I have blogged about the need to practice what you preach previously – and last year I did and we upgraded eOne from GP9 to GP2010 and all went well.
I have also recently talked about my transition to Excel Report Builder to replace my regular export from SmartList. I used this report to review the April sales number just today – and it worked perfectly. I really love Excel Report builder and the 30 minutes it saved me today.
Beyond that I am now a regular user of SmartView – and am loving that too. I had a call yesterday from a reseller saying “My customer believes that they have purchased SmartConnect twice from different resellers and a few years apart”. So how in GP would I research this – when I am unsure of the reseller (customer name) and I have no dates to go from?
I jumped right into SmartView and selected the sales line items, for all time. (I know we are not a massive volume company but I got over 10,000 records back in 7.4 seconds). I did a CTRL F to search all fields and typed in the first part of the customer name. It took an extra 6.1 seconds to return for me two invoice numbers both selling SmartConnect to the same customer one in 2007 and again in 2010! The trick was that the customer name was stored in the customer PO number on one invoice and in the item line description on the other invoice.
Now I have an issue to deal with for client and Reseller – but the beauty is that SmartView helped me do something in a minute what could have taken 20 minutes if I waited for SmartList to do the same job. (Or I may be still looking as I would never have thought to search on the item description field to find what I was looking for).
