Products - Accounting Solutions

Microsoft Dynamics - GP

Running your business, you face a daunting job – managing your resources and business data effectively. To run your business effectively, you need a powerful business solution, but most don’t really match your needs – they’re too expensive and you’re paying for functionality that you’ll never need. Now Microsoft® Dynamics–Great Plains® gives you a solution designed to fit your distinctive needs. Based on its worldclass business solution, Great Plains gives you what you need: effective resource and information management with a price you can afford. And with Great Plains’s modular design, you purchase only the functionality you need.

Financials

ModuleDescription
Accounts Payable Improve your control over expenses with up-to-the-minute information about your payables, easy management of your vendors, and effort-saving automation of many routine or complex tasks that provides a great return on investment.
Accounts Receivable Maintain tight control over your accounts receivable with capabilities that help you track invoices, process receipts, and analyze customer activity, so you can manage sales made on account more effectively and yet maintain lower overhead costs.
Bank Reconciliation Gain unparalleled access to mission-critical financial information within your business and turn that data into a powerful competitive tool, while at the same time controlling it with greater efficiency and ease than ever before.
Cash Management Make timely, informed financial decisions and improve your cash flow with clear, customizable information views provided by Cash Flow Management.
Collections Management Improve your cash flow and reduce bad debt expense with the clear, customizable information views and automated bad debt management tools.
Fixed Assets Take control of your company's assets and put them to the best possible use in your organization with the asset management capabilities you need to effectively track, analyze, and utilize those assets to make them work for you.
General Ledger Manage the financial heart of your business with intelligent accounting and analysis capabilities that make your finances work for you, giving you the vital information you need and changing the way you do business for the better.
Microsoft FRx Professional Master your financial reporting process with Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics–FRx Professional. High-performance capabilities give you comprehensive, highly customizable financial and management reports that are easy to create, distribute, and use.
Multicurrency Management Take control of multinational operations and manage currency transactions smoothly and efficiently with flexible, powerful multicurrency capabilities.

Distribution

ModuleDescription
Inventory Management Give your business a competitive edge. By controlling inventory effectively and setting prices on a customer-by-customer basis, you can reduce operating costs and achieve the fast, efficient fulfillment that keeps them coming back.
Sales Order Processing Enhance employee productivity and streamline your distribution process with sales order and invoicing capabilities that help you enter and process orders quickly and accurately and give you more control over your business process.
Purchase Order Processing Take control of your business processes and empower your employees to make sound business decisions and minimize costs. Purchase Order Processing capabilities streamline purchasing tasks and equip employees to track and manage vital commitments on the fly.
Advanced Distribution Maintain tight control over your distribution channels, improve processes, and drive superior customer service with new Advanced Distribution capabilities.
Advanced Picking Keep pace with competitive markets and low margins. Advanced Picking capabilities provide you with the flexibility needed to reduce handling and increase accuracy for both single and multi-site warehouse operations.
Available to Promise Empower your employees to make strategic decisions and provide superior service. New inventory and order management capabilities help ensure the right inventory is available at the right time to meet customer needs and boost profitability.

Payroll

ModuleDescription
Human Resources Manage and track a wide range of employee information to support informed, consistent decision-making. Understand the business impact of salary changes by running "what if" scenarios with various salary adjustment projections.
Payroll Streamline your payroll requirements, enable your staff to handle complex and changing payroll situations quickly and accurately, and offer better service to your employees while reducing necessary overhead costs.

Electonic Data Transfer

ModuleDescription
eBanking Automate your critical banking activities and interact electronically with your bank with comprehensive tools that help reduce administrative costs, increase productivity, and improve cash management—in a security-enhanced environment.
eConnect Connect your organization’s applications and data to create a powerful flow of information that enables smarter decisions and a more productive workforce. With eConnect, you can use the latest industry-standard technologies to create real-time, transactional connections across Microsoft Great Plains, external applications, and outside organizations.
eExpense Enhance employee productivity and reduce processing costs with expense reporting capabilities that streamline expense management processes, eliminate paper receipts, and enable employees to create and submit reports any time, from any location.
Electronic Document Delivery Organize and schedule the e-mail message delivery of invoices, credit memos, and other sales documents to your customers in XML, HTML, Microsoft Office Excel, or PDF format, reducing administrative overhead and increasing customer responsiveness.

