DynamicPoint Blog
Tired of Reprinting Invoices? Sending Statements? Distributing Reports?
Are the repetitive, mundane customer service tasks bogging down your team?
DynamicPoint’s SharePoint Portals for Dynamics CRM & ERP solutions are proving invaluable in streamlining customer and vendor communications with 24/7 self-service access. Not only have people come to expect immediate access to their information but a portal will contribute to bottom line savings while allowing employees to spend less time on the phone or email dealing with these typical, repetitive customer service requests.
Typical Portal Use Cases:
- Issue Statements. Summit Fertilizer was challenged by supplying customer’s statements which pulled key finance resources off more pressing tasks at the end of each month. They now extend secure portal access to each of their customers so they may access and print statements online, on demand.
- Reprinting of Invoices. The all too common task of contacting the finance department to confirm open invoices can stop with the extension of 24/7 access to open invoices and a historical payment record. Curb the calls to finance, stop the flood of emails and allow your customers to access and even print open invoices!
- Report Distribution. You have leveraged Business Analysts time and again to develop the reports needed to track customer activities but why not share them! That option now exists because DynamicPoint’s seamless integration between your existing Microsoft Dynamics ERP information and the SharePoint portal uses web services to allow for, in the case of Summit Fertilizers, the publication of Dynamics reports delivering immediate access to Dynamics NAV reports for a more effective and profitable customer service experience.
Plus, there is zero disconnect! Our portals present an extension of your organization as you are able to brand the portal to your current look and feel with logo’s, color schemes and web parts populating the appropriate management staff per organization. Putting Summit Fertilizer back in the spotlight here allows us to highlight how easily you are able to extend your corporate branding from your website to a secure Customer or Vendor Portal.
Portal Branding
Make sure you check out our Portals video gallery and feel free to contact us if you have any questions!
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions.
So Many Things to be Thankful For!
In the spirit of Thanksgiving the team at DynamicPoint has so much to be thankful: amazing health, good fortune, friends and family are at the very top of the list! However if we were to apply this same level of gratitude to the work we do each day there are a couple of things that require a huge shout out:
- SharePoint – There is simply no other place to start than with SharePoint – we couldn’t be more thankful for the investment that Microsoft has made into SharePoint as it delivers the backbone to each of our Business Automation Solutions for Dynamics CRM & ERP solutions. We are able to leverage the rich out-of-the-box functionality that SharePoint delivers to meet so many customer requirements with our applications:
- Workflow – The SharePoint workflow engine allows us to trigger the review and approval of expense reports, invoices, and purchase requisitions based on many variables; company, department, expense type, amount, etc. to ensure corporate spending policies are enforceable.
- Outlook Integration – The success to launching any new application is user adoption and with out-of-the-box integration to Outlook Email and Tasks our customers’ employees are notified that they have expenses, invoices and requisitions to review directly in their inbox! In addition, tasks can be escalated if the review process exceeds a certain threshold with nagging email and task reminders all within Outlook.
- Reporting – With out-of-the-box integration to Microsoft technologies; Power BI, Excel, PowerPivot and Power View our customers can expose analytics and create spreadsheets, pivot tables and charts to extend KPI’s to the business, customers or vendors that is most meaningful to their operations.
- PowerApps – Additionally, we couldn’t be more thankful in Microsoft’s continued investment in the App model with the release of Microsoft PowerApps. PowerApps is enabling us to further extend our SharePoint Portal applications in a mobile friendly format without writing code. That is right, we are meeting the customer demands of extending our 24/7 self-service portal access to Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV & Dynamics 365 data in a mobile-friendly format that is freeing up development resources to focus on more technical integrations!
- Web Services – Many may say “web what” but to the team at DynamicPoint and those of you that having being using Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV & Dynamics 365 we know we are blessed to have web services. This is the key element that ensures we can extend the data needed from Dynamics GP and NAV into our SharePoint Portals for customers and vendors to access such items as inventory, sales orders and purchase orders for the most effective customer service experience.
- Customers – Lastly and most importantly during this season, we find ourselves reflecting on the past year and those who have helped to shape our business – our Customers and Partners! It’s been quite a year for us all and we so greatly appreciate the opportunities we have been granted but also the relationships we have built that allow our business and software to grow and evolve. We THANK YOU and look forward to working with you in the years to come.
Happy Thanksgiving from the team at DynamicPoint.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions.
Automate Corporate Credit Card Expense Reimbursement
When your organization has a huge portion of its employees on the road with a corporate credit card, you most likely find it difficult, and at times impossible, to keep track of all of the expenses being racked up and who is adhering to corporate spending policies. We don’t want your AP department to stay buried in the mountains of credit card statements and validation of those expenses so DynamicPoint’s SharePoint Expense Management Solution is here to help! Our application automates the full expense management and reimbursement funnel including the creation, review, and payment of employee expense reimbursement requests. And most importantly, it seamlessly integrates corporate credit transactions by employees into the expense management application for ease in coding and including receipts.
