Year-end and tax time! One of my favorite times of the year!
After successfully closing the Payables Management and U.S. Payroll calendar year in Microsoft Dynamics GP for the 17th time in my career, here are a few gotchas I found out and had to power through:
U.S. Payroll
If you’ve upgraded from GP 2015 R2 or earlier to GP 18.2 sometime in 2020, after you finish the upgrade process of the 2020 Year-End Update, there is one security task you need to manually turn on for whomever is running W-2 forms. This is so you get the nice looking forms with the boxes and don’t have to use pre-printed forms!
In the ADMIN_PAYRL_007* security task, change the Type drop-down to “Reports” and the Series drop-down to “Payroll.”
Check the “W-2 One Wide Forms with Box” task.
Payables Management
During the upgrade process of the 2020 Year-End Update, any 1099 vendor that is set as a type of Miscellaneous and Box 7 will be automatically changed to the new type of Non-Employee Compensation and Box 1. Nice!
It’s best to spot check the 1099 vendors and make sure everything looks right too.
If not, there is the utility to change both the vendors and the transactions to the new 1099-NEC type of vendor. Purchasing > Utilities > Update 1099 Information.
You still need the pre-printed 1099 forms.
Web Services
This was something I should have expected, but didn’t. After the 18.3 upgrade is successful, Web Services doesn’t work. If you run the Configuration Wizard, it will give you the big, blue question mark when checking for the functional currency.
You’ll need to uninstall the GP 18.2 Web Services on the server running it and then REINSTALL from the GP 18.3 DVD download! This is in the AdProd > WebServices folder. Then run the Configuration Wizard and upgrade the objects.
TLS 1.0/1.1 is being retired in Windows Server and Web Services in GP 18.3 is making Web Services compatible with TLS 1.2.
If the Web Services security is stored in a SQL Database (like ours was), you’ll have to change it to store it all in Active Directory for compatibility with TLS 1.2. Lucas Miller from Microsoft put out two articles on how to do this (thanks Lucas!!):
Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Services – How to setup an Active Directory security store
Microsoft Dynamics GP Fall 2020 – TLS 1.2
Besides these sort of scary moments, everything else was successful. Thanks GP Team! You’re the best!
Welcome to 2021 and another year of Dynamics GP fun. YAY!