With the holiday season underway, we would like to take this opportunity to THANK YOU for your continued patronage. We have had the blessing to provide support services to many of you for over a decade. We truly appreciate this opportunity and we can assure you that each and every member of our team continues to learn and strives to help both you and your fellow Great Plains users get the most from your Microsoft Dynamics GP business software system.
The focus of this newsletter is help you prepare for your annual year end transactions in your GP system. The articles include year-end closing routines, recommended annual maintenance services and an article regarding the printing of 1099 forms from Great Plains.
Year-End Services for Dynamics GP System
It’s once again time to plan for the year-end processing in your Microsoft Great Plains ERP system.
Do you need a reminder on how to create the 2022 year to permit you to process transactions come January 1, 2022?
Do you recall how to close each sub-module, so that information such as purchases for vendors in 2021 and 2022 will be correct.
Because these are tasks that you only need to perform once a year, you may be like most of our clients who schedule their year-end service session with our team to remind them and assist them in these once-a-year routines. Especially since some of the routines could take days to “undo” if not executed correctly.
Please email support@micro-force.com to request to schedule this service. If you have a preference as to who on your team you would like to work with, please include that in your support request.
DBA services for GP – give your software system its annual “Tune-Up”
When your Dynamics GP - Great Plains system was first installed, there was a lot of magic that happened "behind the scenes" with your Great Plains software. This included services to fine tune and configure Dynamics GP to work optimally with your Microsoft SQL (Structured Query Language) database.
An example of these services was the creation of Microsoft SQL maintenance plans, so that your data could be backed up multiple times a day. This way, if there was ever a data failure during the day, you would not need to lose the entire day of work if you had to go to a backup to restore your GP data. Routines to maintain your backup logs were likely put in place, so that this would not eat up all your space on your servers over a period of time. Just like a tune-up for your car, certain maintenance needs to be provided to keep SQL running efficiently and prevent possible database issues, which could lead to downtime of your GP system. Unlike a car, this service can be performed while users are using your system for most of the service. What is my risk if I do not maintain my GP system properly? Here are some examples of what we have seen taken place when this was not done:
Users experience extremely slow performance when using GP
Users are locked out of using Dynamics GP
Data corruption and GP crashes
Backups are found to not have been performed for months, many times unnoticed until after a system failure. This could be catastrophic to the operations of your business
Microsoft recommends that these back office services be performed by a database administrator who has been trained to best configure your version of Dynamics GP with the version of Microsoft SQL that is on your servers. It is recommended that this be done at least once a year. Besides the review of the status of the original routines in place, the tasks this person performs include possible index rebuilds, auto close, auto shrinking of GP databases and reviewing system event log for potential issues before they cause problems such as a system shutdown. They also fine tune SQL so that it can run at maximum performance for all users. Our organization has database administrators who perform these services for our Dynamics GP clients on a regular basis. This service typically takes between 4 and 8 hours to complete, but is dependent upon the number of users, company databases and frequency of this service.
So if you do not have an internal staff member who has performed this SQL database admin service for Dynamics GP system at least once in the past year, please reach out to us to schedule this maintenance service. Please either talk to your account manager or email support@micro-force.com to begin this process. If you email us, please reference dba service request as your support issue.
1099 Reporting in Dynamics GP Will Require an Update
The IRS has announced that there will be a change to your 1099 reporting for the 2021 calendar year. In order to print these new forms from your Dynamics GP system, Microsoft has released a software “service pack” that will need to be installed on your system. But the update is only available for any of the versions of Dynamics GP that Microsoft still supports. The table below provides the versions that are still supported. The current version is Dynamics GP 2018 R4.
Based on your version of Dynamics GP, here are your options:
If you are using the Dynamics GP version GP2018, GP 2018 R2 or GP 2018 R3 and you are planning to print 1099’s from Dynamics GP, you will need to apply the year-end service pack.
If you are on GP 2016 or earlier versions, you cannot print 1099’s onto the new forms out of Dynamics GP. The 1099 data that from your Dynamics GP system will be correct. So, you can use Dynamics GP to print properly the data that you can place onto the new 1099 forms.
There is a service provider named GreenShades for Dynamics GP that can print your forms for a fee if you are using an older version of GP. Please email us at sales@micro-force.com if you would like us to provide their contact info to you.
To scheduled your update, please contact us at support@micro-force.com to do so.
To reference the IRS details about the form changes, please access this info via these links below.
1099-DIV FORM: 2021 Form 1099-DIV (irs.gov)
1099-MISC FORM CHANGES: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1099msc.pdf
1099- NEC form: 2021 Form 1099-NEC (irs.gov)
Due Dates for 1099 form submittal/filing to the IRS can be found here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1099gi.pdf
ADDITIONAL DYNAMICS GP RESOURCES
All of our newsletters for the past two years can be found in one central location on our website. You can view older versions of these newsletters by going to Resource Library > Newsletters on our website: www.micro-force.com. For more info about your GP system and business software in general, visit our blog site at https://www.micro-force.com/blog
Thank you once again for choosing Micro Force, we truly value our partnership together and the opportunity to serve your business solution needs!
Sincerely, Jim McCann Partner, Senior Sales Analyst and Software Consultant Micro Force, A Velosio Affiliate Phone: (631) 421-1030 x 302 / (212) 777-7029 x 302 Email: jmccann@micro-force.com