The Dreadful Abyss of Changing Banks in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Diane Bilyeu, Controller
at Rockton Software

Are you a GP User but you didn’t set it up?  Do you now have that daunting task of changing banks?  Do you have to try and find all the places in GP that have to be changed to reflect the new bank as the default bank?  Hitting the Panic Button?

Enter Superwoman (or man), GP’s Navigational Dashboards! 

 For those of you that count ‘clicks’ to get to your destination, it could take you 5-6 (or more counting the mistakes) clicks using the ‘old’ Tool Bar and that’s IF you know where you are going.  You would have to start by going to MS Dynamics GP>(hmmm, now where?) Edit, Tools or Maint>(hmmm, now where?) Setup, Utilities or Routines>(hmmm, now where) Setup has 6 possible choices, Utilities has 4 possible choices, Routines has 3 possible choices.  I think you get my drift here!  If you didn’t set up GP and you don’t know it blind-folded then you quickly get lost in that abyss, possibly intimidated and at the very least will more than likely not catch all the places you need to change your bank in.  Keep in mind that in GP for each real life bank account you have, you have to have a GL account and a ‘checkbook’ set up in GP.  You tie each checkbook to its own GL Account.  Now the hard part happens, if you still use the Tool bar.  It’s easy, if you use the new Navigational Dashboards.  You have to change all the places in GP where the checkbook(s) are used.

By going to the Navigational Dashboards you simply click on each dashboard for all of the modules you use.  As an example, let’s use the Sales Dashboard.  You click on the Sales Dashboard to open it up, go to Setup and proceed to click on each ‘section’:  ‘Receivables’, ‘Customer Class’ (if you use them you have to open each class go to Accounts and change the checkbook there), SOP, Invoicing.  Change the checkbook in each one and you are done.  Very simple, painless and time saving!  You do the same thing for each module you use.

For most companies you use one bank for AR & AP, possibly a different one for PR.  You just set up whichever bank (checkbook) you want to use for each module.  For your Financial module it works a little bit differently because GP has ‘assumed’ you may be using multiple banks.  The only thing you need to do thru the Financial dashboard (actually needs to be done first) is to set up your GL account for each bank and then go and setup your Checkbook for each bank and attach it to the GL account you just setup.  When doing your Bank Transactions, you enter the bank at the time you do the transaction so you have the choice of changing banks.  I hope my tip has helped make your day a little bit easier!  This Dashboard Damsel is signing off until next time…….

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