If you need a way to manage, track, and report on projects in Dynamics GP, then you may be doing some research on what solutions would be best for your business.
Two that should show up in your Google search are Project Cost and Project Accounting.
Is there a difference?
Project Accounting allows you to keep track of revenue and expenses for a specific project, job, or other work subcategories of your company. It also lets you to group projects together and report on that grouping. Reporting can include both actual and budget figures.
Project Cost is a tightly integrated project module for Microsoft Dynamics GP, with GP requisition integration, cash receipts processing, and Report Integration for Dynamics GP and DevExpress.
Both can manage and track your projects. Both work with GP. Both have reporting capabilities.
But there are some key differences that you should be aware of when deciding, and we have broken them down for you in this simple chart.
Here are some important points to consider:
- Tracking project details and WBS is an essential functionality to modern Project systems.
- Project Accounting may have implementation costs associated with T&E entry.
- Any cost accounting system without a good audit trail and reconciliation toolset is inviting increased maintenance problems as well as concerns with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
- Audit problems, lack of Cost Pooling and Allocations are critical issues for Government Contractors.
- Most companies have some unique reporting needs.
- Count the number of windows that need to be opened to bill a single timesheet transaction. Make sure your system is efficient.
Looking into both solutions is important. Make sure you know the ins and outs so you can select the one that will meet your business needs.
If you would like to learn more about Project Cost feel free to:
- Check out this new features blog
- Schedule a demo
- Start your FREE 30 Day Trial
Welcome to our price strategies video series. We are taking you on a virtual journey. You will learn ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.
Our first video was all about rebates, our second video was about dynamic pricing, the third was date-driven pricing, and next up is price adjustments.
What do you think of when you hear price adjustments? How about commissions, royalties, restocking fees, promotions, and discounts. Yes, I could go on and on.
So, you want to adjust the price? Let’s break some of them down for you.
Treat your sales team and vendors like royalty
Because if you do, they will keep coming back. The sales team deserves a commission for all their hard work, and without that vendor, your customers wouldn’t get that specific item.
But now it’s payout time, and it can be a challenge to manage and keep track of who you owe and what amount.
Having a defined strategy will help you with performance, recruitment, engagement, and retention.
We all love a good discount or promotion
Discounts can take the form of a fixed value, percentage, or discounts on products, collections, or variants in their stores. Importantly, discounts give you control over pricing and promotion. They can be used in a variety of ways:
- Feeling of exclusivity
- Launching a new product
- Buy 1 Get 1
- Limited time offers
- Sales promotions
- End of year discount
- Seasonal pricing
- Quantity discounts
Whatever discount you are giving it should have a strategy, it should be easy to implement and track, and it should help drive sales.
What Should Be My Pricing Strategy?
Ben Franklin once said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
Many manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and eCommerce businesses look at their competitors to find similar products to their own. They then pick a price that makes sense, perhaps blindly making guesses based on where their product is at right now.
Yes, you should analyze your competition to know how to position your pricing strategy. But picking your price based on your competitors is not always the right price.
When you don’t have a system in place, it’s too easy to change direction with no true rhyme or reason. Ask yourself these 5 questions:
- What will generate more sales? Ending the price of your product in a “0,” “97,” “98,” or “99”?
- What is the best goal for your product? Revenue, market share, total profit, profit margin, customer lifetime value, average revenue per unit, or something else? And should that goal change during its life cycle?
- How will you react to the competition’s behavior? How might your competitors react to your product, and why? If you match a competitor’s price, how will it impact revenue and profit? What types of promotions will you never resort to doing?
- Should you price low for market share, or high for premium branding?
- What should be the central strategy for your product? And will the central strategy change if you offer different pricing tiers?
It’s time to Automate
Everyone is using price calculations in some way, shape, or form. You should have a solution that handles all of them.
Rockton Pricing Management can handle most any calculation you need and you can hit a specific GL Account for each one.
Need multiple discounts or fees for one line item, no problem. Charge that restocking fee and give the vendor rebate all at the same time.
With Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) you simply establish any pricing scenario one time and RPM does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes. Automatically!
