GPTip42day - Checklists

Here's a great little feature in GP that I rarely, if ever, see clients use.

Company Checklists can be used to create customized checklists of company routines. You can specify the frequency with which routines should be completed: daily, weekly, on payday, at the end of a period, month, quarter, fiscal year or calendar year, during setup, or at a frequency you choose. Using the Checklist, you can launch a GP window, a GP macro or an external task, such as SmartConnect or Integration Manager - really anything application that is an executable.  Heck, with the right executable on your desktop, you could launch a Delta IV rocket.

When you run a routine from within the Checklist, the date, time, and User ID are captured and stored in the SY02500 table in the Company database so if you want to report on or expose the record to SharePoint to incorporate into a workflow, the data is there to do so.

In the screenshot below, I setup a few routines that might be followed in a typical Financial month-end close.

Financial>Routines>Checklist

* click image to enlarge

Checklists are provided in almost all GP modules, not just Financial, and could be used for ensuring processes are carried out at any time, not just period end.

I was going to provide instructions on how to set each type of routine up but it's so intuitive with GP Help, I decided to let you have some fun with it on your own.