Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 was released on the 2^nd October. In this series of posts, I’ll be going hands on and installing the majority of the components; some of them, such as Analysis Cubes for Excel, which are little used, I won’t be covering.

The series index will automatically update as posts go-live in this series.

Now that we have the web client installed, prior to allowing users access, we need to verify the web client is working. To do this open your browser of choice, I am on Server 2012 R2 and so only have Internet Explorer available.

Navigate to the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of you server followed by /GP and log in using a Windows Login whioch is in the Web Client Users group:

Enter your Microsoft Dynamics GP login and click OK:

Select the company (if you only have one company, you won’t see this screen, and click Next:

If you’re logging into Fabrikam, dismiss the sample company warning message:

I typically browse around the test company and try a few functions to ensure everything is working:

Click to show/hide the Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 Series Index

Read original post Hands On with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2: Verify Web Client at azurecurve|Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant

Grab your favorite beverage and settle in as Mariano explains Installing Microsoft Azure Integration Runtime

Membership retention is like a window into your nonprofit’s health – your association’s gauge of overall organizational performance. If retention is high, morale and productivity are, too. If it’s low, concerns abound.

What is your nonprofit’s retention rate? What would you like it to be?

According to Associations Now Daily News, a common retention target is 75 percent. But a recent membership benchmarking report from Advanced Solutions International (ASI) suggests that average retention rates may be slipping: In 2016, 73 percent of survey respondents said retention was higher than 75 percent, compared to only 65 percent in 2017. Certainly, this evidence poses a concern for association leaders who understand that losing members is one of their greatest organizational challenges.

“Perhaps the biggest key to member (and donor) retention is personalizing your outreach,” says Jeff Gordy, President and CEO of Z2 Systems Inc. and contributor to NTen. Gordy explains that while most of your members share a commitment to your organization’s common cause and are likely motivated by similar incentives, it’s important to remember that everyone brings unique preferences, interests, and challenges to the table.

“They all want to hear from your organization through different communication channels, and they all want to engage with your organization in different ways,” Gordy continues. “The more you can cater your outreach to each individual donor based on their habits and preferences, the more relevant, and thus, compelling your outreach will be.”

Engaging members with CRM software

Focusing on member engagement may be the path toward increased customer loyalty, and thus retention. One practical tool to grow loyalty within your existing member base is to ensure you have a reliable and association-friendly membership tracking and retention software in place.

Here’s how using a customer relationship management (CRM) system helps to better engage your members.

1. Maintain accurate data. A CRM provides up-to-date member information such as donor status, event attendance, and preferred channels of communication. Furthermore, by using a member management system powered by business intelligence, you can generate real-time member data dashboards. These reports include data on donor trends, event registrations, email, and social media interactions, for example.

2. Communicate smartly. Process new memberships, renewals, product and service orders, and membership communications promptly and accurately. An effective CRM reveals the best timing and mediums for communicating your member messages, such as phone, direct mail, email, or social media.

3. Personalize interactions. A CRM can help you track member interactions and develop custom messages for individuals based on their prior engagement with your products and services. A member management system also allows you to create segmented audiences based on personas, with personalized pushes for each.

BroadPoint Engage: The best of both worlds

Microsoft Gold partner BroadPoint has built a reputable CRM software that effectively tracks member engagement and retention. Called BroadPoint Engage, the CRM member management system is an enhancement to Microsoft Dynamic 365 that is designed to achieve everything a traditional association management system does while adding capabilities the most sophisticated businesses in the world use.

“BroadPoint Engage is a Saas-based solution built and run 100 percent in the Cloud. We take world-class software and domain expertise to build Engage – providing integrated functionality within the CRM to make it work uniquely for the nonprofit space,” says Tom Condon, VP of Enterprise Solutions at BroadPoint.

Engage fulfills the above benefits and more by creating unique member experiences using intelligent analytics, on-demand data, and contextualized member campaigns. Learn how take your association to the next level with this powerful member management CRM. Contact BroadPoint today to get started.