Conclusion
Price calculations are a must for any business. Figuring out a pricing strategy does take time. Do the research, test some scenarios, and make sure it is going to be just as cost-effective for you as it will be for the vendor or customer.
There is no one size fits all scenario. Floor distributors use rebates for their vendors, waste management companies offer discounts, electronics have restocking fees, and don’t forget about product licensing fees and royalties.
Once you’ve chosen your pricing strategy, the next step is to pick a pricing model based on your product or service.
Neither your pricing strategy nor pricing model is set in stone, and as your product shifts, your pricing model can change, and likewise if your market positioning changes, so can your pricing strategy.
Solve Todays’ Challenges with GP Add-Ons
You know the GP Optimizer online magazine as the place to go for the most current articles about GP Add-On products. On Tuesday, July 28th and Thursday, July 30th, the Optimizer will gather an expert crew of ISVs for two full days of online, real-time, interactive education. We’ll journey through a variety of available solutions that can help you solve today’s challenges and earn CPE credits too!
We’ve all been impacted by the COVID crisis, and common themes are emerging for businesses. Many of you are in unfamiliar territory and the waters may be a little rough. Our presenters have paired up to address emerging challenges and explore best practices so you can chart a way forward – we want you to succeed and thrive!
What are we hearing from the field?
- You need cloud-based solutions and automation more than ever – and the means to secure your data.
- New regulations and compliance mandates must be navigated.
- You want streamlined operational efficiencies on all fronts – from internal workflows to cash flow, AP to payroll, supply chain to inventory management.
The GP Optimizer Live event has a little something for everyone –
Day 1 we will cover:
- How do you stay compliant with COVID-19 FFCRA and CARES Act Legislation?
- Get some practical tips from Integrity Data and Greenshades Software.
- Need more strategic inventory management? Panatrack and NETSTOCK get real about how to drive more profit from your warehouse, even while experiencing supply chain disruptions.
- What does it take to get your GP in the cloud? Join ICAN Software for a look at Mass Apply Documents automation; and PowerGP Online clears confusions from the cloud.
- Are you a distributor struggling with pricing issues? Rockton Software will dive into rebates, royalties, data-driven pricing, and units of measure conversion.
Day 2 we will cover:
- How can you streamline your accounting and sales tax strategies? Nolan Business Solutions and Avalara will show you how to master your digital transformation.
- Are changes in the supply chain costing you big? Blue Moon Industries and Horizons International discuss creating efficiencies in a changing world.
- Want a paperless AP process to enhance your remote work capabilities? Metafile and Mekorma team up to show you an end-to-end automation solution, from invoice capture to approving and sending payments.
- What’s easy about budgeting and project time tracking? Dynamics Budgets and Journyx can show you.
And that’s not all…
Two additional guest presentations will inspire and help you look towards the future:
Bob McAdam (VP / GM Dynamics Communities) will speak on Day 1 – get the scoop on Summit, upcoming Local User Groups and other ways to connect with the GP community.
On Day 2, Abra Gilman (Dynamics GP Practice Lead / Collins Computing) and Mariano Gomez (Microsoft MVP / Dir. of Technology at Mekorma) will discuss “Why GP is a Power Player.” You’ll get a sneak peek of coming GP enhancements, plus an exciting exploration of how the Power Platform suite can add automation and intelligence to native GP functionality.
Additionally, we’ll end both days with a virtual Expo where you can speak with the presenters, get your questions answered – and maybe win a prize or two.
Find the full schedule, session descriptions, and registration for Tuesday, July 28th here.
Find the full schedule, session descriptions, and registration for Thursday, July 30th here.
If you can’t attend in-person, the recordings will be made available. But we do hope to see you then – we’re all in this together!
Welcome to our price strategies video series. In this series, we are going to take you on a virtual journey and show you the ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.
Our first video was all about rebates, next we talked about dynamic pricing, and now we are going to dive into date-driven pricing.
How often do you change your prices? It is annually, bi-annually, or monthly? Do you have date-driven promos? This pricing strategy is most likely a part of your business because it is inevitable that pricing needs to be updated at some point.
Importance of Date-Driven Pricing
You have new pricing and it is time to update your ERP, so what do you do?????
- Maybe it is a time consuming, manual process of uploading spreadsheets and countless hours of updating the old pricing to the new pricing.
