Microsoft Dynamics GP
– Year End Demo –
Microsoft Dynamics GP Year End Demo
John Hoyt
Hello and welcome. This is the TMC webinar series. We’re going to do Dynamics GP Year End Close Process today. My name is John Hoyt, I’m the solutions specialist here at TMC. I’ll be taking you through our process in the webinar today. First, I want to give a shout out to my source material. I have liberally borrowed from my colleagues online inside Microsoft. There is an excellent year-end blog series available. It has probably a dozen or more blog articles that will take you through each of the major module groups in GP in great detail. There are some other tips and tricks that I’ve tried to incorporate into the presentation today, but anybody who’s going through the GP year-end close process for the first time, I would really strongly recommend spending some time here on the community.dynamics.com/gp website. That’s the community web. From there, you can search for the year-end blog series. Just a separate note, we will also be making a PowerPoint available later for this entire presentation, so don’t feel like you have to quickly write down things as I go past the different slides. I’ll give you all of the source material in the PDF including all of my notes.
Second, as we go through the webinar today and each of the slides or some of the slides will reference specific KB articles. Those are the KnowledgeBase articles available at support.microsoft.com/kb/ -whatever the number is that will be in reference to. They are tips and tricks. They are what to do if you run into an error message. There’s a lot of really good information available at that support.microsoft.com site. For the agenda that we’re going to go through today, we’re going to take you through the install and upgrade process that puts in place the latest service packs and updates, the year-end tax changes, et cetera. Then, you need to go through the modules in the order that they’re listed here on the slide. This is critical to having the year-end close process work smoothly. We’ll start with inventory, go through receivables, payables, fixed assets, analytical accounting if you’re using that part of our solution, and finally at the end, general ledger.
A special note here about payroll, when you go US or Canadian payroll year-end processing, that is always done at the end of the calendar year regardless of when your fiscal year might be done. In that sense, it is done independently, so to speak, of the other modules, but for most companies that run on a regular calendar and fiscal year ending December 31st will go through the same due processes at the time. Payroll gets done last if that’s appropriate for you.
When you do the install and upgrades, all of the updates are cumulative. That is you can simply grab the latest service pack or update and install it, it will include all of the prior service pack, hot pack fixes, compliance, year-end updates, everything. There’s only one that has to be done. Both the update and … I’m sorry, first, the update must be installed at the servers and all the workstations that have a GP installation. Everything has got to stay synchronized in that regards. In terms of doing the year-end close process itself, remember that needs to be done directly on the server where GP is installed. Don’t try to run year-end close for your local client, your local workstation. You need to know how to make a back-up of your Dynamics database and all the different company databases that you have on your installation. If you’re not certain how to do that, you can go to the Help menu and learn how to do it. It’s from the Dynamics GP dropdown under the maintenance, and then you can do the backup. I’d be doing local backups.
We’re going to do a backup, essentially, at the completion of each module groups year-end close process. Each step along the process will do another backup. The reason we do repetitive backups over and over again is if something goes wrong, say when we get down to doing the fixed assets year-end close, and I have to restore the backup, I want to be able to restore to the most recent close that was successful. I want to go back to the beginning of the process and start all over again. If you have any modified reports or forms, need to export those out to package files. They will get re-imported at the end of the year-end close process. But to make sure there’s no changes or damage done to those reports, export them out, have them saved somewhere. Same thing is true with modified reports, informs the dictionary files, et cetera. You want to have backups in case anything could possibly go wrong. If you have time and the environment to do so, we’d strongly recommend you configure a test environment and run through this whole process in a test environment first, just to make sure there’s no hiccups, there’s no problems.
When you’re running the updates, you must have local admin rights or be able to run as administrator when you do the installation. If you don’t have local admin rights, you’re just a user on that machine, the install will fail. There are essentially two components. You need to update the application itself, that’s the software that’s going to be used, and then you upgrade Dynamics in the company databases using the Dynamics GP utilities. Typically I say we always do this first at the SQL server and don’t try to do any of this stuff remotely.
