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TIPS AND TRICKS JANUARY 2012 sap business one Enabling is proud to sponsor this booklet and we hope readers gain key insights into our suggestions and views for your SAP solution. For more information on how Enabling are able to streamline your SAP solution, additional copies of this booklet or for more information regarding the SAP Business One suite, contact your local Enabling office. Australia 1800 ENABLING (1800 362 254) New Zealand 0800 ENABLING (0800 362 254) Or visit our website at www.enabling.net and discover how we enable better business for you. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 2 CONTENTS Customer Portal 3 Fixed Assets 3 Auto Distribution of Statements 4 My Cockpit 4 New Bank Reconciliation Report 6 How to Create Recurring Transactions 6 Authorisations 8 Making lookups work for you Part I 8 Making lookups work for you Part 2 9 Making lookups work for you Part 3 10 TIPS AND TRICKS JANUARY 2012 sap business one references SAP Australia http://www.sap.com/australia/ Enabling www.enabling.net tips & tricks authors & contributors: Enabling Team Members: Enabliser Jos Enabliser Kerrie Enabliser Matthew about sap SAP AG, based in Walldorf, Germany, is a world leading provider of business software, offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes. SAP Business One is an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution designed to provide a single, affordable solution for managing an entire business. Designed specifically for small and medium businesses, Business One includes financials, sales, customer relationships and operations. It helps to streamline end to end operations and gain instant access to complete information for greater clarity in business decisions and acceleration of profitable growth. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 3 a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 3 CUSTOMER PORTAL The SAP Business One Customer Portal is the main source of information from SAP for customers of SAP Business One, offering information about the application. By having access to the portal, customers can easily find solutions to simple problems, learn about additional functionality which may be available, gain valuable knowledge with e-learning, and view the latest news about improvements and updates to the system. Users of Business One need to enter their S number (username) and password to access this portal. If you do not have these, please contact your Enabling Consultant to provide this. Users must be current on Software Assurance to receive access to the portal. The address of the SAP Business One Customer Portal is: https://websmp202.sap-ag.de/smb/sbocustomer. It includes the following sections: Support Find a solution for known problems via the SAP Business One Notes database. Get the answer to your problem or query from peers on the SAP Community Network. Your Enabling Consultant is still your first source of support; using the Portal is generally more suitable for simple procedural issues. Solutions Overview Research details of the SAP Business One Solution, and learn more about additional features available. Documentation Access all product documentation and specifications per SAP Business One release. Education Access different training material available on SAP Business One. News Check out the latest news and announcements around SAP Business One. Workbench Maintain the release information of your SAP Business One system. Create and maintain additional users for the SAP Business one Customer Portal. Request and download a license key for our SAP Business One where required. FIXED ASSETS Did you know that SAP Business One includes a Fixed Assets Add On? This Add On has recently been upgraded to the 8.8 family and offers excellent functionality. SAP Business One provides a subsidiary ledger to manage and monitor all your Fixed Asset requirements. Purchasing, retirement, and sale of an asset are all seamlessly integrated into the general ledger. For example, sale of an asset creates your sales invoice and completes all the required balance sheet and P&L posting required for the asset. Depreciation both diminishing and fixed rate, can be handled simultaneously, along with the ability to run both tax and book depreciation schedules. The system calculates the planned depreciation according to the costs of the purchase or production as well as the useful life and carries out the necessary postings in the general ledger. Simple reporting including depreciation forecasting and the Asset Master Data report, allows you to balance everything back to your balance sheet, and show transactions on a particular asset within the period. A simple report easily exported to Excel, this is just what the Auditor ordered. Set up of SAP Business One Fixed Assets is simplified with the use of Excel import functionality allowing assets to be imported and historical depreciation data maintained. Imagine Fixed Assets, fully integrated and no more spread sheets or end of month journals! For more information ask your Enabling consultant a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 4 AUTO DISTRIBUTION OF STATEMENTS Do you want to distribute customer statements via Email or Fax to the relevant customers within a single run? This is possible via the use of a third party standalone product, AutoDoc. The AutoDoc software acts as a local printer ensuring the end user simply prints to it as would they print to a physical printer. AutoDoc, based on the rules defined within the application and the report being printed, will then scan each page and search for either and email address or fax number in white font. The white font ensures that this information is not visible to the end user receiving the report. A predefined email / fax message will be associated to the form being sent and will accompany each statement which can be written to adhere to company guidelines. This ensures that end users do not need to write the email body and subject each time and ensures the company format is always used. For any page which does not contain either an email or fax number will then be redirected to the physical printer to be printed. As well as distributing the report to the recipient it can also archive a copy to a nominated directory under a customer folder if defined, for each copy that has been sent. This ensures that a copy is always present if a copy is re requested as well as ensuring that this has been sent to AutoDoc and ultimately to the customer. For more information ask your Enabling Consultant. MY COCKPIT Do you want a quicker way to find the screens you require, instead of flicking between the different modules to find them? SAP Business One now incorporates a new cockpit view for easy access to the functions and screens that you regularly use. The setup is simple and customisable to suit the needs of each user. Here is a quick overview of how to set up your cockpit and enhance your user experience. In this Tip we will cover the general widgets and customisations. A future one will explain the setup of dashboards and the pre-configured dashboards that are available as standard. 