By BroadPoint, www.broadpoint.net.

The post 3 CRM Benefits That Will Boost Your Member Retention appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Take company offline

Jen shows how to take it offline.

When you’re operating in the crane rental business, you know that transporting a large crane is not easy. To move and construct a tower crane or heavy-duty crane can take several days. Additionally, you need a lot of transport vehicles to get everything from point A to point B. The largest cranes can even take several hundreds of trucks to move them. They stay at their locations for quite a while, because such an enormous transport project is time-consuming and very costly.

Crane rental software

To make these cranes cost effective, you need to make sure that they have enough to do on location and are never at a standstill due to breakdowns. You want everything to run in the most optimal conditions, keep an eye on every process, and register everything that is done with the crane to keep a log for your company. For example, you might record the total number of tons that are lifted over a period of time. This will tell you when you need to do maintenance on certain parts or maybe even replace them. These are all things that need to be managed using the best software available on the market for the crane industry.

Image: crane on construction site

DynaRent for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations was designed by HiGH Software for the equipment rental industry. HiGH software has years of experience in the crane rental business and loyal customers that have been working with DynaRent for many years. One of these customers is Sarens, one of the largest crane rental companies in the world. But we’ve recently attracted other crane rental companies like Ainscough, because our experience in this field is widely recognized.

DynaRent is not only able to keep track of the service and maintenance part of the cranes—transport planning via our transport Planboards also gives you a great overview of what equipment is located where in the world.

Find out what DynaRent can do for you! Send us an email at info@highsoftware.com, or visit our website, www.highsoftware.com.

The MS team explains Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018 R2 – Allow partial purchase of quantity that originated from a Requisition

If there’s a field service component in your operations, then you know the challenges faced by field services companies.

What you need is integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that will enable you to track revenue, expenses, and profitability, not just by the job, but from the field, too. Microsoft Dynamics ERP systems – be it Microsoft Dynamics GP or Microsoft Dynamics 365– tie it all together for you.

For any field service business, such as specialty construction, having your internal team worry about things like coding or manually entering their time into a homegrown system is highly inefficient. Our customers can streamline their financial systems and operational processes with Microsoft Dynamics GP or Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Microsoft has been recognized by Gartner as a field service visionary because of Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions:

Allow your field service personnel to:

• Spend more time on high priority tasks on the job site
• Give your project managers real-time insight into their projects in real time and at all times
• Access the business intelligence (BI) required to accurately report on profitability
• Use mobile tools that sync to your back-office systems
• Take advantage of full integration throughout departments within your organization

Optimize your resources when you:

• Automate scheduling: Improve profitability by automatically scheduling the technician with the right job skills and best location to fit in more appointments per day.
• Empower dispatchers: Manage resource assignments across multiple work orders using an interactive, drag-and-drop schedule board.
• Streamline inventory management: Synchronize and track inventory down to the truck level with real-time visibility to increase first-time fix rates.

Make technicians more effective when you can:

• Ensure on-time appointments: Keep technicians on time with the best route, turn-by-turn directions, and work order details that can be updated in real-time on any device.
• Share customer information: Get a 360-degree view of customer preferences and history with personalized step-by-step instructions to reliably track and complete the task at hand.
• Boost on-site efficiency: Improve field processes through mobile access to back-office information for technicians to effectively capture and update all work order details.
• Create new levels of productivity: Improve outcomes with access to leading-edge technologies such as mixed reality headsets to offer technicians hands-free guidance.

And there is so much more.

Contact your friends at Tidestone Solutions for more information.  You can reach us via email at info@tidestonesolutions.com, or just pick up the phone and call Tidestone at 207.761.2133.

Related Posts

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What to Expect in the Release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2018

Over the past few years, Integrity Data's ACA Compliance team has received many questions around ACA compliance and most of the time, we are able to answer them quickly based on clear guidance given by the IRS, legislative information and/or court rulings.