Here’s the first reference to a KB article. There are particular installs that may fail for whatever reason. There’s KnowledgeBase articles that will talk about how you create a Windows installer log to find out where the failure is going. That Windows installer log is something that either the TMC technical team or the Microsoft support team will ask for. It shows them step by step what’s happening in the background and where the failure might be. Next SQL log, doesn’t take up a whole lot of space, but it does again give us that ability to go through and analyze if there’s a failure, where that failure might be taking place. An important note here. If your database upgrade fails for some reason, do not restore the databases. The troubleshooting that we need to do can take place at the point of failure and we may be able to correct the problem and move forward from there. You don’t have to go all the way back to the beginning and start again.
If for some reason there’s a red X next to the company name when you try to update your companies, that table conversion has failed. There are specific support topics depending on which version of GP you’re running. Reminder for anybody who’s still in GP 2010, you’re going to need to work with TMC because that product is no longer officially supported by Microsoft and that does include year-end close. If you have any questions about that, just contact your project manager or let Jim know, and we’ll make sure somebody gets in touch with you, and we’ll provide the support you need. All the upgraded reports, modified reports, and dictionaries, we’ll get those, again, backed up and stored offline. The upgrade file can be pushed out to your client workstations, so the changes you made at the server, we can use the automatic client update group policies, something like that, pushing all those changes out if necessary.
Finally, when you get done with the install, the upgrade, everything should be ready to go from the database and the client’s software perspective. We’re going to make, again, a backup for the Dynamics database and all the company databases, and again, export out all those modified reports and forms. That gets us to the point where we’re ready to start doing the first year-end close. That’s going to be done in inventory. Inventory module should be closed at the end of the fiscal year before any of the transactions get posted that would affect inventory quantities that have the date of the following year. Any receipt of purchase orders, any sales invoices, adjustments, transfers, et cetera, you need to get those activities after our closed first and then we’ll start to record next year activities.
When you run an inventory control year-end process, we’re going to do a couple different steps in the background. All the summarized current year information gets rolled into the sales history. We’re going to update each items beginning quantity. The quantity on hand now gets updated to the beginning quantity value, will zero out quantity sold, because that’s the year, the date in number. Then, there are some options. You can, at this point, choose to do things like remove discontinued items, remove sold receipts, or sold lot attributes. It’s really kind of a function on your side or decision on your side, do I want to try and save some space inside the database, do I want to keep all this history around, have it available for analysis purposes later, et cetera.
Before you get started closing the year, enter and post all your purchase order processing documents, all your invoicing and sales order processing documents, and any inventory transactions from the current year. There is a detailed KnowledgeBase article that takes you through the step-by-step and where to find each one of the windows to allow you to do this. Key points to remember, always have that restorable backup when recommended. As you get started in this process and you make your first backup, I practice restoring at that point just to make sure that I can do the restore correctly in case I need to. Let’s find out early in the process if there’s going to be any issues. I want to reconcile my sub ledgers, so I want to reconcile sales order, then purchase order, then inventory. Again, the sequence of these steps are important. Please try to do them in the recommended sequences.
Then, related KnowledgeBase articles, again, we’ll take you through those steps. That’s in the year-end closing procedures. What to do if something like I accidentally tried to close inventory twice. How do I unwind that? Pretty much at this point, we’ve been doing the year-end close process in GP for 20-plus years. Most of the year-end processes have not changed significantly. We know the kind of errors that people can potentially run into, and I almost guarantee there’s a KnowledgeBase article that’s written to cover what to do in case something gets done incorrectly or gets done twice, or something. From inventory, we go to receivables. Both calendar year, and fiscal years-end close should be done at the end of the calendar year. Again, prior to posting any transactions for that next calendar year. That’s the critical step. I need to get this process completed, year-end close done before I start to post any transactions for the following year.
We’re going to close calendar year and fiscal year information, move those values into the last year fields, so when I look at my sales summary for various activities, last year’s activity now gets rolled into … I’m sorry. Current year gets rolled into last year, current year gets zeroed out because that’s going to be the start for the next year. Post all your transactions. Again, that KnowledgeBase 857444, that will take me to the detailed steps. Same key points to remember. Always have a restorable backup. Receivables management is not completely date sensitive. There are some things that we can get away with, but in most part, I want to get year-end close done first, and then move into the next year. Related KnowledgeBase articles that relate to receivables.