1. To enable your cockpit view, go to Tools Cockpit Enable My Cockpit. You will be prompted to close SAP Business One as the settings take effect next time you log onto the database. 2. When SAP Business One opens you will now see the new My Cockpit home screen, with several widgets already displaying on your desktop. Your module menu is still there and you can switch between the two by clicking on the side of the menu bar, on Modules. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 5 3. There are four screens available, Home, Sales, Service and Finance. And several different general widgets. The Common Function screen is set up by dragging and dropping your frequently used functions into the widget. Click on the modules tab and drag and drop the screens/ functions you wish to use into the widget. One click on the function opens the screen for you. To more flicking through modules! 4. You can set up your Browser widget to open on any page you wish. Simply click on the spanner icon in the top right hand corner of the widget and type the address of the page into the URL. 5. The search function is a great new tool as well. Type your search information into the search box, SAP Business One will search the database and return the data you require. You can search master data (both items and business partners) or any of the marketing documents. In this example, I have searched for norm: SAP Business One returns the Business Partner Norm Thompson the only Norm in the database. So now you have access to all your commonly used functions and reports and how easy was it! a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 6 NEW BANK RECONCILIATION REPORT With the release of 8.81, SAP Business One has a new bank report for reconciliations. Find the report in Banking Banking Reports External Reconciliation Bank Reconciliation Report. Select your bank account and reconciliation number from the drop down lists on the selection criteria window. Note: The bank account must be set up as a House Bank (Administration Setup Banking
House Bank) with a GL account linked to it, for it to appear in the selection criteria list. This is a sample of the new report: HOW TO CREATE RECURRING TRANSACTIONS A great new feature in SAP 8.8 is the ability to create recurring transactions for sales and purchasing documents. Previous versions of SAP Business One allowed for the setup of recurring journals, but with the release of 8.8 it is now possible to create a template for a recurring sales invoice or purchase order. This has immense time-saving benefits heres how it works. Create a Recurring Transaction Template The first part of the process to create a Recurring Transaction is to create a draft document for the transaction. In this example a Recurring AR Invoice is created, but the following documents can be set up as Recurring Transactions. 1. Go To Sales AR
AR Invoice and create an invoice for the transaction. Rather than add the document, right click on the document and select Save As Draft. 2. Go to Sales AR
Recurring Transactions Templates. Complete the details for the template: a) Template name of the template (alphanumeric 8 characters). b) Transaction Type select from the drop down menu. Ie AR Invoice, Purchase Order. You will note that the report has the yellow drill down arrows similar to those within SAP Business One, clicking on these arrows when the report is run within SAP Business One allows you to drill down into the transactions in the database. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 7 3. Place your cursor in the Doc No column and TAB, this will bring up a list of draft documents to attach to the template. Select the draft template and select Choose. 4. Complete the remaining details of the Recurring Transaction. a) Recurrence Period Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi Annual, Annually, One Time. b) Recurrence Date select recurrence date/day. c) Start Date date first transaction to be posted. d) Next Execution system will calculate the date the next transaction will be posted. e) Valid Until date the recurring transactions should continue to Select Update to save the template. ** Note: To delete a Transaction Template. Select a template and choose Data, Delete Row from the main menu. Recurring Transactions Recurring transactions can be posted either manually or automatically. Manually From Recurring Transaction screen: 1. Go To Sales AR Recurring Transactions. Select the Recurring Transaction you wish to post and drill down on the to open the template. 2. Edit to make any changes to document and select Add to post. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 8 AUTHORISATIONS Version: 8.8.2 Some good news from the SAP Business One 8.8 family is the ability to now print a users Authorisations report. Managing authorisations in a company with a large amount of staff can be quite time consuming, and add to that your Auditors want to know who can do what? 1. Open your Authorisation window (Administration System Initialisation Authorisations General Authorisations). 2. Select the Export to Excel icon and choose one or multiple users from the selection criteria window. 