and other expenses when necessary a breeze. If your organization does any type of expense sharing across entities, departments, etc, consider using GP to do that.
- Overall ease of use. I absolutely love GP. I am a Microsoft Certified Professional in Version 9. It is very intuitive, extremely easy to navigate, simple to set up, and easy to maintain. It has great reporting features, has a simple budget import/export feature, and is truly the best GL package on the market.
Cons
- With respect to the allocations, once the expense is entered into the allocation account, you lose the ability to run any detail on just the total of the expense. It would be nice if you could run a trial balance on the allocation accounts the same way you can with regular accounts.
- I've always thought security set up could be a bit simpler. It actually has gotten better through the years. Specifically, with eight separate entities, it would be nice to have a "master" setup where you could call up one group entity, assign the users rights, and then be finished. Currently, whenever I have a new user, I have to call up each individual entity and select all of the features I want the user to have. That means I have to do eight steps for each user.
- For me, I think the biggest positive of GP is it's reliability and the fact that I don't even really think about our systems. What I mean is it isn't something that constantly troubles me so much that it interrupts my productivity.
- It has helped us become more efficient and provide faster, more accurate results.
- Any negatives that we experience are the direct result of our systems not being integrated. We use a Patient Accounting Program to do our billing, accounts receivable, and inventory management and none of those systems talk to GP. Our deficiencies always fall in those areas, which is not a limitation of GP.
I have used Peachtree, Lawson, Quickbooks, MAS90, and Oracle. I would take GP over those every day of the week. Honestly, if you choose to go with GP you will not go wrong.
Microsoft Dynamics GP Feature Ratings
Using Microsoft Dynamics GP
6 - Accounts payable, payroll, general accounting, budgeting, expense analysis, financial reporting
4 - I am a Microsoft Certified Professional, so I do the majority of work in the system itself and SQL. Our four person IT knows a little bit about it.
- Payables
- Financials
- Allocations
- Allocations
- We need to create interfaces from our external payroll provider and our patient accounting system.
Using Microsoft Dynamics GP
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Entering and paying invoices
- Running financial reports, general ledger account details
- Setting up new entities, creating new reports in FRx
- Allocation Accounts
- Security settings can be a challenge
- Currently there is no way to run reports on the activity of allocation accounts
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