One of the most
important capabilities that an accounting system can offer is the
ability to easily “get to the data”. Many poorly designed accounting
systems capture enormous amounts of data but then fail to make it easy
for users to access that information. Great Plains provides perhaps one
of the best examples of access to data available from any accounting
system or ERP solution in the world with the built-in Smart List
capability. The Smart List is accessible from any screen within Great
Plains with one mouse click at the top of the screen as shown below:
The Great Plains Smart
List tool contains thirty four (34) standard reports providing access to
all data in Great Plains. Users can also create an unlimited number of
additional reports as desired. The screen shot below shows the Smart
List main screen.
As shown above,
clicking on the Customers folder on the left side of the screen
produce’s a list of all customers on the right side of the screen. This
screen works similar to Windows Explorer - hence seasoned Windows users
will find this interface to be fairly intuitive. Please notice that a
customized customer report entitled “Greg’s Customers has also been
created and saved to the Smart List menu.
The default customer
listing has 8 columns of information, but this report can be further
refined by adding up to 171 additional columns simply by clicking on the
“Columns” button and selecting the desired columns. This process is
shown in the screen shot below.
Smart List also offers
a “Search Tool” which is better described as a “Filtering Tool”. Using
this feature, users can refine their report by any criteria, or any set
of criteria for any column or columns of data. For example in the screen
below we have instructed Smart List to provide a list of only those
customers who’s “city” is “Chicago”.
The resulting report
shown below provides those customers located in Chicago, and all desired
columns of data are included.
This information can be
quickly transferred to Microsoft Excel with one click of the button on
the Excel icon. There is also a Microsoft Word icon as well. This tool
provides the user with the ability to work further with this data in
familiar environments. For example, once in Excel, users could easily
produce charts, pivot reports, or “what-if” scenarios.
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