Inventory, then receivables, then payables. Again, run this at the end of the calendar year prior to posting any transactions the fiscal year-end close routine at the end of the fiscal year. If you have those running those on different dates, you’ll do different year-end close processes depending on which year-end you’re approaching. What we do in the year-end close process in in the summary window, calendar year transfers information for like 1099 amounts from year to date, to last year. The fiscal close will transfer all other amounts from year to date column to last year column. 1099, the only part of our payable system that is calendar date driven, everything else we’ve done off the fiscal year and how we have that set up in your company setups. Steps to take, I want to make sure I post all my transactions. Any transactions for the new year have been saved to batches. They’re not yet posted. Make a backup, and then follow those detailed steps in the year-end closing procedures.
I refer to detailed steps, and I don’t want to scare anybody that hasn’t done this before. For the most part, there’s a single window, a couple of checkboxes, and a process button that you’ll need to hit to go through those. Again, payables management’s not fully date sensitive. It’s going to be looking some things based upon your fiscal year-end, not your calendar year-end. 1099 is the calendar year-end one. Any vendor who is going to be issued 1099, make sure that they’ve been marked at the time all your transactions are posted or paid in order for the 1099 information to auto-populate. You can manually adjust those 1099 values in the summary window if you need to, for some reason, but that’s the detail that GP is going to look for when it prints 1099, is at the summary, but it’s preferred of course that we go through and do this properly. Get all the 1099 vendors marked properly first make sure all the appropriate transactions are posted and paid, and then run the year-end close process.
After payables, we go to fixed assets next. A couple things to pull out. If you’re on Dynamics GP 2013, there are separate 1099 address fields. There’s additional functionality that’s been added on the 1099 details window. There’s also some more edit-ability functions. There’s also … Don’t forget to print 1096, your vendor summary forms. I’m getting ahead of myself, here’s the beginning of fixed assets. After payables managements is closed, before we get to general ledger, if you have multiple books setup in your fixed assets system, they can be closed separately or you can do a mass close but all of your fixed asset books must be closed before you can do any processing and fixed assets for new year. You might be tempted to try and take a shortcut and just work on the internal book, because that’s the one that rolls the GL, but no, you need to get every book closed first. Then, we can start to go through the module.
The fixed asset year-end close, what do we accomplish in this? Year-to-date maintenance is clear from the expand last maintenance date window. The quantity is copied to the Begin Quantity field in the Expand Quantity window. At the Asset Book windows, we’re going to do year-to-date depreciation get zeroed, cost bases gets copied over the Beginning Year Cost Field. Life to Date depreciation is copied to the Begin Reserve Field, and Salvage Value is copied over to Begin Salvage Value. In the Book Setup window, we’re going to take the current fiscal year, we’ll increase that for each closed book. In GP 2015, there’s a fixed asset year-end report got added. It’s simply a status report of all the assets that had been affected by the close process you’ve gone through. It’s very important, you must depreciate all the assets through final day of the current fixed asset year before you close the year. Make sure depreciation’s been run all the way through to the end of that year.
Print out any report you’re going to need for the year you’re closing. Before I get the close process started. Again, make a backup, and then the KB article for the details on these steps. If you’re using our analytical accounting year product, there is a year-end close process there but it’s not really separate. It just automatically closes along with the GL, because analytical accounting is really an extension of the GL process, so you got to do both at the same time if you’re using that. If you have any steps you wan to check that AA data, make sure it’s accurate and complete. You need to do that prior to starting the close of the GL year. AA, just basically takes open year to historical information, updates the balance brought forward, et cetera, and then any dimensions in the year-end close that you choose to can be consolidated and tied to that balanced brought forward entry as well.
There’s, again, a detailed KB article. There are scripts you can use to check your AA data against GL, just to make sure that everything ties together. You can mark your dimensions to be consolidated, and then there’s a utility we’ll run to move historical year data to history. This is a one-time process. It all needs to be done. We’ve been running on GP for quite a while. I just see it goes back to GP 10, service pack one or earlier. Again, AA automatically closes with GL. You need to run through the script contained in that KB article first. Don’t forget your management report or data mart is reading from the AA tables. Make sure that AA has been installed and is enabled upon every workstation where is GL is being closed. Some people are not using AA but are using GL, they’ll need the software install, and as always, we’re going to make that backup.
