Technology Solutions & IT News Blog | FMT Consultants

Carlsbad IT consulting company recognized as a member of the Bob Scott’s Insights VAR Stars. Carlsbad, CA, Feb. 25, 2019 -- Today, FMT Consultants has been selected as a member of the Bob Scott’s VAR Stars for 2018, a group of 100 organizations from across the country honored for their accomplishments in the field of mid-market financial software implementation. “Each year, 100 VAR Stars are picked from the best organizations that market financial software. It is always an honor to recognize those who contribute to the development of our business,” Bob Scott said. Members of the VAR Stars were selected based on factors such as growth, industry leadership and recognition, and innovation.  Selection is not based on revenue and those firms chosen represent a wide range of size and many different software publishers of accounting software. “In our industry, Bob Scott Insights represents an objective, informed, and discerning resource for […]

Navigating the Microsoft Licensing Landscape is difficult to say the least.  Here at FMT, we joke that you need a PhD in Microsoft to fully understand it.  In today’s fast growing business world, if you’re like most growing businesses, you don’t have time to learn everything you need to know.  Thankfully, you don’t need to.  Our team of consultants already have. In this recorded training session, you’ll you learn how you can right size your licensing to save money,  increase performance, and navigate the complex and changing Microsoft environment.  By the end, you’ll feel confident in your ability to configure, implement, and deploy the licensing that makes sense for your business.  This session, led by FMT’s own Director of IT Consulting Zach Saltzman, walks you through everything you need to know, so you can stay focused on what matters most…  running your business. Here’s what we’ll discuss: Microsoft licensing […]

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – February 27th, 2019 – FMT Consultants was presented with two Gold and one Silver Stevie® Awards in the Sales Team category in the 13th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service on February 23rd, 2019. The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development, and sales professionals.  The Stevie Awards organization stages seven of the world’s leading business awards programs, including the prestigious American Business Awards® and International Business Awards®. The awards were presented to honorees during a gala banquet on Friday, February 22 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV.  More than 700 executives from the U.S.A. and several other nations attended. More than 2,700 nominations from organizations in 45 nations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of […]

Change… It is something that every organization faces.  Whether it is the change of a business process, change of personnel, change of a software solution or change of data within a software.  Some types of change are more complex than others, but even something as simple as the changing of data within a system can result in a significant amount of resources being expended.  Frequently determining the how, why, when and who behind the change will take exponentially longer than the actual change itself.  In order to reduce the effort spent on answering these questions, we will review the key features of the tools available for Dynamics GP that will help audit the system.  Our goal is to provide you with a succinct snapshot of the options available for Dynamics GP and help narrow down the correct solution for your organization.  Below are four options that will help you answer […]

We all know how powerful Dynamics GP Smartlists are, but sometimes it can be hard to find the right columns/fields to build them out with additional information that we need. One that comes up quite a bit, is the Batch ID associated with posted account transactions. When you add the Batch Number column to the Account Transaction smartlist under the Financial folder, it comes up blank for posted journal entries. Luckily, this is a simple column add once you know the name of the column you need. Open up the Account Transactions default Smartlist (Smartlist > Financial > Account Transactions > *).   In my Account Transactions Smartlist below, I have added Batch Number and Document Status columns. Notice that the Batch Number column is blank for all Open transactions (see Document Status).     Click on Columns then Add. Search for Originating Source in the column list. Highlight that column, […]

There are multiple ways to reconcile sub-ledgers to the GL in Dynamics GP, the Reconcile to GL routine being one of my favorite, but there can be times when you’re still stumped wondering what happened? I had a client recently face this situation. They ticked and tied every transaction to the GL, but their Inventory still did not balance to the GL. In the end, it all came down to a sales return transaction. The quantity being returned went into the Returned bucket instead of On Hand. When the inventory is put into the Returned quantity field, it changes the distributions for the transaction and puts the distribution type as “RETURNS” instead of “INV” if it were put back in inventory. If you’re using the Inventory Historical Stock Status report in an attempt to reconcile, the quantity returned will not hit this report. To fix it, an inventory transfer needs […]

