Part 2: Dynamics NAV 2016: Functionality

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.

Dynamics-nav-2016-functionality

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);

Author: James Crowter

I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times. Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction. So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved. I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand. My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially. I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV. After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential. Follow me online via my other social channels: - Twitter: @jamescrowter - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.

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