Making It Easier with Dynamics GP – Quickly Modify Your Chart of Accounts

An organization needs a financial management systems to help its employees easily handle the routine tasks and complex processes without adding a lot of extra work to what is already required in a day’s work.  Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 offers capabilities which help people work faster and smarter.  The Account Card (also called the Account Maintenance Window) demonstrates how employees can use built-in tools of Microsoft Dynamics GP for meeting specific business needs.

As you know, you can navigate to the Account Card in order to add, delete, or update your Chart of Accounts.  However, there are many circumstances where you need to make mass changes to the Chart of Accounts, and going through the Account Card which only effects one account number combination at a time would be too slow and laborious.

The most typical example is when you have a new department or division and you need to add the same accounts as in your other typical departments or divisions, the only difference being the department or division number.  In a case like this, you may need to add thousands of accounts and it would take you all day to key them in. You would be likely to make errors, omitting accounts, or putting the account in the wrong Account Category or Posting Type.

The Dynamics GP team has addressed this issue with a feature called Mass Modify.  This feature is available under:  Cards > Financial > Mass Modify

In this case, I have created a new department (the 1^st segment of the Chart of Accounts Number) which I have numbered 700.  I must remember to go into Tools > Setup > Financial > Segment, in order to add this segment value of 700 for the 1^st segment, and to give the segment a description, namely, the name of the new department.

My desire is to have the new department, 700, mirror the old department 100 exactly.  So I have set the Account Range from 100 to 100 for the 1^st segment, and the rest of the segments I have gone from all zeros to all nines.  Under the Display section I have selected the “Selected Range” radio button; this shows me the accounts in the grid below that are going to serve as my template to build (copy) the new accounts.  Basically, I am copying all of the accounts that belong to department 100, and creating new accounts with 700 instead of 100 in the first segment.  I have set the New Account Mask to 700 for the 1^st segment, and question marks for all the rest.  Lastly, I have set the Use Description From section to “Account Segments” in order to pull in the account description from the descriptions stored in the Segment Master table (as defined under Tools > Setup > Financial > Segment); in this way, the account will be described with the description of the new department as the beginning of the description of the  account; alternatively, if the account descriptions are only the natural account, I would have selected “Existing Accounts.”

This all works very well.  However, there are times where the new accounts you need to create don’t follow such a simple business rule, as every account in a range of accounts; sometimes the accounts are in a discontinuous range.  Sometimes the list of accounts you want to add are much easier to compile in Excel.  Also, pushing the “Modify” button can be a bit scary; you are not quite certain what accounts this feature is going to create.  You can create a big mess by accidentally creating all kinds of accounts that you don’t need, and the results are often unpredictable if you start putting in complex masks and ranges in the Mass Modify Window.  The real problem here is that the Mass Modify feature does not show you a preview of what it is about to create, instead it simply creates the accounts; what can happen then is that you get into trying to use Mass Modify to delete the accounts you unwittingly created using Mass Modify, and in the process you end up deleting accounts you didn’t mean to delete.

What I suggest is using the Smart List to download the accounts you want to copy into Excel.  Then you can do a Search & Replace operation in Excel (using control-H).  In Excel you can review and study the list of accounts.  When you are ready to add the new accounts, you can use the Integration Manager module (which is really a separate application) to import the accounts by setting up a simple Account Card import routine.  Integration Manager can import directly from Excel, but you have to set a named range of cells in Excel for this to work.  Typically, what I do is set up Integration Manager to import from a text file.  I save (or cut & paste) the source data from out of Excel into a text file, then I point Integration Manager to the text file.  There are sample Account Card import routines in the Integration Manager database that comes with Dynamics GP.

By:  Ren Bellu, McGladrey – Certified Microsoft Dynamics Specialists

Making It Easier with Dynamics GP – Quickly Modify Your Chart of Accounts is a post from: ERP Software Blog

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