Web Based Applications

ModuleDescription
Business Portal Unlock business potential and enhance productivity by providing role-based access to information and processes from a single Web-based portal. Microsoft Business Portal integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Great Plains to deliver applications, information, and processes to employees, customers, and partners across your organization.
HR Management Self-Service Suite Streamline human resources management, and empower employees to view and update personal information from any Web browser. The HR Management Self-Service Suite for Microsoft Business Portal integrates human resources and payroll data and helps provide accurate, current information across your organization.
Requisition Management Help increase control and visibility over your entire purchasing process, reduce paperwork, and automate approval processes. With Requisition Management, employees can enter purchase requisitions online for manager approval and automatic transfer to Microsoft Great Plains Purchase Order Processing.
Internet Sales Empower your salespeople and existing customers by allowing them to place and update orders via an out-of-the-box, business-to-business Internet storefront, saving them time and increasing the accuracy of orders.

Manufacturing

ModuleDescription
Demand Planner Balance supply and demand effectively and gain competitive advantage by establishing a well-defined process for demand planning—or simplifying your current process—and improving the quality of forecasts.
Engineering Change Management As markets accelerate, so does the pace of change. New technologies and new customer demands increase the pressure on engineering to make process and component adjustments that accommodate such changes while maintaining or improving efficiencies and profitability. Engineering Change Management helps manufacturers organize and control this dynamic process.
Job Costing To help ensure business is profitable, you need accurate, current, and easy-to-access data about every costing detail relating to a job. Job Costing delivers this functionality to manufacturers by capturing all costs when they occur, and consolidating them into one location that's easy to access and manage—delivering a comprehensive view of production profitability.
Bill of Materials Bill of Materials delivers complete, consistent, and correct product information, enabling you to maximize production efficiency and cut inventory costs across the extended enterprise. By tightly integrating different types of bills and customized definitions into manufacturing operations, Bill of Materials helps improve performance, support time-to-market and time-to-volume objectives, and ensure materials are where they should be, when they are needed.
Manufacturing Order Processing Track production costs in detail and manage work orders, routings, outsourcing, and work center definitions. By directing the entire cycle of order processing, you can build a business that is both customer-driven and profitable.
Materials Resource Planning Material Requirements Planning helps you realize the control you need to compete. Deep visibility into material requirements translates into more effective resource planning—helping reduce stock outages, drive down inventory costs, and streamline the production process.
Quality Assurance By allowing you to design testing procedures of incoming materials to meet your manufacturing process, Quality Assurance equips you to start with the quality of raw materials you require, and dramatically helps to reduce manufacturing delays, rework, and scrap.
Sales Forecasting Whenever you bring together people to accomplish a task, communication challenges may arise—especially when those people have different objectives and backgrounds. Your sales teams and manufacturing managers probably face these challenges—yet effective communication between these divergent groups is the first step to ensuring product delivery that's both efficient and effective.

Not-for-Profit

ModuleDescription
Analytical Accounting Analyze financial data by whatever criteria you require. Introduce greater reporting flexibility and extensibility and analyze transactions efficiently.
Encumbrance Management Manage your budgets more proactively by streamlining reporting processes.
Grant Management Automate many of your grant management processes to track funds more easily, demonstrate accountability, and help attract future funding.

Project Accounting

ModuleDescription
Project Accounting Maintain tight control over strategic direction, support resources effectively, and ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget. Project Accounting connects project activities with company financials, provides extensive reporting capabilities, and helps ensure accurate accounting and billing processes throughout project life-cycles.
Project Time and Expense Project Time and Expense for provides project team members and managers with a way to effectively capture, review and approve project time and expense data on the Web, enabling prompt, accurate customer invoicing and efficient reimbursement for out-of-pocket employee expenses.

