Microsoft Great Plains Business Applications

CloudRise is a proud Microsoft Great Plains partner. We selected this particular suite of applications as our financial and business software suite for several reasons:

• Great Plains is the best of breed for both small businesses and large ones
• Great Plains is backed by the largest software company in the world
• As it is Microsoft owned, integration with other Microsoft products is simply the best
• CloudRise uses all Microsoft products, so there is synergy
• Great Plains has strength in industry niches common to our East Bay client base
• Great Plains is sophisticated, yet relatively quick to implement
• Microsoft has committed vast resources to Great Plains enhancements and support

What does Great Plains offer?

An integrated world-class business and financial solution enabling small to medium sized organizations to record, track and easily access the information necessary to manage business. The solution offers a broad range of capabilities starting with financial management to e-commerce, to supply chain management, to distribution, to retail, to non-profit support, all designed to help you gain timely and accurate real-time information and insight help to lead management to smart strategic decisions.

Financial application modules

• Take Control with Intelligent General Ledger accounting and analysis capabilities that make your finances work for you. From processing transactions to balancing the books, comparing budget to actuals, to multi-company consolidations, Great Plains supports drill-down analysis and seamless Excel integration.
  
• Improve Cash Flow with clear, customizable information views that keep you up-to-date on amounts due and owed and automated processes that help ensure that you collect payments in a timely manner.
  
• Streamline all your bank-related activity with integrated capabilities, automated reconciliation and powerful electronic banking features. This integration can significantly reduce manual effort.
  
• Master multi-national, multi-site operations and manage fluctuating exchange rates using Intercompany and multi-currency modules. Effectively automate your consolidations.
  
• Empower employees and reduce costs with Web-based expense reporting that streamlines expense management processes, eliminates paper receipts while enabling employees to submit reports from any location, any time.
  
• Manage Receivables and Payables with up-to-date information about vendors and customers and effort-saving automation of tasks that provide a great return on investment.
  
• With the tight integration to the widely used Microsoft’s FRx Professional reporting package, Great Plains data can be accessed in virtually any format imaginable and now made securely available over the Internet.
  
• Field Budget input can be automated, accessed via the Internet, controlled and automated roll-ups can make the annual Budget nightmare go away. Collaborative, bottoms-up budgeting is now made easy with Great Plains and FRx.
  

Business Operations

• Turn insights into profitable actions with Great Plains. You will be able to unify and streamline processes across your business, meet demanding distribution and manufacturing requirements and serve your customers according to their needs. Focus on making the right decisions for your customers, not on managing your system.
  
• Unleash efficiency by automating your financial, distribution, and purchasing functions to work in concert with your entire business. Seamless integration and shared databases all work toward reducing costs, improving accuracy and increasing profitability. Put your inventory to its most strategic use and replenish it efficiently and automatically.
  
• Harness your supply chain process by streamlining your pack/ship/invoice cycle with powerful distribution capabilities that let you tailor workflow processes to your way of doing business. Give customers fast answers, firm delivery promises and flexible pricing and order fulfillment. And by connecting inventory control, purchasing and sales order processing with your distribution process, you can help reduce costs, improve cash flow and ensure that you have right stock at the right time to meet demand.
  
• Effective forecasting of demand using multiple methods and easily recalculating based on historical smoothing can accomplish a dramatic reduction of time to fill orders while reducing the need to carry inventory.
  
• Productivity increases are substantial using role-based application configurations.
  
• Build stronger relationships with your customers with personalized customer information that’s easily accessible. And with the ability to easily tailor workflow, item codes, and inventory pick lists, you’ll know that your operations are designed to meet specific customer requirements with ease. With Great Plains CRM, includes key data mapping for accounts, contacts, product catalog, orders and price lists.

Technical Prominence

• Reliable database technology is the foundation of Great Plains. Powered by Microsoft SQL Server and scalable from a single desktop to a cluster of multi-processor servers located world-wide, SQL Server is proven, technology that can handle thousands of concurrent users while being easy to implement and support.
  
• Built on the latest Microsoft technology, Great Plains can take advantage of business data wherever it may reside and carry out integrations cost effectively and accurately. As part of the .NET suite of technologies, SQL Server is designed to take fullest advantage of XML for moving data across systems.
  
• Powerful security features protect your business information within Great Plains. With SQL Server’s integrated backup and restore capabilities there’s no need to worry about your stored data. Advanced security simplifies processes for configuring and managing user security at multiple levels.
  

For additional information about Microsoft Great Plains functionality, click here.