Dynamics F/SCM Customer Experience (CRM) Dynamics GP Dynamics Business Central (NAV) Dynamics SL Power Platform Fabric Copilot

[Alicia White]

I have been researching CheckLinks and was hoping to find something regarding best practices of when/how often to run as well as more information on the error messages that are produced but I am not having much luck. Can someone point me in the right direction or have tips?
Thanks!

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Alicia White
Papa Murphy’s
Vancouver WA
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[Cecile Dinh]

Hi Alicia,

Here is the official document from Microsoft about Check Links.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-gp/installation/systemadminguide#checking-links

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/850391/information-about-the-check-links-process-in-microsoft-dynamics-gp

If you are on GP2018.3 you can schedule it:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-gp/whats-new/schedule-check-links

In our company, I do it every 3rd weekend of the month – that is not a busy weekend for users.  I start with the longest module to run so I leave it overnight.
I do it in this sequence (Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Financial, Company, and lastly Systems).  
I saved the results in text file only.

Hope this helps.

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Cecile Dinh
GP Admin at ARC (Airlines Reporting Corp.)
GPUG Chapter Leader – Washington, D. C.
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[Joseph C. Markovich]

Hi Alicia-

Cecile’s information is great! Especially the new feature where you can schedule it now!

I do the exact opposite of Cecile’s schedule — because even though checklinks fixes system issues, it can also cause other data issues. This is why you always run checklinks in a test company first and see all of the results that come back.

My preference is to run checklinks these two times:
– As part of upgrade testing to any newer version
– If there is some kind of data issue, running on just the selected series having an issue

Now if we could only schedule reconcile!

I hope this helps too.

Thanks.
Joe

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Joseph C. Markovich
Valparaiso IN
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[Bruce Strom]

When we upgraded GP many years ago, we had literally NEVER run checklinks, we had the GL/CM/PM/RM/IV/POP/SOP modules.
Basically the company did not want to buy another backup server that we could restore production to regularly.
The company said they did not want to do this unless support recommended running checklinks.
GP support said they thought it would be good to run it on the PM/RM transaction/history files to rebuild the keys files, but it was not required.
POP is a special situation, I say this in my blog:

IMHO, running Check Links for the POP module is not only a waste of time, it is also taking an unnecessary risk of data corruption. Not to mention that the POP check link procedures are glacially slow. We ran check links on a test backup of our production data (IMHO, you should never run Check Links first on production data, though these functions are much safer now than in the earlier years of Dynamics GP). Check Links for the POP modules verifies mostly the PO files, but not so much the POP Receipt and POP Link files, which are the real accounting transactions in GP. We came to this conclusion after exhaustively analyzing the text file output of all our POP check link procedures for several years of work and historical. If other consultants have differing opinions or experiences, we would be happy to hear from them.
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/balancing-the-pop-rni-report-to-the-gl/

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Bruce Strom
Programmer Analyst
Paradise GP Consulting, Inc.
sunrise FL
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