Tools

ModuleDescription
Analysis Cubes for Excel Analyze financial data by whatever criteria you require, introduce greater reporting flexibility and extensibility, and analyze transactions efficiently.
Crystal Reports Transform your Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains data into presentation-quality information so you can make better business decisions, with compelling views of business data created easier and faster than ever before.
Customization Meet specific business needs with powerful customization tools that allow your developers to integrate data from external sources, incorporate legacy applications, and modify your Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains solution to fit the most exacting business requirements.
Extender Capture information that meets your needs, and make fast, easy modifications without writing code.
Enterprise Reporting Enterprise Reporting offers you the most efficient reporting solution available for complex, distributed environments. It allows you to easily automate procedures unique to your business environment for complete control over consolidations, financial reporting, budgeting, and analysis.
Integration Utilize business data from almost any platform data source. Microsoft Great Plains offers powerful integration capabilities that use the latest industry-standard technologies, enabling you to integrate and incorporate data with a high degree of safety, flexibility, and speed.
Microsoft Forecaster Take control of the future of your organization with Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics–Forecaster. Meet business objectives and gain competitive advantage with budgeting and planning capabilities that allow you to plan more effectively and respond quickly to changing business needs.
Process Server Maximize your business computing potential by moving processor-intensive tasks off the computers your employees use every day and onto dedicated process servers, avoiding costly slow-downs and vastly improving computer performance.
Report Pack Create the sophisticated analytical reports you need to drive your business forward, taking advantage of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
Report Writer Work with powerful, customized reports that allow you to analyze every aspect of your business, pinpointing the exact information you need to increase your productivity and make effective business decisions.
Smart List Builder Query more of your data in more ways.

Field Service

ModuleDescription
Field Service Manage complex field service operations with higher levels of profitability and customer satisfaction. Nine powerful modules integrate essential accounting, distribution, and service processes to increase technician productivity, reduce overhead, and open up new revenue opportunities while focusing on what's important — your customer.

Security and System

ModuleDescription
Security Management With powerful security management capabilities presented in a clear, interactive format, you can control access to data, applications, and tools; reduce IT administration; and help maintain high levels of protection for your business system.
System Manager Make your business processes work for you with the backbone of Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains System Manager. By configuring your system to meet your business needs, you'll work more productively and share information more effectively across your organization.

Microsoft Dynamics - GP - Standard is priced and streamlined for smaller businesses with growing needs. See how its modular design lets you get the functionality you need to customize your solution now, to add components as you need them, and to transition easily to Microsoft Great Plains Professional as your business changes and grows.

•  Click here for a GP Standard Guide

•  Click here for a comparison between Professional, Standard and Small Business Financials

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Small Business Financials

Manage inventory effectively with Microsoft® Business Solutions Small Business Manager: flexible pricing and cost methods, back order management, real-time inventory adjustments, and integration with sales and purchasing processes help ensure that your business can purchase, sell, and replenish stock to control costs and meet customer needs.

Manage costs effectively
Maintain tight control over costs by assigning one of three different cost methods to inventory items and tracking costs from purchase to customer sale.

Monitor spending
Manage your cash flow and inventory purchases at any given time with real-time inventory allocation.

Tailor inventory management for your business
Maximize flexibility for tracking items, costs, and quantities by assigning lot and serial numbers or grouping separate items sold as a single unit into kits. Manage complex, interrelated inventories to help ensure you always have adequate parts to fill upcoming orders.

Enhance customer relationships
Apply multiple pricing levels to sales items and assign a specific level to each customer.

Integrate with sales and purchasing
Automatically update costs and quantities when items are purchased, received, sold, and returned, as well as make adjustments without having to create sales or purchasing transactions.

Put information to work
Increase sales and improve profitability by using robust inquiry tools to track strong and weak product lines, spot trends, and accurately forecast future needs.