- Maybe you have hundreds of customers and hundreds of items and when there is new pricing or you want to do a 30-day promotion there is just no easy way to tell the system of those changes.
- Maybe your IT staff has to be up late the night of the 31st updating the system with the latest pricing changes so the next day it is ready to go.
It is important to have date-driven pricing to keep with up with the changes in your industry, with certain products or customers, and in making a profit.
No pricing changes could lead to no momentum, no growth, and no profit.
Why it is hard in an ERP
Most ERP systems are not always designed to handle your pricing changes based on date.
In typical ERPs, you can at least create price levels and assign them to customers, so they get the needed pricing. When you enter transactions, the price level will usually default and pull the price for them. They can always change it, but it is just a simple way to pull in the price.
Date-driven pricing might be an option in other ERPs but there are limitations.
Maybe you want to offer a specific customer a special price on a group of items for a set amount of time per contract.
OR
When it comes to special sales – such as a holiday promotion that may only last a day or two, a monthly flash sale or even just putting in your next year’s prices in advance.
Many pricing strategies can be a manual, time-consuming process.
Date-Driven Pricing Simplified
What if you never had to worry about pricing by date again? You can even set it up days in advance or months or even years in advance. Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) does all the work in the background (just tell it the date range) and it will pull in the correct price based on that date. This also takes the guesswork out of data entry knowing that you are not providing sale prices once a promotion or sale has expired. RPM will automatically turn off the price once it hits the expiration date.
RPM is the engine and does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes. Automatically!
Whether you have Dynamics GP, Business Central, or Acumatica; RPM has you covered.
Conclusion
Date-driven pricing is a non-negotiable for any business. It just ends up being a question of whether you want to do it manually or have it automated.
Good price management and strategies can promote your distribution business to the next level. If you are ready to price in a strategic way it is important to have a system in place to handle all types of pricing scenarios.
Lastly, you probably keep a close eye on the competition and adjust your prices accordingly. But whatever changes you want to make, RPM is there for you.
When you think about auditing Microsoft Dynamics GP, do you picture FBI-style interrogators searching the audit logs to point out all ill-intended crooks who are stealing money from your company? In our experience, fraud prevention and detection might be a good starting point for an auditing tool, but rarely is this what makes the magic of auditing valuable in the long term.
Here are 4 Tangible Benefits
#1 – Backup Data to the Rescue
Have you ever hit your keyboard by accident and wiped out some field? Imagine you are in Microsoft Dynamics GP with a transaction window open, receiving a phone call, and bumping your keyboard along the way.
After your call, you come back to Microsoft Dynamics GP and close the transaction window . . . what do you get? A message saying, Do you want to Save or Delete this Transaction? Your only reasonable option is to hit Save, even though you weren’t editing something in the first place. Fast forward a few days . . . you discover that your transaction has gibberish in a key field! If you have an auditing tool in place, you can visit your audit log to restore the information that has mistakenly been replaced.
One of our customers in the healthcare industry, with locations in 15 different states, notes that the number one reason they use Auditor is to “track changes deemed high-risk areas.”
#2 – Why does this keep happening
At Rockton, we ran across two employees scratching their heads on why the Customer Contact in Microsoft Dynamics GP kept changing. Diane was complaining that she changed the company’s contact every other day, and she did not understand why the save hadn’t been working.
We were able to check the audit logs, thus, realizing Ryan, our Internal Accountant, was changing it back. We had a good laugh because we had the audit log to show that Ryan and Diane kept undoing each other’s work, toggling the contact name back and forth.
Ultimately, we were able to have the two of them talk about why they were making the changes, then they came up with an improved procedure on what our system data means and how to use it.
#3 – Are employees pulling their weight?
Now more than ever the workforce is working from home. With this change in the workplace environment, have you ever wondered how productive a certain employee is? With Auditor you can audit one person and track how many new transactions they make. You’re able to view the audit log on a daily basis.
#4 – Troubleshooting made easy
Time and again we run into customers who have customizations that are behaving irrationally. Auditing can do wonders for tracking when and where there is a problem occurring. In the case of bad data, you can email or alert a system administrator with a pop-up message; the system administrator can go to a person’s computer right away and ask them what steps they took to create the issue.
