Why are my reports taking so long to export from Dynamics GP?

I recently worked on a case for a client who was finding that it would regularly take Dynamics GP up to two full minutes to process her invoices for printing. She, understandably, was completely baffled as to how it could take so long to process her invoices when it seemed that all other print jobs worked in a perfectly reasonable amount of time. She checked her internet speed – It seemed to be fine. We tried replicating the issue on our environment – same problem.

So, what’s the holdup?

If you’re finding that a handful of reports are taking a very long time to process, while others seem to process and print just fine, you might want to consider looking at the images on your Word Templates. We often find in these situations that the images that are used for logos or other graphics on these reports are very high resolution and, therefore, very large. These images will then cause your report to be much larger and, in turn, they will take longer to process.

This is a very common issue that we see when clients complain about long processing times for their reports. It ends up being one of the first things that we look at. If we find an image that looks very large, we’ll start by compressing it using Photoshop or an image compression tool. For this particular client, we were able to bring the invoice printing time down from 120 seconds to somewhere around 10 seconds – a significant improvement for someone who has to wait 2 minutes for every single invoice she prepares.

Long story short – start with the common culprits. Check to see if your other reports are taking an inordinate amount of time to print. Check your internet speed. If you have an upload speed of less than 5 mbps, that may be the culprit. But if your other reports are printing fine and your internet speed is reasonable, take a look at the image size on your Word Template report.

If you would like some help investigating a speed issue, or if you need some assistance compressing your logos for your Word Template reports, let us know! We’re happy to help.