Retail and Great Plains Integration

A free add-in improves integration between Microsoft’s Retail Management System, a point-of-sale and inventory management application for small and midsize retailers, and the Great Plains business management and accounting package. Because these products were acquired by Microsoft from separate companies, integration between the two has been limited. The add-in reduces redundant data entry and simplifies inventory tracking for retailers that have both packages, giving Microsoft a better solution for midsize retailers and stepping up the competition with business management application vendors such as Intuit and Sage.

Add-In Improves Integration with Great Plains

Microsoft’s Retail Management System (RMS) targets businesses with one or more retail locations and more than US$1.5 million in revenue. Roughly 7,000 customers have deployed RMS, and the product’s most recent update, RMS 1.2, was in July 2003.

RMS already provides some integration with each of the Microsoft Business Solutions enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and also integrates with non-Microsoft accounting packages QuickBooks and Peachtree. For example, RMS can pass account activity data to Solomon or Great Plains general ledgers, giving retail businesses the ability to view and track store activity, such as sales and commissions, individually or in consolidated views (for example, regionally).