However, there have been questions that are harder to answer, for example: “How is eligibility affected when a designated full-time employee transitions to variable hour part-time status and we use the lookback measurement method for variable-hour employees?”

That answer is not as straight forward for reasons we’ll get into later. The basic answer is: The employer should re-test that employee from the most recently completed measurement period to determine eligibility for that employee. If the employee did not work sufficient hours during the most recently completed measurement period, the employer is no longer required to continue coverage under the employer-sponsored plan and should offer to extend coverage to the employee under COBRA. However, if the employee worked sufficient hours during the measurement period, the employer should honor the full-time eligibility status until the end of the stability period. At the end of the current measurement period, the employer should test the employee again based on hours worked during the current measurement period.

The caveat to this answer is that the IRS has not provided definitive guidance in this area. As a result, we recommend that employers err on the side of caution in this situation, aka to the benefit of employees, in order to avoid potential litigation and penalties for non-compliance. We believe that should the IRS give guidance in this area, they would require employers to honor the eligibility status as though the employee had been tested with other variable-hour employees during the most recent administrative period.

The justification for this approach is that the employer is required to measure variable-hour employees to determine whether they are a “full-time” employee. If the employee is determined to be full-time, they must extend an offer of coverage. The regulations do not clearly differentiate between a “designated full-time employee” and an employee “determined” to be full-time based on hours worked during the measurement period. Notice 2014-49 describes related scenarios surrounding changes to employees that may result in a different measurement period for the employee. In this notice, it’s clear that when the IRS refers to a “full-time” employee they are referring to an employee determined to be full-time based on hours worked during the measurement period. In addition, the IRS made clear in the “Identifying Full-time Employees” information that the definition of a full-time employee is as follows:

For purposes of the employer shared responsibility provisions, a full-time employee is, for a calendar month, an employee employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week, or 130 hours of service per month.

There are two methods for determining full-time employee eligibility status:

• The monthly measurement method, and

• The look-back measurement method

These definitions of full-time employees are then considered when applying the employee eligibility status that applies during a stability period. Thus, the employer may not retract an offer of coverage until the employee is no longer “determined” to be full-time in a measurement period.

We understand that the 2018 instructions for form 1095-C cover situations where an employee is offered COBRA due to a “reduction in hours” that may appear to be contrary to the answer provided. The example on page 11 of the instructions discusses a situation where an employer may terminate existing coverage due to a reduction in hours in middle of a stability period. However, the example does not clarify whether the employee averaged more than 30 hours per week during the measurement period. In our understanding, this example covers the situation where an employee would not have been determined to be full-time during the previous measurement period.

In addition, this example expressly states that the reduction in hours resulted in “a loss of eligibility for coverage under the plan." This then implies that it’s possible for a reduction in hours to not affect the eligibility status of an employee. The onus is on the employer to make that eligibility determination in context with the reduction in hours event.

Finally, 26 CFR VII Section 10 of the Federal Register details out the requirement to maintain eligibility as determined in the prior measurement period.

To further this justification, let’s assume we have two employees that have worked for the organization for several years. Employee FULLTIME was a designated full-time employee during that time working a regular schedule of 40 hours per week. Employee PARTTIME was determined to be full-time as a result of working on average over 30 hours per week during each year’s lookback measurement period.

On January 1st for our calendar year plan, both employees enroll into the employer-sponsored plan. On June 1st both employees experience a reduction in hours to 25 hours/week. It is widely accepted that the employer may not terminate coverage under the employer-sponsored plan for employee PARTTIME. Therefore, it would be equally inappropriate to terminate coverage for employee FULLTIME.

