Questions a/b RMS

I am currently working with a demo of RMS and trying to determine if it would be an appropriate product for us. I am also looking into moving our accounting from Quickbooks to Great Plains. I would much appreciate if someone can help me with the following:

- In the demo, I am trying to do a proof-of-concept with importing customer information from our current home-grown Access database. Basically, I'm using ODBC to link to both databases and run a query to import records from one to the other. Can someone tell me all the tables/fields associated with creating a customer record in the RMS DB?

- Assuming we go with GP, I would certainly be interested in integrating RMS with GP. I understand that this integration is currently limited and only at the HQ level. Is HQ a separately licensed product? Does MS plan to better the integration between GP and RMS anytime soon?

- I've noticed that the help files/documentation for RMS refer to several third party EDC applications. Does RMS actually handle processing transactions itself or would we have to license one of the third part applications that work with RMS?

- We would ultimately like to integrate purchasing and credit card processing with our website. Is this easy to do with RMS? Would it require additional apps? Would it be a good idea to link a website directly to the RMS database?

Thanks, Scott

Take a look at the Customer table. The field names should be self-explanatory.

Yes, HQ is separately licensed.

In mid-September they released a new RMS-GP Integration module. It lists the following capabilities:

a.. Inventory Item records* a.. Customer records a.. Vendor records a.. General ledger transactions (with or without inventory item adjustments from RMS) a.. Sale/Order transactions into the Receivables Management (RM) module a.. Account Receivable/Deposit transaction apply information into RM a.. Purchase Orders and Receivings (both closed and partially received) into the Purchase Order Processing (POP) module

*Note: Item quantities between Headquarters and Great Plains will NOT be synchronized. Inventory valuation will be maintained in Great Plains through the transaction imports into RM and POP, while the actual on hand quantities of items will be maintained in RMS.

I'm not sure how EDC is handled, as I've never had to use it. As for integrated debit and credit cards, if you're in the United States then there are a handfull of processors listed which are natively supported. There are also third-party solutions (ICVerify, etc), which have varying degrees of success. Up here in Canada, TD Bank has recently come out with an RMS add-in for integrated debit, and it works quite well (it's never given me any problems after installation was complete.)

I'm not sure the best way to integrate credit processing on the website. There are some pre-built e-commerce packages, but I've not heard anything about them. Microsoft also says it supports the Yahoo Store, but I've never tried that either. So far all the websites that I've integrated to RMS have been coded from scratch and were strictly an online catalog with no ordering capabilities (it can be done, I just haven't had anyone want to do it yet .. I'd probably try a package first though)

Hope this helps.