Dynamics GP is great accounting software and Dynamics CRM is great customer relationship software, however their roles in most businesses are significantly different but in many business scenarios there is some overlap between the two. In many cases you may be invoicing clients whose details will exist in both your accounting solution and your customer relationship solution.

There is no native functionality within either Dynamics GP or Dynamics CRM to synchronise data between either and the other. Why you may ask have Microsoft not made a connector to achieve this? Surely many clients would find this useful?

The answer is they have! It took some time coming but does now exist. The connector copies account data between Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP, NAV or AX. Once the account is in GP, it becomes the master record and any changes are copied back to CRM. Only accounts you select are copied to GP and once in there the CRM copy becomes read only. The connector also allows you to create sales orders in CRM using product info from GP. For more information on the connector’s functionality look here.

Microsoft has tried hard to cover most of the common customer requirements for the connector but in many cases it is something of a sledge hammer where really a finely balanced toffee hammer is required. Another rather obvious question is why hold the data in two places and then have to copy backwards and forwards? Why have two ways to do the same thing? All this effort is really only used to synchronise address and contact data where in many cases this will never change.

As a front end for entering sales orders Dynamics CRM is over complex and inefficient, it does not provide the order taker with the targeted focused view of the customer purchase history or spending habits that can be provided by a bespoke solution. Finding your customer and product can take so long that you will be in danger of having to wake up your customer several times while taking the order. CRM is good however in holding lots of detailed customer information in a manner that is easily extensible and so it is most suited to sales lead generation.

CRM – GP Integration the Bycodeit Way

CRM is useful due to its extensibility for holding data which can be used when creating complex orders or invoices. For example: where you need to do some calculations based on a number of parameters before you can create an invoice, and where you will need to create complex distributions to numerous accounts based on these calculations. This is where the bespoke integration solution comes into its own.

In these cases it is best to hold the customer specific calculation details in CRM, use a bespoke solution to grab these details from CRM and then create the sales/purchase orders, or invoices in GP. It is even possible to create multiple documents simultaneously saving massive amounts of time and preventing data entry errors.

This can be made to work with multi-currency and even multi-company scenarios.

At Bycodeit we have invested a lot of time developing reusable code that allows us to rapidly develop just such solutions. You too can benefit from this investment with your own custom solution.

If you would like to know more then please use this form to contact us and we will be happy to discuss your requirements.