Let’s say you sell swimming pool filters as a business. When you sell a new swimming pool, the salesman usually sells 3-4 filters to go with it. In your General Ledger you’ll recorded this to an account called ‘Sales New – Pool filters’. This lets you know how much money you have made from selling pool filters to new pool buyers. The revenue (and cost) is allocated to the P&L of the New Sales department.

When a technician goes out to service a pool, often times he will recommend new filters and sell them to the customer. This is a sale of the identical filter from above. In the General Ledger this sale should be recorded to an account called ‘Service Sales – Pool filters’. The revenue (and cost) is allocated to the P&L of the Service Team.

It is common to sell filters over the phone and mail them out to customers as it is one of the most profitable methods of sale within the company. When a call center operator makes a sale of filters it is assigned to the Call Centers sales account in the general ledger.

Now making things more complicated are the three regional profit and loss statements which are Eastern, Western and Canadian. Each region has a profit and loss statement for New Sales and Service Sales – although the call center is national and does not have regional P&L’s.

To go even further – you also sell to commercial operations and not just backyard pools. Commercial is a whole extra category and any of the above sales channels can sell to commercial customers – which is an entirely different set of sales and cost accounts in the chart of accounts.

Unfortunately Microsoft Dynamics GP is not this flexible and could not handle all of the above scenarios out of the box. This is where Flexicoder kicks in, and provides a very robust solution to give you the coding structure you need.

CHART OF ACCOUNTS

In the scenario above let’s say your chart looks like this 11-222-33-44444 (Region-Department-Business Type-Account). So when a sale is made in the eastern region the first segment must be coded to 20. If the sale is made by the service team then segment two must read 300. If the sale is made to a retail customer then segment three must read 40. In Flexicoder setup you define all of these segment based rules. When an invoice is entered, imported, saved or posted Flexicoder kicks and recodes the transactions based on your rules.