[Tiffany Byrd]

?Good Morning,
I was trying to determine how other organizations use the security roles within Great Plains (GP). For your accounts payable clerk and accounts payable manager what roles do you give them in GP, is it Purchasing Manager? What is the common security role for a senior accountant that needs to make journal entries and be able to run trial balance reports? Let me know if there is a best practice or standard security user setup for different roles within the accounting department of an organization.

Thanks,
Tiffany

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Tiffany Byrd
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
Bethesda MD
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[Kerry Hataley]

Good Morning Tiffiany,

So you have an open ended question here, that really does boil down to your own segregation of duties and what your organization needs to have, based on your auditor, internal auditor, federal / state regulations, SCC etc. They all have different ideas to how this needs to be managed.
All auditors will want a pure separation of duties and that is it. Period.
Well in the real world this will not happen… We don’t have 20 people in the AP department to make this work.

So what do you do…
You need to understand what NON SYSETM controls you have in place. For any segregation off duties that is not maintained, then there needs to be a control put into place.
example: AP clerk enters shipment, invoice and pays the vendor.
Manual controls need to include Vendor setup, cheque register sign off and signing of cheques. (Checks – Sorry my Canadian coming out in me)

FastPath has a great product to manage the audit and controls side, as well Mark Polino has a great book called ‘Microsoft Dynamics GP Security and Audit Field Manual’ that helps with this. (https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Dynamics-Security-Audit-Manual/dp/1985158558)

Start with the pre-made roles that Dynamics GP has and try and if you need to modify, create your own based on the pre-made roles. This helps later when Microsoft makes changes to their built-in roles.

I know this is not the click and point answer you are looking for, but the topic you are asking about is not something that should be.

I hope this helps a little…

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Kerry Hataley
CEO & President
Nanook Software, Inc
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[Tiffany Byrd]

??Hello Kerry,
Thank you for your response. We definitely have segregation of duties, a strong policy in place to ensure we are in compliance. and strong checks and balances in place. I think my post was not clear on what I was asking. I was looking to find out more about some of the security roles within GP as it looks like some of the roles are redundant. For instance, someone who is an Accounting Manager do they have the ability to post transactions like a Purchasing Manager would. Would a Certified Accountant role have the abilities of the Accounting Manager with a few added rights? I was just trying to find out how other organizations structure the security roles to see if there was a standard type of set up. I want to make sure staff have the appropriate roles within the security setup unless they are more customizable. I hope this makes more sense.

Thank you,
Tiffany

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Tiffany Byrd
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
Bethesda MD
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[Sandy Righi]

?Hi Tiffany,

We took tasks from the provided roles and made all our own roles. For example, we have a role called “Senior Accountant”, which has more access than the “Payables Entry” role. We also have a separate “Check Printing” role, as we have that separated from the payables entry. Then users are given the specific roles needed. So the payables manager might have both “Senior Accountant” and “Payables Entry”, as well as a few other roles such as the ability to do voids.

In a few cases, we also created custom tasks. One task we needed was to open/close fiscal periods; that was limited so we created a separate task and gave it to only a few users. There aren’t as many roles, so we didn’t use any special naming convention. But there are many more tasks, so we did use a special prefix for our custom tasks to help find them more quickly.

It’s a big job, but important. Good luck with it!

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Sandy Righi
Senior Programmer Analyst
Howard Hanna
Mayfield Heights OH
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[Tiffany Byrd]

?Thanks Sandy! This is very helpful and useful information.

Best,
Tiffany

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Tiffany Byrd
American Society of Health-System Pharmacists
Bethesda MD
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[David Musgrave]

If you are planning to do any work with Security and want to understand the GP Security model and extend it with Deny based security, you need GP Power Tools.

Check out the benefits presentation at https://www.winthropdc.com/products_GPPT.htm#Downloads

For more information also see the GP Power Tools portal: http://winthropdc.com/GPPT

Take advantage of the free 30 day trial, just install and activate.

David

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David Musgrave MVP, GPUG All-Star

Managing Director
Winthrop Development Consultants

Perth, Western Australia

http://www.winthropdc.com
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