Andrew Karasev

Great Plains Partner Newsflash: Membership Services in Dynamics GP

Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP is flexible platform, and in the case of membership or club style of business model, where you have to bill out and track payments for annual member dues, Great Plains could be chosen and tuned respectively

This is definitely industry vertical and likely that each membership schema varies significantly, in this small publication we will review custom way of doing this job in Dynamics GP

1.       Membership legacy application.  Membership business seems to be established model in the previous decades and likely that if you are running such a business, you already have membership system in place, which needs to be integrated to your back office ERP, such as Dynamics GP Great Plains

2.       Calendar year membership versus customer specific anniversary date.  Calendar year membership obviously doesn’t need custom programming, where member specific anniversary could be entered into user defined field on the customer level, or customer class level

3.       Dues invoices.  We recommend you to deploy Sales Order Processing module to create Invoice type for each specific membership line.  If you have high percentage of membership renewals, then you can decide to post membership invoices batch, otherwise keep invoices in work stage and simply apply customer deposits as they show up and then, move paid invoice into separate batch and post them every week or month

4.       Dues invoices and payments automation.  Here you should review two options.  First is Great Plains Integration Manager, where you can import dues invoices from the text or CSV file, initially exported from your front end membership application.  The second and probably more flexible way is to program dues integration as eConnect application, where you can achieve similar goal, plus you could do it in real time or with custom logic, comparing to Integration Manager

5.       Annual Dues reporting.  Here you will have to create SQL views to depict important comparisons with previous few years, aggregate profit by membership line, customer class to give you few examples.  Consider either Crystal Reports or Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) – both tools do similar job, where Crystal might be a little be more user friendly to design report, however this opinion might be biased and if you are Microsoft Visual Studio programmer, you may be more comfortable with SRS

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