Microsoft Great Plains Implementation: Collection Management ? Overview For Consultant

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is very good fit for mid-size company and probably good budget solutions for large corporation. Being matured product ? Great Plains provides such horizontal solutions as Collection department automation. The most common question we hear in collection department is how we assign problem clients to specific collection manager and how she/he works with them one by one, simply by hitting next arrow button. This is not possible in Great Plains Accounts Payable module and this is where Collection Management module comes to the scenes.

Installation

? Reg Key. Great Plains reg key allow you to use specific set of module and number of user (this is in System Manager). Collection Management module requires Receivables Management module and you need to purchase it and get new reg key

? Loading. You should load collection management from CD#2. It is Dexterity chunk file and it will be integrated the next time you launch Great Plains Workstation.

? Company Install. Utilities->Sales->Install Collections. This utility creates tables and stored procedures on MS SQL Server side Setup

? Module. Here you set up the module itself: is it integrated with SOP or Invoicing, User Defined fields, etc

? Collectors. Here you associate Great Plains user with collector role

? Actions. In you collection cycle you can assign actions to your customers. Later on Actions could be used as selection range in the Collection Query

? Letters. You can automate your actions with sending different type of predefined letters where customer info goes into designated fields

Transactions

? Collection Management Build Query. Here you can restrict the quiry by Customer Info, Balance, Period, Notes, Action Type.

? Collection Main Window. When you are done with building the query ? click on query tab in Build Query window and you will open collection main window, where you will see the range, defined in the build query ? and here is the answer on the question from the introduction paragraph

Maintenance

? Check Links. If you are administrator of Great Plains ? you should be familiar with check licks ? it checks consistency of the tables and if any orphan or missing info is there. Shrink/Rebuild were actual for Pervasive SQL and Ctree only, you do not do these for SQL based system

Happy implementing! You can always appeal to us to help you with your system. Give as a call 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577, [email protected]

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Microsoft CRM, Navision, Microsoft RMS, Microsoft Business Portal customization company, serving clients in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Toronto, Montreal, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Australia, Canada, UK, Europe, Russia an having small offices in multiple states and internationally.