For years I’ve witnessed Microsoft Dynamics GP clients need to alter data in their systems due to changes dictated by either their customers or vendors. However, they hesitated to do it even though Microsoft supplied a tool for these issues called the Professional Services Tool Library (PSTL).
Why were our customers reluctant to make changes with PSTL? One word—cost.
PSTL was running our clients approximately $500 per “FIX”, eliciting responses from them such as “It’s ok, we’ll just live with the Customer ID of NJNETS001, even though the customer moved to Brooklyn!”
The good news is settling for this kind of inaccurate data is no longer necessary since early 2012, because the PSTL tool can now be installed free of charge with the rest of the modules our clients are licensed to use in their Dynamics environment. This adds tremendous functionality they would have never considered taking on in older Dynamics GP instances, due to the thousands of dollars that would have been needed to perform functions in the window below.
Now, after we have finished installing Dynamics GP on a client’s LAN, my first course of action is to install the PSTL tool on all computers housing the application, if not done so already.
Not only is this add-on useful for the more mundane, well-known purposes of: changing Customer & Vendor IDs without losing history; combining customer accounts into one; or changing around an Inventory Item’s ID number, but now that I have the full suite of tools to use, I often train my clients to also take advantage of:
1. SOP Customer Item Lookup
- This feature in the “sales tools” section of PSTL allows a user to look up past items purchased for a customer during Sales Order Entry.
- Order takers can view item history for quantities as well as prices, and then select the item in the history lookup screen to be automatically entered as a line item on the current order.
2. RM Transaction Unapply
- This tool is another great feature of the PSTL product, allowing customers to unapply sales documents which have already been moved to the history tables in GP through the Paid Transaction Removal process.
- A/R inquiry screens in the system will make a lot more sense to users, as they may have been reluctant in the past to move records to history on the off chance that one of their customer’s checks might be returned from the bank as NSF.
- Now when our clients look at aging buckets in the Customer Payment Summary Inquiry window and view documents with an Open Status, it really means that the transaction is unpaid and not just in the Open Tables of A/R. If a check happens to bounce in a few days…boom….use the RM TRANSACTION UNAPPLY tool to open up the original A/R record once again, which in the past was impossible to do after running Paid Transaction Removal
3. SOP PO Number Check
- This is a feature I automatically turn on with my new implementations these days. It’s an add-on which can:
- prevent duplicate POs from customers on specific SOP docs
- require PO’s for SOP docs (if this is what a client chooses to do)
- bring up an “exception list” to specific customers in the system who do not have to abide by the restrictions applied through this PSTL feature.
4. Default Add Item POP/SOP
- This is a feature I like to enable in the Miscellaneous section of the PSTL Tool for all of my implementations, in an effort to prevent non-inventory items from being entered during the PO process.
- More often than not, when opening the Purchase Order window in Dynamics GP users will find that the ADD ITEM option is NOT checked off as per the screen shot below. The problem is nobody ever bothers to check this option, nor should they have to.
What might seem harmless to the naked eye can cause some issues down the road, as a misguided keystrokes during line item entry will allow a non-inventory item to be entered on the Purchase Order without a prompt from Dynamics GP.
By enabling the DEFAULT ADD ITEM POP/SOP fix, end-users will always be prompted by Dynamics when attempting to add an unknown Inventory Item onto a Purchase Order.
There are some other great features of this tool which can be utilized in each of the modules in Dynamics GP, but the ones I covered above seem to be the most coveted by our clients. To read more about installing, making a shortcut, and using each of the tools available in PSTL, you can go to the documentation folder on your Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010, GP2013 or GP2016 install, and read theProfServicesToolsLibrary.pdf that is available.
I hope you’ll start using the PSTL tool today during Dynamics GP implementations, as the product might reduce some of the normal complaints during a changeover of systems Dazzle your trainees with some added functionality their current application most certainly did not provide!
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