Who uses BI? - Dwight Specht

This one's an awesomely simple yet on-the-dot post, which I read today. I am not going to brief about this post and I leave it to you read it fully, understand what exactly it wants us to learn.

Here is the post, written by Dwight Specht: Who uses BI?

I myself am working on BI reports, a lot, nowadays and posts such as this only add to my constant improvement.

Special thanks to Dwight.

VAIDY

Customer Credit Summary: Average Days To Pay

I received an email today with a query on GP's "Average Days To Pay" on a Customer's Credit Summary.

Query is: How GP calculates Average Days To Pay for a customer?

According to GP's Receivables Management user manual:

After a customer has paid his or her first invoice, the average days to pay (ADTP) is calculated based on the number of invoices a customer has, the time taken to pay the first invoice, and the time taken to pay the most recent invoice.

The formula for calculating the average days to pay is: 
ADTP = (Current ADTP) x (Number of Invoices) + (Number of Days Taken to Pay Most Recent Invoice) / (Number of Invoices + 1)

The time it took to pay the first invoice would provide the initial value for the Current ADTP. Any later invoices paid by this customer will provide the values for the number of invoices and the number of days taken to pay the most recent invoice. The ADTP calculated on the customer’s initial invoices then becomes the “Current ADTP.” You can use this value when you recalculate the ADTP for later invoices.

There are two ADTPs; LTD (Life To Date) and YTD (Year To Date).

The important point that you may have to remember is that Average Days To Pay YTD will be calculated only based on Amounts Since Last Close.

VAIDY

Packt's Microsoft Dynamics Mayhem

Packt Publications has once again given us an opportunity to get desired Microsoft Dynamics books at staggering discounts.

The list of books are quite handful. You do get favorite Microsoft Dynamics GP books (Cookbook by Mark Polino, Reporting by Liley & Duncan & Implementation by Victoria Yudin); all are awesome books for any GPian.

Visit Packt's page to learn more about this and get benefited: Microsoft Dynamics Mayhem.

VAIDY

RIP Apture - I Will Miss You

How many of my blog readers remember about my blog being enabled with Apture Highlights?

It's very sad that this beautiful feature is now no more. I got to know this long back, but the feature that I added on my blog still worked; until this morning.

You check out Apture's Site. All you got to see is a message from Apture Team as below:

I am not sure what to express, but only one thing which I feel right now is this: Google, you have successfully killed one more beautiful product.

RIP Apture. I loved your features. I loved the way you simplified my vocabulary learning. I loved the way you just simply popped out of the web page without taking me to any other site. I loved the way you were just a simple yet catchy product called Apture. I was so in awe that I put your logo on my blog and proudly claimed that my blog got "Aptured".

Not any more.

I will surely miss you.

VAIDY

Test Company Posting Journal File Destinations

One thing we all must remember while restoring a Live Company DB onto a Test Company DB is, that several places in GP tables, Company ID is stored. We have a SQL Script that will search ALL tables and ALL columns that contain the Inter ID (SQL ID for each GP database) and replace the live DB ID with test DB ID.

This post explains some specific cases where the Posting Journals of all transaction types are destined to a text file. Typically, in a multi-company environment, consultants would setup the path for all Posting Journals with the respective company Inter ID (or any folder name that uniquely identify each company).

I will explain you an ideal scenario, where this poses an issue.

I would restore live backup onto a Test Company and run the SQL script that will replace all live company ID references to test company ID. But my Posting Journals File destination is a simple string value, something like below (I have taken Purchase as a sample series):

:C:Journals/[CompanyID]/Purchase/[JournalReportName].txt

So if my live company ID is, for instance, VMLIVE, then the above path would like this:

:C:Journals/VMLIVE/Purchase/JournalReportName.txt

Whenever I post a purchase transaction, my Posting Journal detail would go and get append on this file, which I can audit at any point of time.

Now, consider that my Test Company ID is VMTEST. When I restore my live backup onto my test company and run the SQL script which replace live company reference with test company ID, everything would get fixed except this. Since the value stored in File Destination field in the Posting Journal Destinations table (SY02200) is NOT JUST the company ID, but the above Filename with Path.

After restoration and I post a purchase transaction on my test company, the posting information get appended on the file JournalReportName.txt on the path C:\Journals\VMLIVE\Purchase, which is WRONG. It's not just wrong. Your posting journal file gets dumped with test entries as well as live entries. If any client audits the Posting Journal files as part of their internal process(es), then it's a big trouble.

In such scenarios, where all posting journals are destined to a text file on a path identified specifically by a company ID or name, the GP Administrator must make sure that the field FILEXPNM (File Export Name) on table SY02200 (Posting Journal Destinations) must be properly updated before we post any test entires. Below is the simple UPDATE statement which would fix this:

UPDATE SY02200
SET FILEXPNM = REPLACE(FILEXPNM, '[LiveCompanyID/Name]', '[TestCompanyID/Name]')

Where [LiveCompanyID/Name] denotes the value which identifies your Live Company and [TestCompanyID/Name] denotes the value which identifies your Test Company.

VAIDY

To all Budding GP developers - Screen Resolution Does Matter

This is very silly point, but quite a huge dampener when it comes to Customer satisfaction.

I had given a simple customization as a trial to a budding developer as part of an exercise. I received the chunk to test it out.

What I could see was a huge window containing almost 50-75 fields (including labels, several text boxes, etc.) with lot screen real estate being wasted between fields. Secondly, this window went out of my test machine's screen space. The only possibility for that, in my opinion, is the resolution of the developer's machine was way too higher than my test machine's screen resolution.

Always, keep in mind, that when you develop a customization on a computer with higher resolution than that of the customers', it's going to be an issue. Customer would have to scroll horizontally each time to enter or view data on each field. And trust me, that's very irritable than a bad and buggy customization itself.

Always, try to limit the window size that would fit inside a 1024 X 768 screen resolution (that's the lowest that I feel is still existing in this universe), so it would fit in almost all resolutions.

This possibly be a non-issue soon with technology being so advanced nowadays and customers are willing to shed out some bucks on higher resolution & wide screen monitors.

But you never know.

VAIDY

Support Debugging Tool (SDT) v11.0 Build 16 is Released

We have a bundle of features and enhancements added to SDT and the new version v11.0 Build 16 is released.

David has a write up on this release with exhaustive details.

Sure this is going to be more useful than previous versions.

VAIDY

Welcome 2012...!

My heartfelt wishes to entire GP Community... Happy, Prosperous, Successful & Peaceful 2012...!!!

Most part of 2011 was quite dull, especially the later period, due to various professional and personal commitments. I would like to change it this year and be active as much as possible.

Wishes again for a wonderful 2012.

VAIDY

SQL Tip: Find Table(s) Having A Particular Column

This SQL query is my savior for a long time now. Thought I would just share it with all budding SQL developers.

Q: How to find the table(s) which contain a particular column which I know?
A: Below is the query that would do the trick.

SELECT name 
FROM sys.objects 
WHERE object_id IN 
(
SELECT object_id 
FROM sys.columns 
WHERE name = [columnname] --Column which you would want to locate
)

This query will return all tables which contains the specific column. And this query also would save your time immensely.

VAIDY

Capturing Images from a Microsoft Word Document (.docx) - David

That was awesome. Sheer awesome.

David shares with us about capturing images from a Microsoft Word Document (only .docx) file.

Honestly, I never even imagined that any .DOCX/.XLSX/.PPTX file is actually zip archived file in disguise.

Thank you so much, David. Another tip that's quite interesting and awesome.

VAIDY