Workflows Galore in GP2018 and What Makes Them Great!

Hands down, one of my favorite features of the newer versions of Dynamics GP are the workflow capabilities. The workflow tool is slick, well though-out and doesn’t get enough recognition (or requests for implementations) that it so rightfully deserves.

A few things that are fantastic with workflows…

• Email approvals (approving user never even has to open GP)

• Customizable emails (you can provide so much detail via email that the user has no need to even want to go into GP)

• Attachments added in GP can be made to flow-through to email (including attachments added at master record level)

• Works with Outlook very easily, including Office 365.

• Super easy to setup and straight-forward. A workflow guru can make it perfect, a newby can make it work.

• Reminders on workflow tasks

• Ability to set out of office for approvers

• Microsoft is COMMITTED! Workflow enhancements have been coming with probably the last 5 major releases of GP and I expect them to keep coming!

• The number of workflow options AVAILABLE!

Available Workflow Listing in Dynamics GP 2018

• Financial

  • General Ledger Account Approval

  • General Ledger Batch Approval

• Sales

  • Receivables Batch Approval

• Purchasing

  • Payables Batch Approval

  • Payables Transaction Approval

  • Purchase Order Approval

  • Purchase Requisition Approval

  • Purchasing Invoice Approval

  • Receivings Transaction Approval

  • Vendor Approval

• Payroll

  • Employee Profile Approval

  • Employee Skills Approval

  • Payroll Direct Deposit Approval

  • Payroll Timecard Approval

  • Payroll W4 Approval

• Project

  • Expense Report Approval

  • Timesheet Approval

• Administration

  • SmartList Designer View Approval

I can go on forever on the pros but I’m stopping it there. I do want to touch on a few cons…

• Restrictions can be set to what workflows apply to BUT there’s no way to prevent the workflow from having to be kicked off once the workflow is enabled. Ie.) If my workflow is on EFT payment batches (PM Batches), I still have to “submit” my other PM batches even though there isn’t actual workflow steps for anything but EFT batches. It’s just an extra step in the typical process and turns some people off.

• Reporting options are “young”. Microsoft is slowly rolling out more reporting options for workflows and workflow statuses but it still has a ways to go (Workflow status not included on Vendors SmartList).

• No “Approval Hub” for approver. In a perfect world, a user would go to one place that listed all of their pending workflow tasks and could approve from there. As it is right now, they have to run a report to view this and then separately go into each record and approve.

All in all, this tool is slick and does close to everything you’d expect a Workflow application to be able to do but does it in a way that it’s simple and easy to maintain. Kudos to the Microsoft team on this one and if you’re considering delving into workflows for your business… JUMP! (and let us know if we can help).

See ya next post!