A high school soccer coach of mine always used to yell, “If you don’t shoot the ball, you can’t score a goal!” I’ve always liked this statement – it reminds me that you have to go for things in life in order to get anything out of it. This is especially true for sports teams and the organizations that run them. For a sports team to win, it needs to focus on the team and its athletes; but behind the scenes, it also needs to run a successful business. Microsoft Dynamics GP has many tools and features that can be tailored specifically for sports teams and organizations.
Here are three features in Microsoft GP that sports organizations can utilize for a winning season:
1. Flexible Budgets
Sports teams often deal with time periods that don’t break down into an even calendar year. A baseball team may have its season go from April to October, with post-season play possibly stretching into November. Football can run from August to January. A budget that runs from January to December just doesn’t make sense.
Dynamics GP provides the option to have flexible budgets – these can have different start and end dates and can even overlap fiscal years. A sports organization can have budgets for pre-season, regular season, and post-season.
Management Reporter, GP’s financial reporting tool, provides the ability to report on actuals against budgets, allowing users to easily compare budgets and actuals year-over-year, or season-over-season.
2. Business Analyzer
Most sports executives want to spend their time focusing on the win-loss record of their team, the stats of the team they are competing against next week, and how they are going to make it to the playoffs. They don’t want to be running reports and manually figuring out what the data means.
Business Analyzer is an application that can give users an instant pictorial view of their data – such as whether sales are up or down, or whether the budget is on track for the season. Business Analyzer dashboards are available either within GP or as a stand-alone tool. They are dynamic dashboards, so if the user wants to change a date range or filter the data differently, this can be done directly in the tool and refreshed for an updated view. Custom reports and dashboards can also be created specific to the needs of the sports executive.
3. Electronic Banking
Microsoft Dynamics GP has several electronic banking features that are available – using these can streamline data entry and speed up cash flow. Implementing these features can be one of the easiest ways to save time and decrease manual data-entry errors. Working with a sports organization’s bank, the following features can be configured in GP:
- Lockbox. Instead of manually keying in checks from customers and applying them to invoices, checks are sent to a bank’s lockbox, at which point the bank provides a file that can be imported into GP so that cash receipts are automatically entered and applied.
- Safepay. For banks that require positive pay, a file can be generated out of GP and sent to the bank of all checks processed for the day.
- Payables and Receivables EFT. Paying vendors electronically can be a big time saver for an organization. A file can be generated out of GP and sent to the bank so that payments can be remitted to vendors electronically. On the Accounts Receivable side, EFT can be set up so that when a batch of invoices is posted, those funds can be debited directly from customer accounts.
- Electronic Reconciliation. Monthly bank reconciliation can be a time-consuming process, especially when multiple bank accounts are involved. GP can be set up so that a reconciliation file can be downloaded from the bank, including transactions – such as cleared checks and deposits – and imported into GP to auto-reconcile those matched transactions. For organizations that may be dealing with high numbers of transactions, this can save a tremendous amount of time.
There is no limit to the number of accounts or banks these features can be configured for within Microsoft GP. Once a file format has been defined in one company, it can be imported into other companies for a speedy and consistent set-up process.
In summary, these are a just a few of the features in Microsoft GP that sport teams we’ve worked with have found extremely useful. For more details on how GP can help support your sports team or organization, contact Armanino for a demo.
About Armanino, LLP
Armanino is a Gold Certified Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP and CRM Partner with five California locations (San Ramon, San Jose, San Diego, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco) as well as offices in Portland, OR, Bellevue, WA, and Naperville, IL.
Our team understands the unique business processes, common pain points and compliance issues many high-tech manufacturing and life science companies’ face and can assist you with integration to front or back office systems, deployment, data migration, and training.
We encourage you to call us with questions and let us know about your company and business goals. Visit us online at: http://www.armaninollp.com
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