I was recently posed with a challenge to create a custom Microsoft Project Online field to calculate the difference between a custom numeric value and Actual Work, specifically the rollup of number of work hours completed on project tasks. Simple enough right? I knew it could be done but the execution of meeting this customer requirement wasn’t straight forward. The client utilized the work column to forecast their efforts like most MS Project users but they also wanted track committed hours which was the effort their sales team proposed to their clients. They wished to do this because at times work could be adjusted for ramp up, setup time, and other tasks non-billable tasks. What they wanted to capture was the true effort their resources were doing above the sales proposed estimate so they could consider past data to more accurately quote customers in future engagements. With some simple configuration […]

In the Importance of a Good Unit of Measure Schedule blog, we walked through the importance of unit of measure schedules and how to design a unit of measure schedule. Using a well-designed unit of measure schedule and proper configuration of inventoried items in Dynamics GP, enables your system to accurately track inventory balances. An item card in Dynamics GP maintains a multitude of information about an item such as default accounts, tracking options, valuation methods, engineering data, and much more. In this blog we will focus on the setup of a item card with relation to default purchasing and selling units of measure. To configure these default units of measure, there are four windows that you need to access – yes, you heard right, four windows! But…you want accurate inventory balances, correct? Let’s take a look at the four windows we will review:  Item Maintenance Window: Defines the Unit of Measure […]

When configuring inventoried items in Microsoft Dynamics GP, we need a clear understanding of the types of transactions which occur against inventoried items. You purchase items, sell items, transfer items between sites and bins, consume items during production, and produce items. That is A LOT of transactions. But…if you think about it, you probably already enter these transactions using Microsoft Dynamics GP. So why not let Dynamics GP track your inventory for you? Okay, so this is a great idea, right?! But where do you start? Obviously you need to know what items are considered inventoried items and you need to know where your items are located.  However, just as important is your unit of measure schedule! We just looked at six transaction types which may occur against an item, but each inventory transaction can occur in different units of measure. You may purchase a box of 50 units but […]

After the release of Microsoft PowerApps, many Office365 subscribers are thinking that Microsoft PowerApps is designated as replacement of InfoPath. Microsoft PowerApps provides many features that are available in InfoPath and enables enterprise users to create, collaborate, communicate and manage mobile apps without having developer skills. PowerApps can also be easily integrated with any other services of the Office365 ecosystem. From this perspective, Microsoft PowerApps can be hyped as the successor of InfoPath. However, Microsoft PowerApps has some limitations that make it unsuitable to replace InfoPath. Even, Microsoft doesn’t support to replace InfoPath Forms with PowerApps. Power Apps supports creating an app from the data stored in the lists. PowerApps is considered as a successor for custom forms and it is based on an open source version of the software called Apache Cordova powered by resources from Azure app Service. PowerApps allows to easily create and share apps from the […]

In this article, we will go over understanding, pros and cons as well as flow fundamentals of Microsoft Flow. Microsoft announced the release of Flow - a new productivity app specific to SharePoint Online - that allows users to create cross application workflows. Since Microsoft introduced the Workflow Manager in SharePoint 2013, there has not been any additional enhancements to their workflow engine. It would make sense to assume that Flow is the replacement for SharePoint Workflows. Specifically, for approval process, we have to use Flow for simple approvals, or approvals that involve multiple sites or external services. Use SPD for more complicated processes and customization options for approvals that involve a single site. To understand if Microsoft Flow could be a replacement to SharePoint Designer, we will look into the pros and cons of Microsoft Flow and how it stacks up as compared to SharePoint Designer. 1. Why should […]

I’ve been a part of the Microsoft ERP community for over 20 years and the title of my blog is a pretty remarkable statement. Why? Microsoft has made some pretty remarkable decisions in the past year to make this happen! You have to go back in time to 2001 and 2002 when Microsoft acquired both Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV (back then known as Great Plains and Navision) which made Microsoft mid-market ERP leaders in both North America and Europe with these acquisitions. However, both Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV are on-premise products and if this term is ‘computer geek-speak’ to you, here’s what this means:  Running on-premise software applications means you need a dedicated server to run the database for the ERP software and then the user needs to have the application or client installed on the user’s workstation to run the software.  Now there are variants to running […]