I am constantly searching for ways to help my clients save money & improve performance.  Often the answer includes automating a particular process.  One of such process includes Emailing Customer Statements.  For clients with a large number of customers, the savings can be extensive.  Clients save on paper, ink, wear & tear on printers, envelopes, postage & most importantly, employee time.

Automating the customer statement process is very simple to setup.  First, enter the Customer Maintenance window & click Options.  Enter the email contact for the customer in the ‘To’ box in the bottom right corner of the screen & check the ‘Send Email Statements’ check box.  Now, when creating customer statements, check the ‘Send Email Customer Statements’ under the Email Options heading.

The return on users’ time investment will be realized after the first statement run.   So automate the process of sending customer statements & free up your time for more important tasks.

Next time you are printing Sales invoices, try this time-saving alternative:

Select Options > Quick Print, or simply CTRL + Q on your keyboard

This will print your invoices according to the settings in the Quick Print Setup screen (also under the Options menu).  Default can be created for:

· Orders
· Invoices
· Packing slips
· Picking tickets

Select a print Destination & number of copies to be printed.  Print options available for documents are:

“Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking, just a moment.”  If you’ve ever seen Office Space, you know how annoying THAT person can be.  What if your system did that same thing?

Dynamics has a small quirk that can annoying to those in Accounts Receivable.  Since invoices can be entered in multiple windows.  Both the Sales Transaction Entry & the Invoice Entry windows perform the same essential function of populating sales invoices.  As such, Dynamics warns users when entering these windows.  Well, that warning can become annoying after viewing it for the 463rd time.  To get rid of this warning, run your GP Utilities (from your Start menu).  In the Additional Tasks window, select the ‘Remove SOP and Invoicing message’.  Proceed to uncheck ‘Warn in Sales Order Processing’ & ‘Warn in Invoicing’.  When complete, your little annoying warning will be gone forever.

Take a penny; leave a penny.  I think these are the greatest invention.  Personally, I don’t carry change.  When offered 2 cents change, I usually tell the clerk to keep it.  The only time this comes back to hurt me is when I’m short a cent or two.  That’s where the beauty of the ‘take a penny; leave a penny’ system shines.  It helps people avoid breaking a bill only to receive a bunch of coins. 

The worlds of ERP & accounting have their own ‘take a penny; leave a penny’ jar.  Writing-off immaterial amounts of money is a common practice that occurs when small over or under payments are made.  To access the Write Off Documents window in Dynamics GP, look in the Sales Routines.  This window will create debit or credit memos that are then posted & applied to the documents you’re writing off.

Using this window is fairly simple for most novice GP users.  Select the Write-off Type, Write-off Limit & other restrictions as appropriate.  I advise using the Preview button as it provides a listing of documents to choose from.  Click Process when you are ready. 

Note:  This screen does factor in Maximum Write-off from the Customer & Vendor Options.

Maybe you have an inactive customer that has a very small balance remaining on their account or you accidentally underpaid a one time bill by a small amount … write-off these documents & clean up your system.

I've seen it numerous times...it happens in law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms, and any company where employees are the "product" upon which revenues are based.

The problem with the professional services industry is that a large key to success is cash flow management. That means that you must effectively manage the time between when your resources perform the work and when the customer pays. Let's take a look at the whole process.

Part 1 : Time and Expense reporting

To effectively get your personnel to report their time and expenses, it must be simple. Some of the ways to address this are :

- enable your team to enter their time and expenses through a simple to use web portal, or even a mobile device. That way it doesn't take a significant amount of time out of their day to "get their paperwork in".