Features: Inventory
•  Cost methods: Setup your inventory valuation to match your business needs by assigning one of three different inventory cost methods to each item-FIFO, LIFO, or Average. •  Item types and capacity: Choose from multiple item types including stock, kit, labor, and service, or set up user-defined fields. Manage an unlimited number of inventory items, and prevent errors with an optional alert when invalid item numbers are entered on sales or purchase orders. •  Serial and lot numbers: For items with the same item number, assign lot #s or serial #s to the items to maintain control over your inventory.
•  Unit of measure: Input individual units of measure for each item.
•  Multiple price types: Choose the pricing type that works best for each item: specified price, percent increase on last cost, percent adjustment on base price, or amount adjustment on base price.
•  Kitting: Group items sold together as kits and automatically track component costs and quantities when kits are sold.
•  Multiple price levels: Create up to five price levels per item and then assign price levels by customer.
•  Multiple tax levels: Determine whether or not items are taxable and assign the appropriate sales and purchase tax to each item. Tax is then automatically calculated on sales and purchasing documents.
•  Allocate quantities: Ensure appropriate inventory tracking by allocating items to a sales order as soon as it is created. Once posted, items quantities and costs are updated in the system.
•  Automatic update to inventory: Item costs and quantities are automatically updated in the system when items costs and quantities are purchased, received, sold, and returned. Automatic reminders help ensure that items are consistently replenished.
•  Assembly component management: Track inventories of both assembled units and their individual components, with parts linked to specific finished goods. Manage complex, interrelated inventories and obtain forecasting reports on up to ten levels of assembled components.
•  Backorder tracking: Items sold that are out of stock are automatically assigned to a backorder list to be purchased later.
•  Adjust inventory: Adjust quantities and costs directly, without going through the sales or purchasing process.
•  Change costs: Meet your business need by changing the item costing method after it has been set up.
•  Physical inventory checklists: Conduct accurate physical inventories with the physical inventory worksheet.
•  View history: Easily look up and view your inventory history by item.
•  Find item transactions: Find all item transactions associated with a given inventory item with an inventory item search tool.
•  Inventory stock status: View detailed real-time inventory prices, costs, and quantities by item, along with summary inventory value.
•  Other Inventory reports and inquiries: Analyze inventory using reports and inquiries, including the historical stock status, item price list and physical inventory checklist.

Small Business Financials Modules

ModuleDescription
Financial Management Maintain tight control of banking, while effectively monitoring cash inflows and outflows. Microsoft Business Solutions Small Business Financials integrates all cash, check, and credit card transactions, track bank account balances, and lets you automate the monthly process of reconciling these accounts.
Financials Microsoft Small Business Financials is designed for ease of use, business growth, and changing business needs. It provides you with flexible account structures, efficient transaction processing, familiar Microsoft Excel-based budgeting, and sophisticated financial reporting capabilities.
Fixed Assets Take control and improve fiscal management of fixed business assets with convenient, flexible ways to automatically calculate, track, and post depreciation.
Reporting Provide easy access to information without interrupting everyday business processes. Microsoft Business Solutions Small Business Financials offers more than 148 customizable reports that let you quickly view, analyze, and monitor business metrics and more.
Inventory Manage inventory effectively with flexible pricing and cost methods, back-order management, and real-time inventory adjustments. All this integrated with sales and purchasing processes helps ensure your business can purchase, sell, and replenish stock to control costs and meet customer needs.
Purchasing Manage vendor relationships, control costs, and replenish inventory efficiently. Microsoft Small Business Financials includes automated purchasing, payment, and vendor tracking processes, with integration to help ensure purchasing and inventory information is consistent, current, free of errors, and easily available.
Sales Streamlined sales processes enable employees to process and fulfill orders smoothly, helping ensure customer satisfaction. Sales reporting capabilities turn data into information to help you make better decisions about offerings, and meet customer needs better.
HR Management / Payroll Save money, maintain control over payroll processes, and respond quickly to employee requests with Microsoft Small Business Financials U.S. Payroll.


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Small Business Accounting

Top 10 Benefits of Small Business Accounting 2006

Small Business Accounting 2006 was designed to bring small business owners and managers the benefit and understanding of their accounting and finances with one, comprehensive solution. With Small Business Accounting 2006, companies can share data and information across the business and across software programs; access important business information easily, allowing better business decision making; and increase efficiency, enabling better connection with customers—all this with the familiar look and feel of Office. Here are the top 10 reasons to put Small Business Accounting 2006 to work for you.

1  •  Start working right away.

Small Business Accounting 2006 does not require technical training to install, or accounting training to use. The Startup Wizard, configured to meet company needs, helps get you up and running, and ready to migrate existing data, right away. Write your first invoice within 10 minutes. Businesses already using Microsoft Office Excel or Intuit QuickBooks to store financial information can easily export existing data to Small Business Accounting 2006. Small Business Accounting 2006 has the familiar look and feel of the Microsoft Office programs you use every day—the learning curve is virtually zero.

2  •  Share data across the business and software programs.

Integrated with Microsoft Office 2003 programs, Small Business Accounting 2006 brings the power of Office programs to financial data. Companies can reuse data entered in other programs, such as Excel or the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client, saving time and eliminating data re-entry error. Data from Small Business Accounting 2006, for example, quotes and invoices, can be exported to Microsoft Office Word for consistent, professional-looking documents. Reports can be created in Small Business Accounting 2006 and then exported to Excel, maintaining all of their rich formatting, for deeper analysis and calculations.