If you haven’t considered auditing before, you should consider giving Auditor a chance. Not only do we track changes to data, we have alerting systems to notify when audits happen, and the ability to selectively audit specific people or companies. It is easy to configure and provides many added benefits.
Dennis L. Day, LKA’s Chief Consultant, described Auditor as,
“Very intuitive to setup, however, the ease of reporting is the most important thing to our clients. Since Auditor uses SmartList reporting, our clients are able to quickly analyze the data changes needed for their organization whether it is information on new hires, changes to employee’s pay, who added a new chart of accounts, or who added or modified a vendor account.”
We are dedicated to Microsoft Dynamics GP users who want their system to run more efficiently. Our products are designed to be quick installations with minimal setup and training required. This product is coded in Dexterity to provide the best results with Microsoft Dynamics GP and other 3rd party products.
Take the Audit Challenge!
You can try Auditor for free in your own environment. Get your FREE trial today!
Welcome to our price strategies video series. We are taking you on a virtual journey. You will learn ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.
Our first video was all about rebates, now we are going to walk through our second topic, Dynamic Pricing.
Dynamic pricing models vary in complexity, from simple, rules-based pricing updated periodically to sophisticated, real-time models. It can be based on certain customers, certain quantities, or whether the shirt is green or blue. The possibilities are endless.
Yes, we are opening that can of worms. So, why have Dynamic Pricing? What is its purpose? Should you incorporate it into your pricing strategy? Let’s dive into those questions and more.
Importance of Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing is a strategy that involves setting flexible prices for goods or services based on real-time demand. With COVID-19 and the influx of supply and demand, this strategy is now more important than ever.
Dynamic pricing leads to growth in sales and can also generate profitable revenue. It is a real-time pricing technique that helps in setting a flexible cost of the product or service you offer. The importance of dynamic pricing is that it allows for a real-time change in what you offer or sell based on certain criteria.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Dynamic pricing can be time-consuming, but it also can be beneficial and successful if implemented correctly.
Advantages include:
- Increased sales
- Keeps you competitive
- Learn more about your customers
- Better inventory management
- Allows pricing to reflect demand
Disadvantages include:
- Customers are not a fan of it
- Loss of sales if not implemented properly
- Not applicable everywhere – works better in certain fields and industries than the others
Why Dynamic Pricing
Because static pricing isn’t a strategy. Using the mix of Cost Plus % based on customer loyalty can return a much higher margin than simply a static Cost Plus price on an item.
Consider charging those excellent customers a little less of a markup percentage on their top items, and then raise the markup on lesser purchased items. This option isn’t possible with a static Cost Plus pricing methodology, but you can easily see how those dollars quickly add up to profits. Using a dynamic pricing strategy can give you greater control over the overall margin you receive across your entire product line and customer base.
It is also important because it determines how much profit you will make. Your challenge is setting the right price for your products and ensuring that your pricing strategy doesn’t turn customers away.
Dynamic Pricing Simplified
What if you never had to worry about which Price Level you should use on a transaction? With Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) you simply establish any pricing scenario one time and RPM does all the calculations and hard work behind the scenes. Automatically!
Conclusion
Dynamic pricing is an essential strategy and can be successful. The main takeaway is dynamic pricing works well only if implemented properly.
If you are feeling left behind don’t worry. The good news is that few companies have truly gotten it right so far. Research shows that only 18% of B2B company’s price dynamically.
Now is the time to take charge and put a strategy in place, if it makes sense for your industry. Pricing is a discipline that continues to improve over time; therefore, getting there first can deliver significant and sustained benefits over the competition. Given the tangible nature of the payoff, wasted time is wasted profit. The payback can be immediate and ongoing, assuming you have a plan, strategy, and can execute it quickly and effectively.
9 Hours, 9 ISVs, for all GP Users
I get it, there are a lot of virtual user groups, events, and webinars lately. With everyone going virtual, everything going virtual, this is pretty much the new norm now.
Our historic mindset around these events is that we drive or board a plane, bring our business cards, and prepare ourselves for a week of keynote speakers, breakout sessions, and networking events that enable us to get the scoop on everything Dynamics GP. This includes the infamous expo hall and all of the ISV solutions out there to help make your work simpler and easier.