There are exceptions to this generalized rule. In 26 CFR VII Section 10 of the Federal Register, there is an allowance to classify a group of employees under the monthly measurement method which would allow the employer to terminate coverage once the employee completes 3 months of service after the change in status assuming that the employee does not work at least 130 hours per month during this time. This classification as monthly or lookback must be applied to all employees within the classification group on a uniform basis. In addition, 26 CFR VII Section 10 of the Federal Register makes allowance for employees in an initial measurement period such that they may be reclassified as variable-hour and the employer may terminate coverage and offer continued coverage under COBRA when the reduction in hours occurs. Additional clarification can be found on pages 9-11 of Notice 2014-49.

Integrity Data Disclaimer: This opinion is not legal advice and does not come from an ERISA attorney. Employers should seek the counsel from their own qualified tax or ERISA attorney for further guidance.

“Last mile” is a major buzzword right now, especially as it relates to PowerApps. To understand the concept behind the buzz, let’s consider a company that spends millions of dollars on CRM and other software to help induce customers to buy their product. Perhaps the various parts of said product are created in multiple countries, shipped to the US, and driven across the country to stores or warehouses to facilitate a customer’s purchase, all of which is nicely tracked in the CRM. Then, after all that complexity, the sale falls apart in the “last mile,” which is the seemingly simple act of delivering said product to the customer’s house.

This is a big issue across industries right now, as customers have high (and constantly increasing) expectations for flawless execution, service, delivery, etc. To that end, it is becoming tougher every day to meet the standards set by the likes of Uber and Amazon, and thus “last mile” gaps are created.

In this blog post, we will show you how you can build last mile solutions to ensure your users:

1. Can get what they want, when they want it, wherever they are.
2. Can get information easily, seamlessly, and painlessly.
3. Adopt the bigger Dynamics 365 implementation through these apps!

In the example below, we’ll look at how an employee who is always (or mostly) on the road can use a PowerApps app to:

• Easily communicate with customers through phone calls and text messaging.
• Get driving directions to customer locations.
• Email customers and coworkers.
• Schedule appointments.

…all with minimal clicks!

In the home screen below, we have a list of contacts that the user owns. (Note this “gallery” can be filtered based on various conditions.) For each contact, we can do the following with a single click:

1. Call
2. Text/SMS
3. Get driving directions to their location from user’s current location
4. Email
5. Check calendar + schedule appointments

Digression: At the very bottom is a “robot” icon. We have integrated a QnaMaker.ai chatbot with this app that does not require any coding. More on that in an upcoming blog post!

Notice that not all contacts have the same icons. That is intentional! If we don’t have a contact’s mobile number, we make our users know that by hiding the call and text icons (another option is to “gray out” the icons).

The first three icons under Yvonne McKay perform calling, texting, and getting driving directions – with a single click, as shown in the video below:

Clicking on Yvonne’s fourth icon takes us to the next screen, where we can add as many email addresses as we want, compose an email, and send it to everyone.

Note: The email screen integrates PowerApps with Exchange, making it a breeze to find coworkers to add to emails.

Clicking the final icon for each of our contacts allows the user to do two things: check calendar and schedule appointments. As a bonus, our app once again connects to Exchange to:

1. Show the current user’s appointments first
2. Schedule meetings with coworkers – by picking a date and duration of the meeting, the app shows all the times that work for everyone without conflicts.

The screen is doing a lot here, and the coolest part is that we’re using one of the out-of-the-box screens that are available within PowerApps. In other words, you wouldn’t need to write a single formula to adopt this functionality!

Bringing it All Together

So, what are we really doing here? Essentially, four things:

1. Surfacing information from a certain data source. In our example, contacts are coming from Dynamics 365, but the source can be SharePoint, Excel, or any other.
2. Providing users the ability to interact with their customers and co-workers easily, creating a wow! factor for everyone involved.
3. Encouraging user adoption.
4. Helping to close those last mile gaps!

Apps like this one are extremely quick and easy to build. In our next blog post, we’ll show you the formulas that our PowerApps designers used to build this app. Until then, learn more about PowerApps here.

As always, Happy D365’ing!