DynamicPoint automates the pickup of your corporate credit statements, parses the report by employee, maps expense types by merchant category codes (if applicable) and alerts employees to credit card transactions that need to be coded. Here is a short video that shows exactly what that process looks like:
When the report is routed for approval the reviewing managers will be provided with a holistic view of an employee’s expenses, including credit card as well as out of pocket expenditures. When the report is approved and integrated with Dynamics these transactions can be created as a payable against the credit card provider or as a journal entry to a credit card clearing account.
DynamicPoint’s SharePoint Expense Management Solution helps your organization steer clear of those fiscal cliffs by providing the visibility you’re AP departments need to keep credit card expenses streamlined and accurate.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics GP & NAV.
Using Power BI to Create Reports from DynamicPoint Data
Microsoft Power BI can be used to easily create and share reports and dashboards on the information that resides within DynamicPoint applications. This includes all of our products, specifically Expense, Requisition and Invoice Management as well as our Customer and Vendor portals. These analytics can then be shared in Power BI on Office 365 or published back to SharePoint such that they can be viewed directly within the site. This is yet another reason why creating our applications on the SharePoint framework provides our customers with so much flexibility and extensibility in using complementary Microsoft product offerings.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions
Automatically Calculate Canadian Tax for Employee Expense Reimbursement
Canadian tax can make automating employee expense reimbursements complicated, but it does not have to be! Our application allows your organization to configure how GST, PST, QST and/or HST tax will be calculated to ensure you take full advantage of the available Canadian tax credits. The flexible nature of our SharePoint Expense Management application allows for the automatic calculation of the applicable taxes based on a total expense amount being entered. If a variation to the default percentage needs to be taken into account, you may configure the application to allow the user or reviewers to edit the tax amount.
In addition to the tax data collection during the creation of the expense report, tax amounts will also be recorded to specific GL accounts. Therefore upon approval of the expense report the tax entries are recorded to the proper GL accounts as well as the employee being reimbursed.
Watch this short 3 minute video to see how easily an employee can create an employee expense report notating the various Canadian taxes along with the integration to Dynamics GP and NAV.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint – SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics GP & NAV.
DynamicPoint releases its SharePoint Portal Service
DynamicPoint is proud to announce the beta release of its SharePoint Customer and Vendor Portal application. Built using the latest technology and hosted on Microsoft Azure, the Portal Service allows DynamicPoint to rapidly synchronize the data within a customer’s Dynamics AX (Axapta), Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP (Great Plains), Dynamics NAV (Navision) or Dynamics 365 environment to a customer or vendor facing portal. The architecture of the application is very flexible in that it support Microsoft Dynamics installed either on premise or in the cloud. On the SharePoint side we are equally as flexible, supporting SharePoint Office 365 or installed on premise to a customer’s environment. The core of the application is DynamicPoint’s Portal Synchronization Server, which provides the connectivity, security and data mapping from your Microsoft Dynamics installation to SharePoint. This allows such information as Sales / Purchase orders, Customer / Vendor profile information and payment status to be published to a SharePoint extranet site. The data is filtered such that the external user only sees the information that is pertinent to them. Additionally, security to the site can be managed using Active Directory, Microsoft Live or Forms / Claims based authentication to ensure easy access to a group of customers or partners.
The resulting architecture of the solution is as follows:
Additionally, because all the information is stored directly on the SharePoint server in lists you reap the benefits of quick access to the data along with the flexible and extendable nature of SharePoint being integrated seamlessly with Dynamics Great Plains and Navision to tackle the following common use cases published in our previous blog post, SharePoint Online for Dynamics ERP Customer & Vendor Portals.
What does all of this mean for you? Well, if you are interested in providing your customers or vendors a 24-7 portal site in which they can review reports, access and edit certain information in Dynamics, and perform such tasks as document management and workflow, then DynamicPoint has the answer.
Learn more about our portal applications and associated pricing.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions.
VIDEO TUTORIAL: Integrating Data From Microsoft Dynamics to a SharePoint Customer Portal
SharePoint, and specifically SharePoint Online (Office 365), are natural platforms for delivering Customer Portals. So much of the functionality that companies want to extend to their customers, including workflow, document management, analytics, etc., are available right out of the box. The part that is missing, and where DynamicPoint comes in, is the integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV and Dynamics 365 by extending such items as inventory, sales orders, and payment status.
In today’s video we demonstrate how you can integrate key data using a no-code configurable product available on the Office Store. This is a great way to get started in sharing some information with your customers. As your requirements get more sophisticated such that you require real time data queries, workflow approval process, and the ability to edit information, that is where DynamicPoint has you covered. Watch below!
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions.
Expense, Requisition & Invoice Management Applications Integrate with Project Accounting, Job Tracking & Analytical Accounting Modules Out-of-the-Box
Since DynamicPoint’s SharePoint products are built exclusively for Dynamics GP and NAV it is only natural to link to various Dynamics ERP add-on modules as well as 3rd party applications. Thus far, Microsoft Dynamics GP application integrations have been created with Project Accounting, Encore Project as well as Analytical Accounting. On the Dynamics NAV front this includes Job Tracking as well as Dimension Codes.
