Murphy’s Law states that if something can go wrong, it will. Perhaps the greatest antidote to stave off Murphy (or to lessen the consequences of a problem) is preparation. Q Factor strongly encourages all of its clients to perform regular practices to get the most out of Microsoft Dynamics GP. Dynamics GP takes well to customization, whether in creating accounting reports or allowing changes to the system, and we recommend two habits to help save a lot of headache for every company: making server notes whenever changes are made, and performing regular backups.
Whether your in-house accounting team is one or twenty, it is important that everyone who touches Dynamics GP make note on the server what changes and improvements they have made. The reason to make notations about any system modifications is so that, in case the “improvement” turns out to have unanticipated, or even has unwanted results, you are able to revert to a previous state. Often, you will not realize you made a mistake three steps ago until you’ve moved forward far enough to realize its impact. Without notes to understand what has been tweaked, it becomes a much bigger problem than it has to.
Additionally, if you have a team member leave the company, these notes allow for continuity. Many who are taking over the use of GP may not know the foundation of what comes with the software compared to the changes a team member introduced to accommodate your company’s business processes. Making notes can help your current and new team members understand a colleague’s stopping point. This also makes it far easier to have more members of your accounting team working with Dynamics GP, because they can follow one another’s improvements.
Regularly backing up GP-specific files, your team can be confident about protecting the efforts being made. Backups can also allow you to roll back to the prior state if a recent change interferes with the effectiveness of GP. Typically, the accounting team and the IT team are not working or communicating with each other effectively. If there is no one in the accounting department setting up backups of data, and no one has communicated the importance of such backups to IT, you can assume you’re not getting the backup you need.
Daily backups are critical to protecting your data. As your accounting team works to improve notation making habits, you should also be onboarding IT members to regularly back up the data that sits on the server.
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