Initial Great Plains Dynamics architecture had three SOP Invoice forms: Long, Short and Blank. Modern GP is popular in scenarios where you have more than three companies under one business entity umbrella
Some consultants might tell you that you should deploy long form for company A, short for B and finally blank form for company C and this is it. But what if you are running something like membership outsourcing business where you need to have twenty or more companies? Let’s review your options:
1. Customization Packages. Let’s assume that you prefer SOP Invoice Long form and what you need to do is place graphical company logo in the left top corner. Everyone knows Report Writer and if you have your logo in jpeg format for example it is easy to place it on the form. But let’s say month later you will need to print invoice from another company where the logo is different. Let us give you directions. When Invoice form is ready with graphics follow these directions: Dynamics GP -> Tools->Customize->Customization Maintenance and here highlight Long Invoice Form and click Export. Give your export package the name associated with current company
2. Month later change the logo which is attributed with the second company and export the package. Do the same with all your customers. Let’s assume that you are in membership outsourcing business where member dues are paid annually
3. OK. Now you have to process and print invoices for company A as you are now in the next year. Go back to Customization Maintenance screen and click Import. Here pick the package that you saved last year for this client. At this point you are ready to print invoices
4. What happens behind the scenes? There is background technology exporting specific modified form from Reports.dic dictionary file. And there is technology which imports report back to Reports.dic. If you are using customization packages export and import then you have no limits to the number of modified reports. Life is beautiful isn’t it? Well let’s talk about known issues
5. When you are trying to print invoice you are getting ‘unknown error’ message with suggestion to send it to Microsoft. If you are experienced and certified Windows professional you may think that ‘unknown error’ might be associated with file corruption and in our case the suspect is Reports.dic. And your guess is close to what is going on. Let’s think about situation. When you are importing the package other users are working and printing other modified reports. Reporting dictionary is shared and partially locked and there is the chance that it is getting corruption while you are importing package. In the next paragraph we will advise you about the fix
6. ‘Unknown Error’ fix. We figured out and later on read from MBS knowledge base that you can simply rename your Reports.dic and import all the reports from renamed dictionary
Let’s pick and answer few questions:
Q. Instead of exporting and importing packages is it possible to backup and restore Reports.dic file with the logo of specific client?A. It is brilliant idea and it should work. We suspect that you are Great Plains consultant and thank you for the contribution! This solution was popular with earlier versions of Great Plains such as 6.0, 5.5, 5.0 and 4.0 where packages were not yet available
Q. We are using Great Plains in Mexico and we would like to know your opinion if customization export and reimport will work in Spanish client interfaceA. We do not see the difference as GP is Dexterity application and Spanish language is localized within String resources and it is not affecting business logic
For additional information please call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us: help@albaspectrum.com
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