The product development approach taken to support these integrations lends itself as being highly flexible as to what Dynamics modules or even custom external databases can be integrated. As opposed to taking the approach of supporting one or the other, a concept of “external categories” has been implemented in all three of DynamicPoint’s products. This strategy enables data to be queried directly from Dynamics and either selected or defaulted on the SharePoint web parts within the Expense, Requisition and Invoice Management Applications. These categories can include such items as projects and cost categories, jobs and tasks, or analytical accounting codes and dimensions.
In addition to the ability to select this information in the application and ultimately pass it to Dynamics, an administrator in the system can configure relationships and restrictions amongst the categories. For example, maybe only a certain subset of projects should be available to a given department or expense type. The jobs and projects can be defined as related to departments such that only the users within those departments can select them.
These are just the capabilities of modules within the Dynamics products. We have already used the new external category capability to hook up to external SQL databases, customization tables and even 3rd party applications. It is pretty much a “you name it and we can integrate with it” opportunity. Assuming the external data source has a method for querying the data that is to be selected on the expense report, purchase requisition or invoice, then SharePoint can query it and the data will be available for selection on the SharePoint form.
If you thought your process was too complicated for the typical Expense, Purchase Requisition or Invoice Management Application schedule an interactive demonstration to better understand the integrations available with Dynamics add-on modules or external data sources.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint – SharePoint Expense, Invoice & Requisition Management applications built exclusively for Dynamics GP & NAV.
SharePoint Online for Dynamics ERP Customer and Vendor Portals
Features of a Customer or Vendor Extranet for Microsoft Dynamics GP & NAV
One of the many capabilities of SharePoint Online/Office 365 is to provide an extranet for use by your customers and vendors. It becomes a more effective experience when you layer in integration to Dynamics ERP and CRM solutions and deliver 24/7 access to information on demand. Eliminate the need to contact support or a customer care representative with the flexible and extendable nature of SharePoint integrated seamlessly with Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV and Dynamics 365 with the following common uses:
Why Use SharePoint to Build Your Portal
The main advantage of using SharePoint to deliver the functionality for your Dynamics ERP portal is that most all of the features outlined above can be delivered out of the box using just configuration. Some of the main areas of SharePoint that are used in the development of portals include:
- Branding – Nobody wants their partner facing portal to look like it is just a generic template. That is why SharePoint allows you to change the look and feel to match your existing company branding
- Content Management – Standardized web parts can be dropped on any page and security applied so your customers and vendors are seeing only the information that is applicable to them
- Business Automation / Workflow – Approval processes can be associated to project tasks, contracts, documents and other items that require interaction between the various parties
- Communities – With the standard integration with Yammer, SharePoint can provide a private social media platform directly to your business partners
- Reporting – Partner performance metrics and other reporting and KPIs can be published directly to your customers and vendors
- Authentication and User Management – Security is a big concern in exposing any of your company’s information over the internet. Only authenticated users should be able to access the portal and you don’t want to create a nightmare of maintaining their accounts. SharePoint Online (Office 365) simplifies this with the use of Microsoft Live Accounts. Partners can be invited to the portal and maintain their accounts using the Live Platform, alleviating you of the dreaded “I forgot my password” calls.
What are the Benefits of Using SharePoint Online?
The biggest benefit of using Office 365 and SharePoint online to deliver your extranet solution is that your organization doesn’t have to worry about the procurement, maintenance and setup of the SharePoint servers. Also, all of the security requirements to prevent your portal from being hacked are management by Microsoft. Don’t forgot the best part, external users don’t require additional licenses (validate here to make sure you are following the rules!), so you can share your site with many external users without an impact to your software costs.
DynamicPoint Extends Your Dynamics Data Seamlessly to SharePoint
With all of the features available with SharePoint it brings to question how DynamicPoint fits in the mix. The answer is simple. We supply the integration with your Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP Solution. For both Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV and Dynamics 365 we deliver immediate access to customer and vendor data residing within Great Plains and Navision, including such items as inventory, sales orders and purchase orders to ensure key data is easily assessable for the most effective customer service experience.
Learn More about Customer & Vendor Portals Watch the Video!
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
SharePoint Purchase, Invoice, Expense & Portal applications built exclusively for Dynamics ERP & CRM Solutions.
SharePoint 2016 Release | Road Map Update
“SharePoint Server 2016 delivers foundational improvements that enhance the quality of your on-premises SharePoint solutions and enable you to take advantage of innovations we introduce to Office 365 and SharePoint Server moving forward.” – SharePoint Team, 2016
With the official SharePoint 2016 release, we look forward to fully utilizing the cloud-inspired infrastructure, seamless connection to innovative Office 365 features, and enhanced user experiences. We will continue to focus on the migration of all products to Office 365 as well as support the SharePoint 2016 release. All products will be fully compatible as you look to upgrade your existing environment. More details will follow regarding migration options for our existing customers who wish to move to SharePoint online or SharePoint 2016.
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint – SharePoint Expense, Invoice & Requisition Management applications built exclusively for Dynamics GP & NAV.
Why Customer’s Love DynamicPoint