Year-end close. We finally get to the general ledger. We’ve done all these sub-ledgers in sequence. Brings us to the point we’re ready to start to do general ledger. Just a reminder, you should have done already inventory, receivables, payables, and fixed assets in that order. The year-end close routine is going to take all of the open year transactions from the GL20000 table, the GL30000 table, that’s the history table. Doesn’t go away, we can still report against it, but it reports, and inquiries, searching through smart list, et cetera, a lot faster because all that stuff gets moved from open year to historic year. We’ll create and bring forward all the balances where they’re appropriate. Any inactive accounts that do not have a balance or a history get removed. If you’ve chosen to set them as inactive, it’s the flag on the GL card of course. For GP 2013 R2 and up, this is also going to clear out the balances in all of your unit accounts, if you have them marked to do so.
If I’m using a unit or statistical account to track balances of the course of a year, this process can be used to zero those out for the new year. Then all the balance sheet accounts are going forward to the new year of course. P&L accounts get rolled into retained earnings, or if you have it setup with divisional, you can have multiple retaining earnings accounts. Fiscal period tables get updated to mark the year just closed as a historical year. This automatically closes analytical accounting and the year-end close report prints at this point. If you need to save that report for auditing or other purposes, please print that out. There is no option to reprint those reports for year-end close. I need to do this now if I’m going to do it.
Again, the KB article, and if there’s any issues or errors, again, we’re just going to restore the backup and we’re only going to go as far back as the prior module that got closed successfully. If inventory was the last one, or if it’s fixed assets, whatever it might be, just roll back that far. Very important to remember this, always be making the backups, know how to restore them. If you got any questions about that before you start, please ask. We’re happy to help with that. Do not ignore or try to skip any errors, even if it’s an error related to a part of the system that you think won’t impact you, it will impact the year-end close process. If you get an error message, take a screenshot, let our help desk know. This is where I’m in, and this is the error message I just got.
Have to have all your other users out of GP when you do this. If you have your system up to date in smooth, this process shouldn’t take very long, so not a huge inconvenience, but you will need everybody out of the system while you’re doing it. Make sure you do the year-end close at the server. If you are worried about free space on the server, basically what we need is the size of the GL20000 table is going to double. If you’ve got a GL20000 table that is 500 megabytes in size, and you’ve only got 400 megabytes for data storage left on that server, you’re going to need to free up some space. My rule of thumb would be have as much space available as the size of your entire company database. But at a minimum, needs to be the size of that GL20000 table.
If you’ve never run the GP year-end close process before, you may notice the little fuel gauge once you start the year-end close process for GL get started, it will run up to the 50% mark and then it will appear to stop or hang. It hasn’t. It really is still running. What it’s doing in the background is a lot of work communicating back and forth at that point to SQL server, and the client isn’t doing anything. Just let it run. Be patient. Go grab a bite to eat. Talk to a colleague, but it will keep running. If you do not see a specific error message that says it stopped, just let it go. There have, sometimes, been issues with divisional retain earnings because it doesn’t update the GL40000 properly if it gets marked and unmarked. This has been fixed in GP 2013. Shouldn’t be an issue for anyone on the webinar today, but just in case. In GP 2013, they added some additional features. Some more in GP 2013 year two, including the ability to reverse your historical year.
If we needed to, for some reason, we can now simply go in there and say I want to reverse the last closed historical year, bring it back to its open status. Finally, some of the KB articles that are available. Like I said, there are quite a few of them, and I will be happy to make this entire presentation available to anybody who inquires to Jim. Again, you’re just going to go to that one website and then walk through. There’s additional material that I’m going to have in the handout that we’re not going to cover today, which are things like payroll, year-end close and some other specialty things, but they are available in full detail on that handout. At this point, I’d like to say thank you very much for listening to this year-end close webinar for GP. If you have any questions or anything, you can reach out to either Jim or myself at TMC.
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