3. Click on the OK button and the complete Authorisations for the user/users will be exported to an Excel worksheet. Not sure what process each of the Authorisations allows your users to complete. Please see also SAP B1 How-to Guide: How to Define Authorisations. Happy Authorising!!! MAKING LOOKUPS WORK FOR YOU PART I The lookup windows in SAP Business One that you will be most familiar with are the BP and Item lookups. Out of the box they are fairly generic, containing not much more than the code and name. You may also be familiar with the Form Settings tool button. This is what lets you customise your screens by adding or hiding columns, and changing the display order of columns. You may not realise that the Form Settings tool button is also applicable to your Lookup screens, allowing you to customise them to make lookups potentially faster and more useful. Example: Your item codes are just numbers with no relationship to any property of the item. When using the Find screen, you first double-click into the Description heading to make that the find focus (denoted by the triangle shown in the column heading), and can then type a portion of the item description into the find box to get to the item you want. Solution: Customise your lookup window so that the item description is the first column; this means any portion of the item description that you type into the find box will take you to the item you want, without having to first change the focus of the find box. This is because the initial focus is always on the first column in your find screen. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 9 MAKING LOOKUPS WORK FOR YOU PART 2 Our previous article was on customising your Lookups with the Form Settings tool button. This lets you customise your screens by adding or hiding columns, and changing the display order of columns. You can also customise your lookup screens, allowing you to customise them to make lookups potentially faster and more useful. We showed how you can change the initial find focus by moving columns around. In this article you will see how useful adding extra columns can be. Example: It would be useful for the sales entry team to know what the on hand stock quantity is when finding the item, instead of waiting until later in the order process when the ATP (Available To Promise) screen pops up to advise you are out of stock of an item. Solution: Customise your find window to also include the items stock on hand quantity:
In Part 3 in this series you will find out more about the power of customising your lookup windows. Additional Notes: Remember these lookup windows are grids like any other in SAP Business One so can be exported into Excel. Any changes you make to a lookup form are not specific just for you; they are company-wide. In Parts II & III in this series you will find out more about the power of customising your lookup windows. Additional Notes: Remember these lookup windows are grids like any other in SAP Business One so can be exported into Excel. Any changes you make to a lookup form are not specific just for you; they are company-wide. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 10 Enabling is proud to sponsor this paper and we hope readers gain key insights into our suggestions and views for your SAP Business One Suite. For more information on how Enabling are able you to streamline your SAP Business One Suite to optimise your business, please visit our website at www.enabling.net and discover how we enable better business for you. Or contact us: Australia 1800 ENABLING (1800 362 254) New Zealand 0800 ENABLING (0800 362 254) MAKING LOOKUPS WORK FOR YOU PART 3 Our previous articles in this series showed how you can change the initial find focus by moving columns around, and add extra columns. In this article you will learn how to summarise or group the items that are initially presented in the lookup window. Example: You have many stock items, and end up scrolling through screen after screen to find the one you want. Solution: Customise your find window to group the items logically, by (e.g.) their item group: Additional Notes: Remember these lookup windows are grids like any other in SAP Business One so can be exported into Excel. Any changes you make to a lookup form are not specific just for you; they are company-wide. a tips and tricks publication from enabling PAGE 11 Enabling a better business solution can often mean a desire to achieve higher sales performance, make better decisions with accurate data, streamline or automate financial and business processes in a way that creates business success. To achieve this you need the right business software and a partner who will support you for the long term. With a team of over 100 experienced professionals throughout Australia and New Zealand, Enabling can review your business requirements, and help you to select the right solution from the very best software vendors in the market. We enable better business through our following Business / Industry solutions: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Financial Management Information Solutions (FMIS) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Supply Chain Management (SCM) Construction, Property Management and Engineering Solutions (CPE) Professional Services Automation (PSA) Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development and Integration (SDI) five key reasons to choose enabling These form part of our corporate vision and are the benchmarks from which we are able to determine the success and quality of the services we offer. Passion Is a key part of our culture. We care about your business and we want you to succeed. To this end we ensure that absolute value is what we deliver to your project, and we make sure our attitude and behaviors support this goal. Choice Having more than one offering allows us to focus on matching the right business solution to your distinctive business requirements. Enabling is unique in that we have partnered with several leading software vendors within our industry. Experience We understand business and technology; and with more than 100 team members, have the skills and resources to deliver results consistently. Methodologies With our best practice methodologies we are able to help lead your team from solution selection, through to delivery and long term support taking the guess work out of technology. Raving Fans A Raving Fan is when you would, without hesitation recommend Enabling to a friend or colleague. For Enabling the true measure of our success is a Raving Fan. the enabling experience The Enabling Experience focuses on delivering a superior level of service that creates happy customers (Raving Fans). This experience provides a complete methodology including project management discipline and tested best practices. The Enabling Experience is designed to help drive productivity through a consistent approach. Utilising standard tools and templates in this way we are able to achieve successful project execution driving business value from the outset, whilst always aiming to gain a Raving Fan as a result. 1 2 3 4 5 enabling better business