While it does remain uncertain on where things are heading over the next few months, we wanted to take you on a virtual journey with 9 different ISVS. You get 9 hours of free content.
Introducing the first-ever Dynamics GP ISV Virtual Round up. This is a round-up of seasoned ISVs with years of experience in the channel. Check out the breadth of these topics below.
Day 1 Topics
- GP Power Tools by David Musgrave
- Coping with COVID- 19 Legislation in GP and Payroll by Integrity Data
- Secure Payment Processing and AR Automation by Nodus
Day 2 Topics
- How eOne fits into your Dynamics GP integration strategy by eOne
- Security, Auditing, Compliance and More! by Rockton Software
- Make it easy: centralize and automate your payment process in Dynamics GP by Mekorma
- Metrics Matter: Transforming Your AP Department by Measuring These Key KPIs by Metafile
- Extending the Power of GP by Encore Business Solutions
- Hackers, Phishers, and Remote Workers – Oh my! It’s not just about going to the Cloud anymore by PowerGP Online
We know in-person events are so important and we can’t wait to be a part of that again. We hope to deliver amazing content that will help inspire and educate. We hope to provide value and show you innovative ways to make your GP user experience be more streamlined. You are the reason we’ve created these products. You are the backbone of this community. We could not do any of this without you.
So, we just want to say Thank You! All on-demand recordings and materials are available here so you can watch them at any time.
COVID-19 Update
To our software community,
We live in a much different world today than we did two months ago, with our professional and personal lives being disrupted in numerous ways, both large and small. At times it feels that some parts of our lives are perpetually on hold and, with this type of uncertainty, it can be difficult to plan what to do next.
At Rockton Software, we are taking decisive action on what we can control while continuing to celebrate our larger Dynamics channel family. Today, we are announcing that Rockton has canceled all business travel to events with over 30 participants for the remainder of 2020. We will take smaller events with less than 30 participants into consideration on a case-by-case basis.
The health and safety of our team are non-negotiable. We strongly believe that attending a public event before a permanent vaccine is found would put our team, partners, and customers at unnecessary risk. As a business owner, I cannot in good conscience ask anyone on my team to travel, knowing that everyone has different levels of risk and are taking unique precautions. Making the sacrifice to travel for work adds unneeded stress, especially when you have family members that may be immunocompromised, which includes members of my own family as well as others on our team. Instead of leaving everyone in a space of ambiguity, we’ve decided to put some clear parameters around business travel.
In an effort to continue supporting our technology community, we have tasked our talented and creative team to find new and effective ways to connect, engage, and celebrate innovation. We have already paved the way with the GP Optimizer magazine coming to life and other virtual events, in addition to collaborative webinars with others in our channel. Are they different? Yes. Are they working? Yes. We believe that these actions taken together will support the long-term health of our business while protecting our team and external partners.
We look forward to a day where we can see your smiling faces to discuss business solutions and advanced networking opportunities. In the meantime, I hope that you will join me in taking a stand against business travel for a defined period of time while we work to regain control of our future and focus again on making our business world work simpler & easier®.
Sincerely,
Mark Rockwell
President
Inactivity Timeout Tool Saves Time and Money with a Remote Workforce
Is your team struggling to remember to log out of GP when they are logged in from home? Are you greeted to a Maximum Number of Users has been Reached message when you try to log into your Dynamics GP system? Do you often have to run a routine to kick people out so users who need to be in the system can get in?
Most users and GP Admins respond with a resounding “YES”!
We have good news; you can put your users in Time Out. Well, maybe not good news for them. The Inactivity Timeout tool works exactly likes it sounds. You can automatically log users out of the system if they are inactive for a pre-defined amount of time and remove those inactive users with ease.
Here are a few ways this tool can help you and your team:
Enable Users to log into Microsoft Dynamics GP
- Using the Inactivity Timeout tool can help when there is a need to lower your Dynamics GP FULL User Type count or the count has already been lowered.
- The enabling and easy setup of the tool will aid in logging Users out of the system who are no longer active in Dynamics GP and allow for other Users to log into Dynamics GP.
