The news that will delight most NAV users finance teams is the standard support for deferred income and expense postings will be part of the original document registration. Users have often requested the ability to spread subscriptions or annual charges across multiple periods from the input document rather than posting and then doing a subsequent journal.
Management accountants will have to think about how far they allow users to post ahead and what this means for date restrictions.
But for me the more significant advance is a postings preview function. When a sales or purchase document is entered it’s going to be nice to be able to check if everything is valid (dimensions, posting groups etc.) and see what effect it has on balances without actually doing the transaction.
For me this cures one of the key issues with data quality, where users can create for instance a sales transaction for a new item and its only when the warehouse come to ship it that a problem with the posting group combination produces an error halting the shipment. By building a mandatory posting preview into the release of the sales order, it will not get out of the sales teams responsibility.
So, my obsession with data quality means that, I’m looking forward to situation where we can create a customisation; so when a customer, vendor or item record is unblocked we create a transaction using that record and use the posting preview to check that it’s all valid before deleting the transaction again. While we have written routines to do a considerable number of checks over the years it’s been impossible to catch everything that might cause an error on posting, but this will mean we can make it completely robust. That’s important because the time to catch data issues is when the data is created – not when it needs to be used, that’s horribly disruptive to a smooth process.
Other than that they have made some changes to support more positive pay with US banks and added some G/L account categorisation (which I’m not sure yet will prove useful as it’s a fixed list of categories and you could have done this type of reporting in an account schedule anyway).
Note
This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);
- Intro
- Part 1: First Public Sight
- Part 2: Dynamics NAV 2016: Functionality
- Part 3: Dynamics NAV 2016: CRM
- Part 4: Dynamics NAV 2016 : Office 365 with PowerBI
- Part 5: Dynamics NAV 2016: Workflow
- Part 6: Dynamics NAV 2016: e-Everything
- Part 7: Dynamics NAV 2016: Windows
- Part 8: Dynamics NAV 2016: Engineering
- Part 9: Dynamics NAV 2016: Azure