Do you need a solid foundation for unifying and automating processes? Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains offers integrated capabilities for financial management, distribution, manufacturing, project accounting, human resource management, field service management, and business analytics. By delivering deep access to decision-driving information, a rapid return on investment, and expert, dedicated customer service, Microsoft Great Plains can help you grow and manage your business better.

Microsoft® Business Solutions–Great Plains®

Analytics: See Demo 1 SeeDemo 2

Get the right information to the right people at the right time in a format that is
easily understood.

Having the right information at the right time is critical to run your business effectively.
Microsoft Great Plains gives you the tools to sort through the data to find the exact
information you need to make critical business decisions.

FRx Financial Report Writer allows you to create pivot tables and graphs directly from your
financial data source. This saves time and makes it easier to analyze your financial data.
With Excel Pivot tables you can “slice and dice” information in a variety of ways and
visualize it graphically.

With the FRx Report Manager you can create Report Books, grouping a series of reports
together. You can even add a table of contents and text pages explaining financial
information. Whether it’s your entire year end report or individual departmental reports, FRx
Report Manager adds organization and a professional look to your reports.

Report books can include multiple types of files from FRx drilldown reports, Excel
worksheets, PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Great Plains reports, and more. Reports
can be generated on demand or scheduled to run at predetermined times.

Financial reports, graphs and pivot tables can be emailed to recipients based on access
rights set up in FRx. Employees will get access only to the reports they need.

Use the power of Microsoft Great Plains to help you generate fast, accurate and professional
looking reports for your business.

Better Together -- Microsoft Business Inelligence See Demo

Solutions Great Plains and Microsoft Office System

Excel Integration See Demo

Turn Microsoft Business Solutions data into Information with Excel 2003. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 enables you to turn data into information with powerful tools to analyze, communicate, and share results. When Excel 2003 is directly integrated with your Microsoft business solution, the benefits become even greater

Here you see an Excel worksheet populated with Microsoft Business Solutions sales data. This worksheet was created by using the built- in data import functionality in Excel 2003.

Let's walk through the data import process to show how easy it is to import Microsoft Business Solutions data into Excel.

First, you select Import Data from the Data menu in Excel

Then select the +Connect to New Data Source.odc option to launch the Excel Data Connection Wizard.

Choose Microsoft Business Solutions as your data source and click Next.

Then select the data object within the Microsoft Business Solutions database that you wish to import into Excel.

In this case we've chosen the Top 10 Items by Sales Amount selection within the Sales Highlights data object.

Next, select the data fields to bring into Excel.

Once the Data Connection Wizard has finished importing the data, an Excel worksheet will appear displaying the Microsoft Business Solutions data you selected.

From within Excel you can format the data in whatever manner you wish, such as adding a bar or pie chart to the worksheet.

Through the built in integration between Microsoft Excel 2003 and Microsoft Business Solutions, you can quickly import data into Excel to easily streamline further analysis and distribution of your business information.

Smart Tags Integration See Demo 1 See Demo 2

Work Smarter with Microsoft Office Smart Tags
Microsoft Office Smart Tags help you work smarter by providing instant, automatic links between text in Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook, and the related information in Microsoft Business Solutions.

For example, you can type a customer's name in a Word document and instantly display that customer's outstanding balance, recent purchases, and other information to help you work smarter every day.

In Microsoft Office Smart Tags are represented by a purple dotted line. For example, in this customer letter you see a purple dotted line under the name Aaron Fitz Electrical. This is a visual queue that this text is recognized as an entity in the Great Plains database.

If you hover over the name you will see a Smart Tag Icon that contains a menu of options.

In this case the Smart Tag represents a customer record in Great Plains. From this menu, you can view summary data, notes, or transaction information for this customer.

Choose View Summary Data to open the Smart Tag Viewer window to see a summary of this customer's payment history.

Using the Smart Tag Viewer window, even employees who do not have direct access to the Microsoft Great Plains application can still retrieve information about their customers, vendors, products, and more.
Just highlight the information you want and right click to copy this information into the letter.
In just a few clicks, you can insert a customer's payment history into this letter cutting down on the time it takes you to prepare your payment notices.

Now let's look at how to take advantage of Smart Tag functionality in Microsoft Outlook.

When you enter information into Outlook that is recognized in the Great Plains database as a Smart Tag, the text is underlined in purple and the Smart Tag icon becomes active. In this case, the Smart Tag icon is active on Carlson Specialties as a vendor.

Click on the icon to see the available Smart Tag options for that field. By selecting Open Transaction Inquiry, you will be prompted to login into Great Plains and then you will see a vendor transaction inquiry window that displays all the open transactions for this vendor.

With Smart Tag Manager, you can instantly review the vendor's account activity and determine if their request for payment is valid, or if there are outstanding issues which need to be resolved before payment will be made.

With Microsoft Office Smart Tag functionality integrated to Microsoft Business Solutions you gain access to the right information when you need it making you more efficient at your day to day activities.

Letter Writing Assistant

Build Customized Communications with Microsoft Great Plains Letter Writing Assistant
The Letter Writing Assistant feature in Microsoft Great Plains lets you build customized communications in Microsoft Word using a step by step wizard that will automatically populate a letter with customer, vendor and employee information.

To start the wizard, click on the Reports menu and select Letter Writing Assistant

You can choose to use one of the existing template styles or your own customized letter.

The Letter Writing Assistant comes with letter templates for customers, vendors and employees. Let's prepare a customer letter.

First you will select which customers to receive the letter. You can select a range of customers, type of customer, or all customers.

Next you will see a predefined listing of letters. Let's choose the customer survey letter.

The wizard now displays a list of customers for whom the letter will be generated. This list is based on your earlier selection criteria. At this point you could unmark any customer you did not wish to receive the survey or choose to select all customers.

To complete the Letter Writing Assistant wizard, enter the name, title and phone number information to be included in the salutation of the letter. And click Finish.
Now you have survey letters for all of your customers ready to go.

The Letter Writing Assistant is just another Office integration feature that lets your organization take full advantage of existing software investments and builds on the productivity foundation that Microsoft Office offers.

Smart List

Better Track and Analyze information with Smart List Favorites
Smart List Favorites in Microsoft Great Plains make it easier to track and analyze the information that helps you run your business better. A widely used query tool for locating critical business information, SmartList now offers more than 100 pre-defined queries that can be easily modified and exported to Excel or Word for further analysis or to share with others.

Here you see a sampling of the many SmartList queries at your disposal. If you select the Vendor Balance SmartList, you will see the vendor Id, Name, current balance, Last Year balance and contact information. This particular view is sorted in descending order so that the vendors that you have done the most business with this year show at the top.

This information can easily be sent to Microsoft Excel or Word for further analysis.

Here you see the same data in an excel spreadsheet.

This is just another example of how Microsoft Great Plains can leverage the productivity tools of the Microsoft Office System.

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