Find The Data You’re Looking For With Smartlists in Dynamics GP

Have you ever tried to find basic information in Microsoft Dynamics GP but don’t know which of the 800+ reports to look at? Have you ever tried creating your own Smartlist? Smartlists in Dynamics GP can be a quick and easy thing to create when you understand how they work. It’s important to realize that a Smartlist is just a list of records that meet a certain criteria. Once you create the Smartlist, you have the ability to export it to Excel and get totals or subtotals on fields.

Ready to find the data you need in Dynamics GP with a Smartlist?

For this example, you might want to see a list of payments received from a specific customer during a specific time frame. You only want to see the Customer ID, Customer Name, Phone # and current balance fields in your list.

The Smartlist screen is broken down into modules and then sub topics.

Let’s create the customer balance Smartlist.

1. Click on the ‘+’ in front of the module name to expand the trees so you can see what the subtopics are and any Smartlists that have already been created and saved as Favorites.
2. Go to Smartlist – Sales – Customer and click on the ‘*’ which is the default Smartlist you can use to build on. As you can see, this Smartlist already contains some of the fields we‘re looking for and others we don’t really  need. 
3. If  you click on the Columns icon on the top ribbon,  the Change Column Display will open up.In this case, we don’t need any address information in our Smartlist so we can click on the fields we don’t need and hit the remove button.
   
   That leaves us with these fields and now we can start adding fields.
4. To add a field, click the ‘Add’ button to bring up a list of available fields. The fields appear in alphabetical order based on the field name. If you know you’re looking for a specific type of field, like Currency for example, you can click on the Type column header to sort the fields by type.Note: It’s important to remember that each Smartlist item you select is only looking at ONE specific table in Dynamics GP. The field you are looking for may not be in the table for the Smartlist item you selected. Sometimes you just need to select a different Smartlist item to look at a different table, other times you might be looking for fields that exist in multiple tables. If that’s the case, then you need to use Smartlist Builder, which allows you to select fields from multiple tables, but we won’t be going into that in this example.
   
5. Use the scroll bars to scroll down and select the Customer Balance field and click the ‘OK’ button.
   
6. Now Customer Balance shows in our list. Once your list is correct and all the fields you want are displayed, click the ‘OK’ button.
   Congratulations! You’ve just created your first Smartlist.

Note: Notice there are 3 fields at the bottom of the screen. The first one will show how many records were found, the second indicates the search has completed, and the third shows how many records were searched and what the criteria was.

Now you’ll want to define your Search Criteria:

1. Hit the ‘Search’ icon from the ribbon on top to open the Search Criteria window. Here, you have the ability to enter up to 4 different search criteria options. Maybe you only want to see customers who have a balance over $500.00. We can set that up as a Search Definition as shown below.
2. Enter the number of records you want the search to return in the Search Options field. If you have 500,000 customer records in your system with a balance over $500 and you leave that number as is, you will only see the first 1000 records. If you want to see ALL records, you might enter 9999999999 in that field to return all records that match your criteria.
   
   
   Now we see 88 customers with a balance over $500.00.On the Smartlist below, I added the State field and moved it to the first column. While you’re in the Smartlist, you could sort the record by State, Customer Name, Customer Number or Customer simply by clicking on the column heading. Notice the little up arrow on the Customer Number field – this indicates the Smartlist is being sorted on that field.
   
   Let’s say you wanted to see customers with balance of over $500 only in Kansas. To do this, we would add a second criteria to the Smartlist.
   
   If you create a Smartlist you will be using over and over again, you can save it as a “Favorite” and it will show up on the Smartlist menu for you.

To save a Smartlist as a Favorite:

1. Click the ‘Favorites’ button on the top ribbon.
2. Give your Smartlist a name.
3. Click the ‘Add’ button for a drop down menu and select ‘Add Favorite.’Now your Smartlist is on the menu for you to use any time you need it. If you need to make a change to your Smartlist, for example changing the state from KS to IL, just hit the ‘Search’ button on the top ribbon and change the State Criteria from KS to IL.

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