Customizing Microsoft Great Plains

by Tenny Ing

Published on this site: December 8th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Microsoft Great Plains is a very popular accounting software that is so flexible to work for various types of businesses. The reason is it has so many customization tools, like Dexterity, eConnect, VBA, and Crystal Report. It comes with modules like General Ledger, Sales Orders, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, Project Accounting, Inventory, Manufacturing and other modules, all of them allow customization to make it fit your business.

Dexterity is a programming language that allows developers to modify or add custom window forms and reports to Great Plains. The results look just like Great Plains built-in forms and reports. For example, you can have extra data fields like multiple emails and website addresses on the Employee Maintenance window and report. It also allows the developers to add functionalities that are different from what Great Plains already has, for example, you can automate posting of selected batches of sales orders to invoices.

eConnect is another tool that you can obtain separately from Microsoft Great Plains to automate the migration of external data from and to Great Plains. The data will be converted into XML file format before eConnect works with it. Typically, there will be a Visual Basic program to specify where the data will come from and go to Great Plains. It can also work with Business Portal and the web, and there is an option to migrate data in the background using the Windows Queuing services.

VBA stands for Visual Basic for Application allows developers to modify window forms and reports for Great Plains. However, VBA is a separate program engine and the developers need to test it to make sure that VBA and Great Plains work well together. Like Dexterity, the developers can use VBA to add functionalities to Great Plains.

Crystal Report is a very popular reporting tool that the developers can use to create custom reports for Great Plains. Even though Great Plains has a Report Writer, but more complex reports may need to be written in Crystal Report. Custom reports like complex income statements, aging reports, gross margin reports are just a few examples.

With the advance of the web access, remote customization has become very practical and convenient. The developers usually already have Great Plains tools and then create the custom program or modification. The result can be installed and tested remotely easily.

Tenny Ing writes for Viccomp, Inc. There are other useful tools like Continuum to synchronize Great Plains and an external program written in Visual Basic or Excel. You could visit http://www.Viccompinc.com and we can provide you with more answers.