If you have multiple companies in Great Plains Dynamics or Microsoft Dynamics GP, there might be the need to print invoices in each company with company specific graphical logo.
As you might be aware,
Dynamics GP SOP Invoice has three forms to print: Blank, Long and Short, and if you have only three companies, you may design these forms, making them similar and just have difference in the Logo Picture resource. If you have more than three companies (where you are serving as accounting outsourcing firm for membership organizations, for example) you may decide to move Sales Invoice printing to Crystal Reports. We were involved in the implementation of the mechanism of overloading SOP Blank Invoice form for one of the membership servicing organization, and we would like to share this discovery and implementation with you:
1. Annual Membership dues. The term annual means that it is OK to spend 5 minutes to tune your Great Plains to print the invoice for specific membership customer. This approach might also work for generic wholesale, retail, distribution or service business, please make your judgment
2. Let’s assume that you have just modified SOP Blank Invoice form in Report Writer and placed company logo on the Invoice Header and Page Header (if it crosses the first page and prints second one - Page Header should also have Picture resource on it). Now, let’s archive this form Microsoft Dynamics GP -> Tools -> Customize -> Customization Status, please here highlight SOP Blank Invoice Form, click Export, change Package 0 Package to something like SOP Blank Invoice form for Membership One and save it on one of the server partitions
3. Now you are at the point where you need to print invoices for Membership One company. Microsoft Dynamics GP -> Tools -> Customize -> Customization Status, click Import, pick your package, saved on the step #2 and click OK, in the dialog box: Existing Item(s) will be Overwritten. Do you want to continue? Click OK. You will have SOP Blank Invoice form in exactly the same appearance as you saved it in the paragraph #2
4. Some practical recommendations, based on our Dynamics GP consulting practice and various Great Plains technical support and data repair cases. Report Writer modified reports are saved in Reports.DIC file. It is common practice to have this file deployed on the server and shared among the Dynamics GP Users (very nice from the point of view of the IT department, it is part of the backup plan, etc.). However how we saw through the almost twenty year Great Plains consulting practice, if Reports.dic file is seeing high traffic in updating reports, it becomes corrupt frequently, and then issuing strange error messages about unknown Windows error and suggestion to report Microsoft. The cure is typically simple, you copy Reports,dic, delete Report.dic file, login GP and then reimport all the reports from the copy of Reports.dic. If you do not have internal Dynamics GP technical support team, we do not believe that you would like the idea to expose your Great Plains users to such panic and resolution procedure. It is probably more practical to have invoice printing Dynamics GP workstation with local Reports.dic in Dynamics.set file
5. Described approach and Great Plains Dynamics GP versions. Case study customer is on version Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, the same is supportable in Dynamics GP 9.0, 10.0 and 2010 (often referred as GP version 11.0). If you are on one of the archaic Great Plains versions: 7.5, 7.0, 6.0, 5.5, 5.0, 4.0 or earlier, consider instead of archiving reports, archive the whole Reports.dic into the company specific folder and the server and then, when time is to print company specific SOP reports, have all the users log off Great Plains, replace production Reports.dic and go ahead with Invoice printing
6. For additional information please call us 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com Our popular services include Dynamics GP Dexterity Customization version upgrade and recovery, FRx old version support, Crystal Reports design for Great Plains, Dynamics GP Barcoding, Warehouse Management, eCommerce (both B2B and B2C blends, such ecommerce shopping cart platforms as Magento/PHP, ASP .Net Storefront are supported), repairing and re-enabling batches failed in posting, second opinion of your local Dynamics GP VAR screwed GP implementation, data conversion, integration. We also support all the versions of Great Plains, including Great Plains Select on Pervasive SQL 2000 or Ctree, Great Plains Accounting on DOS, Windows or Mac
