Microsoft Great Plains in Agriculture – implementation highlights
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
1-866-528-0577,
1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
In this small article
we’ll concentrate on farmers associations and non-profit state-sponsored
organizations, dealing with subsidized state and federal programs distribution
and management – loans to farmers and rural communities. As we realized this is
relatively narrow market niche and it is almost ignored by software developers.
In the typical case you should take generic ERP application, such as Microsoft
Great Plains and integrate it with legacy systems or create custom piece in
Great Plains
to serve your association needs.
- Loan Tracking
System. Your customers –
farmers are customers in Microsoft Great Plains Accounts Receivables (AR)
module, however the association doesn’t have the loan on its balance – it is
managing the program for the fee. This is why Loan Tracking system is usually
custom application. It is often written in Microsoft Access. You need a link
from Great Plains Customer Maintenance screen to the customer loan record in
the MS Access. This could be realized via smart tag.
- Loan marketing.
You can improve your results by analyzing loans by farmers segments and offer
related and associated financial products to farmers community. This is
excellent field for Crystal Reports designer
- State regulation.
As the association you need to file numerous state-dependent reports, related
to your financial activity. The reporting is based on Microsoft Great Plains
company database as well as your custom made loan tracking system/database.
In MS SQL Server you should create linked server and heterogeneous SQL queries
and stored procedures
- Non-profit chart
of accounts. Great Plains
handles non-profit accounting. Chart of accounts is flexible from Microsoft
Great Plains side – the often case is implementing the same chart of accounts
as you have in your legacy accounting application.
- Customization &
Integration. Association
service loan programs and dealing with numerous banks. Expect EFT and bank
transactions integration, which should be considered individually with each
specific case. Portion of the above mentioned loan system logic you may bring
to Great Plains. Good candidate would be interest calculation and AR interest
and principal reimbursement invoices automatic creation – SQL stored
procedures with Great Plains Dexterity setup screen will do the job. In this
case you can verify statements from the bank and match them with your own
calculations in Great Plains.
We encourage you to analyze your
alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577
or 1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at
Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision
to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia,
Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan