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Add "Save As" to Report Options
The standard reports (like Receivables Trial Balance) allows for options to be set and saved. However, there is no way to make a new option set based on an existing one. If I open a report option set and then change the name to a new one, all of the existing options in the window are reset to default. Please add "Save As" functionality that will allow a new report option set to be created from an existing one retaining the existing options.
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Replace CHAR Data Type with VARCHAR
Dynamics GP stores text fields using the CHAR data type. This pads the value with spaces. CHAR wastes space and introduces problems with custom reporting. We have to add RTRIM to custom queries to get rid of the extra spaces. Please consider converting to using VARCHAR for text fields. -
DATETIME > DATE, TIME, DATETIME2
The DATETIME SQL data type is deprecated. Please look into replacing use of DATETIME with DATE, TIME or DATETIME2, as applicable. -
User Access - Company Sort
In User Access Setup, once a user is selected, the list of companies is listed on the right side of the screen. It appears the companies are added to the grid in the order they were created. Please either add them in alphabetical order or make the grid sortable so that the administrator can sort them into alphabetical order.
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Replace checklinks with SQL Foreign Keys
Checklinks is a symptom of a problem that need not exist, and likely a holdover from the application's past. Now that only Microsoft SQL Server is supported as a database backend, there are powerful features available that weren't when multiple database backends were supported. Please define foreign key relationships at the database level so that it becomes impossible to experience the data damage that checklinks is designed to correct. -
Resume Active Development of Management Reporter
Once receiving cumulative updates on a quarterly basis, now the most recent update for Management Reporter is from Feb 2017 (over 1 year ago). The messaging on the status of Management Reporter has been confusing, but it does appear that development has mostly ceased. Please reverse course on this and give Management Reporter the development resources it deserves. Financial Reporting, first via FRx and later via Management Reporter, has been an important feature in GP that should not be abandoned.
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Native PDF Support
In order to generate PDFs from Dynamics GP, Adobe Acrobat Pro must be installed. It's expensive, and an administrative hassle, to have to license this for users just to be able to print and email PDFs from Dynamics GP. Microsoft Word has had the ability to natively generate PDFs for years now. Additionally, Windows 10/Server 2016 comes with a Microsoft PDF printer out of the box. Please either implement native support for PDFs in the GP code or enable support for generating PDFs using the Windows 10 "Microsoft Print to PDF" printer so that the dependency on Adobe Acrobat can be eliminated.
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Fix PM Historical Aged Trial Balance (HATB) Performance
When we implemented Dynamics GP, the accounting team selected the Payables Historical Aged Trial Balance (HATB) report as one to run at month end. They really like being able to run the report as of the last day of the prior month after all the payments have been recorded. 10 years of data later and the report is taking forever to run. When I tested recently, it took 9 minutes. If I run the "Steve Gray" version of PM HATB, it completes in 6 seconds. I looked into the stored procedures behind the report, pmHistoricalAgedTrialBalance and pmPrintHATBGetDocuments, and they use multiple nested loops and dynamic SQL, techniques known to be harmful to SQL performance. Please refactor how the report is calculated to use SQL coding best practices so that large data sets no longer decimate the performance..
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Remove NOLOCK Nolock From Report Code
A user brought a situation to my attention. The Payables Historical Aged Trial Balance he ran at 12:09.05 PM was off by $6,000. When he ran the report again at 1:08 PM it was correct. It looks like an invoice from Feb 2019, an invoice that is in history, was left off the report. With the invoice in history for over a year, it's not possible that someone made a change in between the report runs. I recovered a backup using transaction log backups to bring a test instance to the exact time stamped on his report sample (12:09.05 PM). I ran the Payables Historical Aged Trial Balance report and got the correct result. For the user, it looks like a transient error caused GP to generate an incorrect result. I looked into the stored procedure behind the report and it is littered with "nolock" hints. It's well-documented that nolock can cause issues like this. I suggest that nolock be removed from all of the reports, and to avoid locking problems, use of SNAPSHOT ISOLATION be implemented. Based on GP's legacy design it would not be be wise to enable READ COMMITTED ISOLATION on the database for all of the activity. But enabling the database for SNAPSHOT ISOLATION and then configuring the reports to opt in to it would be safe to do and avoid the reporting errors that can occur with NOLOCK hints. -
Deletes a User's SmartList Favorites When Access to a Company is Removed
I recently received a report from a user that his SmartList favorites were missing. Online searching led to a possible explanation from 2015 about Dynamics GP 2013 R2. "Did you remove a user's access to a particular company in GP? If so, this process removes their Smartlist favorites across all companies. Microsoft is aware of this issue but has no plans right now to fix it." I then tested this and confirmed it is still like that in Dynamics GP 2016 R2. Please reverse course and schedule fixing of this bug. If a user has access to multiple companies, removal of access to one of those companies should not delete the user's SmartList favorites.
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