3  •  Make better-informed business decisions.

The customizable Company Home page gives owners an up-to-date view of important company information—daily reminders, cash flow, bank account summaries, overdue customer accounts, vendor lists—providing businesses the information they need at a glance. Companies can use the Cash Flow Forecasting tool to manage upcoming revenue and expenses by running different scenarios to pick the best path for the business.

4  •  Break out details in customizable reports.

Company owners can get detailed views and analyze their business information with more than 60 customizable reports. An easy-to-use reporting tool allows for a wide range of modification to each report. Any report can be exported to Excel, while retaining rich formatting, for further calculations or chart building.

5  •  Get a complete view of the customer.

Customers who use Microsoft Office 2003 Editions can put all of their customer account information in one place by integrating Small Business Accounting 2006 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Update1. This combination enables e-mail, notes, appointments, and documents to be linked, along with financial history and status, directly to each customer account. Employees get a comprehensive overview of the customer account, and can respond to customers quickly and accurately. Owners and managers get added insight into all aspects of the sales pipeline. Learn more about Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Update.

6  •  Streamline payroll and integrate seamlessly with ADP.

Payroll and tax subscription services from Automatic Dataprocessing, Inc. (ADP) integrate seamlessly with Small Business Accounting 20062. The ADP payroll and tax service eliminates the need for paper-based time sheets. The offering includes tax reminders and signature ready tax forms clients can use to file and pay their payroll taxes. ADP payroll for Small Business Accounting allows clients to print their own checks. Learn more about ADP payroll services.

7  •  Share secure, reliable multi-user access.

Up to five users can use the program at the same time, with support for high volumes of transactions and no limits on the number of records. No waiting for colleagues to finish an entry, and no shifting into and out of multiple-user mode. Work flows more efficiently because multiple employees can access business information that helps them do their jobs more effectively.

8  •  Automate bank accounts, customer payments, and forms.

Small Business Accounting 2006 helps make banking tasks and processes easier. Companies can customize and organize customer payments, write and print checks, manage multiple bank accounts, and reconcile accounts and order forms. Small Business Accounting 2006 can also access credit card processing provided by third parties2, print receipts, and create customer credit-memo templates for future transactions.

9  •  Keep track of transactions, sales, and billable hours.

When Small Business Accounting 2006 is integrated with Office 20031, employees can use Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Update to create invoices, quotes, and orders. These can be linked to customer accounts in Small Business Accounting 2006 to update information in real time. Additionally, using Outlook, employees can mark appointments as billable and submit them directly to Small Business Accounting. This eliminates excess paperwork and increases accuracy and revenue from billable time.

10  •  Use a solution that grows with the company.

Small Business Accounting 2006 is scalable to accommodate growth of the thriving small company. When the financial needs of the business change, Small Business Accounting can be seamlessly upgraded to a more sophisticated program from Microsoft Business Solutions. Learn more about Microsoft Business Solutions.
1This and other Microsoft Office programs and editions must be acquired separately, or as part of a Microsoft Office 2003 Edition.
2Requires purchase of an additional third-party service.

Small Business Accounting Comparison Guide

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Great Plains  •   Small Business Financials  •   Small Business Accounting
Great Plains - Microsoft Dynamics GP Professional and Standard
Great Plains is a comprehensive business management solution built on the highly scalable and affordable platform of Microsoft technologies. It offers a cost-effective solution for managing and integrating finances, e-commerce, supply chain, manufacturing, project accounting, field service, customer relationships, and human resources. Great Plains is easy to deploy and configure, and with its modular approach you can license only the functions you currently need, with the option of adding users and additional capabilities in the future.

Small Business Financials - Microsoft Dynamics Small Business Financials
For companies that require more than basic accounting software, Microsoft Small Business Financials North America Edition offers affordable, integrated financial management capabilities. With sales, purchasing, inventory, payroll, and reporting functionality, Microsoft Small Business Financials can help your business excel in e-commerce, financial management, and supply-chain management.

Small Business Accounting - Microsoft Small Business Accounting
A full-featured financial management program designed for small business owners to manage their business financials using out-of-the-box software that has the familiarity of Microsoft Office 2003.

Dramatically Improve the Performance of Your Business!

Increase efficiency and facilitate decision-making.

Turn your company data into a powerful tool for making decisions.