It’s Saturday, or after hours a buyer lands on your website and discovers the only way to order your product is by calling you the next business day. You lost a sale and the real problem is you may not even know it. Would you like to have a website and manage the content without a webmaster? How about a website that takes orders and passes all the information into your accounting system with the push of a button? Here is a list of the tools you would need to purchase, all for a total investment of around $1,600 and a few days of your time.

Domain name registration $25 Make sure the provider is reliable, easy to work with and has the ability to change and redirect your web domain if you need to. Additionally, make sure you have password protection, registrar locking ability and for advanced users you may want the ability to change DNS settings and have flexible configuration options without having to pay for these changes.

Peachtree Web Site Creator Pro Version 4.5 $197.88 for the annual subscription. Build a professional-quality web site for your business with customizable pages and an online catalog, including inventory items that you can upload from your Peachtree Premium software with graphical pictures. This product has an intuitive basic setup page that includes a step-by-step guide to help you get your website up and running. You may view a sample of this product @ http://www.bellwethergarden.com/ct_catalog.htm

Peachtree Web Site Trader Version 4.5 $197.88 for the annual subscription. Sell your products and services online and transfer web orders into your Peachtree Accounting software. This product has a secure interactive storefront and instantly adds new customer information to Peachtree from web orders. Additionally, the e-mail order confirmation for you and your customers is simple to modify. The price listed also includes annual web hosting. After you have your Peachtree Accounting software up and running you may purchase the web site subscription from www.peachtree.com.

Peachtree single user Premium Accounting Version 2006 retails for $499 – This product has additional features not found in some of the lesser priced versions of Peachtree. It is designed to help small businesses better manage their accounting, streamline their operations, and aid in their decision making. With training you can quickly learn, use and easily correct mistakes. This product helps businesses do more in less time. To get almost a 20% discount off the software, plus mail in rebate coupons, forms discount coupons and free tips and tricks newsletters shipped with your order go to www.bizsoftresource.com.

Training classes from certified training centers are generally around $350 per day, include a training manual and sometimes lunch. I would suggest a minimum of 2 days of training. A listing of the certified training classes be found @ www.peachtree.com/forms/html/premiertrainers.cfm

We have helped a few of our clients set up E-Commerce solutions using these tools and have set up a site of our own. Once we decided on the content it took us less than 8 hours to upload our inventory and configure the website. I give this product thumbs up! Look for information on Peachtree’s credit card and a payroll processing services which we will review in future articles.

Jennifer OBrien is the founder and president of JCS Computer Resource, Inc. and has served on the Steering Committee for Certified Consultants for Sage software 5 times over the past 15 years.
www.jcscomputer.com

Looks like Microsoft Great Plains becomes more and more popular, partly because of Microsoft muscles behind it.  Now it is targeted to the whole spectrum of horizontal and vertical market clientele.  Small companies use Small Business Manager (which is based on the same technology – Great Plains Dexterity dictionary and runtime), Great Plains Standard on MSDE is for small to midsize clients, and then Great Plains serves the rest of the market up to big corporations.  There are several reporting tools available and you definitely need to know which one to use for different types of reports.

If you are database administrator who is asked to import some data to Great Plains or repair or copy data from one company to another – read this and you will have the clues on where to look further.

1.  Microsoft Great Plains Tables Structure – Launch Great Plains and go to Tools->Resource Description->Tables.  Find the table in the proper series.  If you are looking for the customers – it should be RM00101 – customer master file.

2.  DEX_ROW_ID.  This is identity column and each Great Plains table has it - this is due to the Great Plains Dexterity technology.  This column is never used as a key field - so don’t try to link your tables on DEX_ROW_ID.  In case if you need to transfer the table from one company to another you should use these queries:

select * into GL00100_BAK from TWO.dbo.GL00100
go
alter table GL00100_BAK drop column DEX_ROW_ID
go
insert into GL00100 select * from GL00100_BAK
go
drop table GL00100_BAK

The set of queries above will transfer GL00100 (Account Master table) from TWO company into your current company.  Then you need to run Checklinks - refer to GP Manual - in order to recreate the rest of the account master related tables.

3.  Do not modify the table – sometimes it seems to be nice if you just append couple of extra columns to the table - like in IV00101 - inventory master file why wouldn’t you just add couple of additional descriptions.  If you do this - Great Plains Dexterity engine will fail reading all your items - due to the fact that DYNAMICS.DIC (main Great Plains Dictionary file) has exact description of all the tables and Dexterity uses it for reading and writing into the specific table

4.  Feel free to create SQL views or stored procs.  If you are helping your internal developers to create Crystal Reports - good SQL views are real help to them.  Let me give you example, the view below will show work and historical SOP Invoices - then Crystal can just use it

create view SOP_WORK_HIST
as
select SOPNUMBE, CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, DOCAMNT from SOP30200 where SOPTYPE=3 and VOIDSTTS=0
union
select SOPNUMBE, CUSTNMBR, CUSTNAME, DOCAMNT from SOP10100 where SOPTYPE=3 and VOIDSTTS=0

The above view will show all the work and historical non-voided invoices (SOP Type = 3 stays for invoice)

5.  Some repair / unlocking tips:

If you run query above against DYNAMICS database - it will unlock the user, who accidentally shut down the computer without logging off Great Plains:

delete ACTIVITY where USERID=’JOHN’

Next one will unlock hanging batch:

update SY00500 set BCHSTTUS=0 where BACHNUMB = ‘JULYINVOICES04′ 

Happy querying!  if you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Great Plains implementation and customization company, based in Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Miami and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com), he is Dexterity, SQL, VB/C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.