Graceful logouts
You no longer need to reach out to your IT department to delete a User who has left for the day by removing their record in the ACTIVITY table.
Inactivity Timeout logs a User out of the system the same way it would if you were to choose Microsoft Dynamics GP | Exit or the Microsoft Dynamics GP Close button. It’s a complete log out of GP and the ACTIVITY table.
No need to worry about Active sessions being logged out.
The Inactivity Timeout tool is smart! If you are actively working in the system, even if a process takes a long time, you will NOT be logged out if you are posting a batch or waiting for a report to generate. It also knows if you are midway through entering a transaction and need to complete it. Dynamics GP will provide a message asking the user if they want to save their changes but will NOT log them out. We don’t assume what you want to do with your work in those cases, so there is no risk of stuck data.
Flexibility with User Groups
User Groups can be created and then added to the Inactivity Timeout tool to specify the following:
- If the User Group should be included or excluded from the tool. For example, an ADMIN group could be created for Users like ‘sa’ and then marked as excluded from the Inactivity Timeout tool. Then the rules never apply to that user and they are never automatically logged out.
- The number of minutes inactive before gracefully logging the users specified in the User Group will be logged out of the system.
- This is helpful with light users who may only access the system for a brief period of time each day – you can set this timer for 5 minutes, so those licenses are rarely tied up.
- Schedule when the Inactivity Timeout is active or inactive for the User Group.
- Specify the default minutes inactive before timing out for all Users not specified in a User Group. This is a great catch-all if you don’t want to put all your users into specific groups right away!
Check out this quick video to see this tool in action.
This just one of the 27 tools in our Dynamics GP Toolbox. It is one of our most popular Dynamics GP add-ons, is packed with a ton of functionality designed to save you time, money, and frustration all while improving your Dynamics GP user experience.
Next Steps:
- Try it for FREE for 30 days
- Schedule a more in-depth demo
- Check out the rest of the tools in the toolbox
You can always email us as well with any questions or concerns at sales@rocktonsoftware.com.
Welcome to our price strategies video series. In this series, we are going to take you on a virtual journey and show you the ways to save money, time, and headaches when it comes to managing your pricing strategies.
So, let’s get started!
Wouldn’t you love to keep your customers happy? I hope you are answering with a resounding YES!
Rebates are a great incentive program, but they come with a ton of processes and headaches to manage and keep track of. One thing holds true, you need to make sure you are not overpaying or underpaying.
You need a strategy, not just offer them because “that is what everyone else is doing”.
Top points to consider:
- Rebates are part of the industry. You need to know how your competitors use them. You need to have concrete reasons as to why or why not you should offer them.
- Programs and rebates need to be well thought out. You need to have a plan, a strategy, and a process to track, report on, and incentivize not only your customers but your sales staff too.
- Rebates should not be based entirely on growth. Eventually, every distributor has a flat year. If the rebates are heavily skewed in the growth direction it could take revenue away from your channel when they need it most for driving sales forward.
- The best rebate programs are built around distributor behavior. If you want to displace niche competitors on the distributor’s shelf, link the rebate to being the only product line on their website. Want better visibility in their showroom, base the rebate on being the only product line displayed. We could list a dozen more points like this but, you get the picture.
Rebates Simplified
With Rockton Pricing Management (RPM) we take the guess work out of the who, what, and when your customers get paid.
- Rebates are easy adjustments to setup in Rockton Pricing Management
- Rebates can be done as percentages or amounts
- Rebates can be setup to accrue in any GL account you designate
- Rebates can be driven by item, customer, date and location specific using a variety of filters
You can break out unlimited adjustments to a single line item on an order, so it doesn’t just have to be a rebate calculation. In the example below, the item is being sold with a rebate, a customer incentive and a sales commission with each adjustment going to a separate GL account.
Conclusion
Rebates are just one of the many pricing strategies that can be cumbersome and time-consuming but also beneficial and successful if the right tools are in place to manage them.
Whether you have Dynamics GP, Business Central, or Acumatica; RPM has you covered. There is a way to manage rebate programs effectively so you can ditch those spreadsheets and manual processes.
Because who doesn’t want to spend less time worrying about losing money on rebates and more time actually getting things done?
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