Navision Product Tour

Our objective is to walk you through a review of Navision so that you can obtain a feel for the product. In this product tour, we will review and discuss some of my favorite features and functionality within Navision. Of course nothing beats a live demonstration tailored to your specific needs, however in the early stages of evaluation, this brief executive overview can be very enlightening. We hope you enjoy this product tour.  

Customization Tools

Navision allows for complete and unlimited customization capabilities through this object-oriented program. To protect your work and ensure that all customizations are fully compatible with future releases of Navision, the company has set aside the following object numbering scheme. Objects numbered 1 to 9,999 are set aside for Navision Denmark to use in programming and designing Navision. Objects numbered 10,000 to 49,999 have been set aside for Local Navision Units (like Navision – US) to further modify the product. Objects numbered 50,000 to 99,999 have been set aside for dealers and end users to modify the program to their hearts content. If you know anything about object oriented programming, you can easily see how this simple strategy clearly keeps all future versions working together neatly and cleanly.  

Navision provides several customization and data access tools that allow you to modify Navision to meet your specific needs. These tools are listed below:  

• The FormDesigner Tools – allows you to hide fields that are not relevant, display additional fields, rearrange the fields on the screen, change the display length of the fields, and control the order of cursor movement between fields.  

• The ReportDesigner Tools – allows you to customize the content and format of all of the printed reports in the system including invoices, financial statements, and any of the more than 150 provided reports. You may use this tool to create new reports as well. The ReportDesigner Tool also provides import/export capabilities that allow you to send data out to a spreadsheet, manipulate the data, and bring it back into Navision.
• The ApplicationBuilder Tools – allows you to add new fields to the tables or expand the length of fields in the database. For example, if you need more characters for inventory IDs, you simply expand the Inventory Code field to the length you need.

Quick to Incorporate the Latest Technology  

Navision's development environment has allowed Attain to take the lead in adding many new technologies to its application. It was one of the first vendors to add XBRL to its product, was first to show BizTalk integration, and has been one of the first few vendors to be certified on each new release of Microsoft Windows operating systems since Windows 95.  Here is a sample of the Biztalk integration setup screen in Navision.

Database Integrity

One of Navision’s strengths is the C/SIDE relational Database on which Navision is written. Specifically this relational database is very fast and can accommodate a very high volume of transactions. In addition, the integrity of the C/SIDE database is outstanding. Each time a transaction is recorded in Navision, a change is not actually recorded in the database until the write transaction is complete. The result is that you can turn off the power during heavy data entry and Navision’s design will prevent the data from becoming corrupted. An article to this effect was published in the December 1996 Datamation. The article described how Triad Resources – a contract-manufacturing company in Campbell , CA. lost power with 20 users con-currently using the Navision system. When the power came back on, the Navision systems came back up with no problems.

Attain now offers a choice of database platforms, Microsoft SQL or its native C/SIDE database with no change in the product look or feel and no price difference in the application.

It could be argued that because C/SIDE is not considered to be an industry standard product (i.e.: not a Microsoft database) that can be modified and enhanced with industry standard tools (i.e.: can not be modified with Microsoft Visual Basic, etc), that Navision suffers from the typical pitfalls related to a proprietary platform. Still, Navision has earned every Microsoft Windows logo since the release of Windows 95.  Further, the C/SIDE relational database is extremely similar to Microsoft Access and the corresponding tool set is very similar to Visual Basic. Therefore the company does strive to follow the industry standards as dictated by Microsoft. While the specific tools may not be industry standard, the approach is industry standard. In addition, Navision and all data can be completely backed up – even when the product is opened.    

Drill Downs and Navigation Tools  

• Drill downs - allow you to navigate to detailed transactions in the various modules, down to the originating documents,  to the details of line items on the documents and more.

• Filter Tools – allows you to slice your numbers across departments, projects, dates, and other parameters important to your business.

• The TrendScape Tools – allows you to display trends in your numbers on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even on a daily basis. You can also define your own set of periods to analyze the results of promotions, special offerings, or the impact of major economic events. The TrendScape Tools handle many years of data and appear throughout the application.

The Menu

The Navision main menu is shown below. Navision’s design is clean and uncluttered. In general, buttons and tabs provide quick access to pop up menus and informational dialog boxes. Because the product is Windows  compliant, navigating through Navision is rather intuitive.  

In previous versions of Navision, there were points where some operations are not as obvious to the user. For example, looking up or inserting new codes typically requires that the user press the F3 or F6 keys to “lookup” or “Insert” new codes. The newest version of Navision has solved this problem by introducing new Icons that make these operations easy to access. Still, the following function key shortcuts in Navision are very handy:  

F1 – Help

F2 – Edit

F6 – Lookup

F12 – Main Menu

Shift + F1 – What is this

Shift + F2 – Edit Assist

Shift + F6 – Drill Down

Shift + F12 – Object Designer

Control + F2 - Designer

Control + F4 - Close

Control + F6 – Next Window

Inventory

Navision provides excellent consistency in design and functionality throughout the product. Once you understand how to use one module, the other modules are very intuitive. In this section, we will look at some of the features that make Navision Inventory a strong solution for almost any company. Presented below is the Inventory main menu. For our purposes, we will concentrate on the “Items” option of this menu only.

An easy way to differentiate the low-end accounting products from the high-end accounting products is to examine the fields of data kept for each item. Many low-end accounting packages will maintain approximately 15 to 30 fields of data while the powerful manufacturing system – Macola Progression - maintains 85 fields of data for each inventory item. The Inventory module keeps track of 174 fields of data for each inventory item – which is extensive and impressive. Some highlights of these fields follow:  

To begin our evaluation of Navision Inventory, we first select the Item List shown two screens below. The first screen displays buttons that may be used to sort this listing by any column in ascending or descending order. There is also a button that allows you to search for any string of text embedded in the item description. This is important because most accounting software packages only allow you to search by the first letter of the item name. Therefore if the user searches for “CHAIR” instead of “LONDON SWIVEL CHAIR”, they will not find what they are looking for. However, with Navision, this search is fairly simply using the “Find” button (which looks like the binoculars found in Windows 2000).  

Once you have found the item you are looking for, notice that Navision provides a row of buttons along the bottom of the screen. These buttons lead to pop up menus for quick access to all of the information maintained for each inventory item. The diagram below shows the options available under each of the pop up menu buttons.  

Each of these options leads to useful information with simply the point of your mouse. (As with all Windows compliant applications, if you do not use a mouse, you can simply press the ALT key plus the letter that is underlined on the screen to access that button.) As an example, the screen below displays statistics on the London Swivel Chair we selected from the Item list.

These statistics offer a “gold mine” of information, especially with the monthly, year to date, last year, and life to date comparisons. For example, with this screen it is easy to tell what the profit percentage has been over different periods of time compared to what the profit percentage is today on these swivel chairs. If the percentage has changed (one way or the other), then an investigation and resulting adjustment is probably in order.  

In addition to overall statistics, you can also gain statistics on the swivel chair you last sold, and the next one you are about to sell (or post). Most high-end accounting systems can deliver this information – but only with a tremendous amount of effort. Often, the result is that you never review this information and accordingly never benefit from its insight. However in Navision, this information is always close at hand.   

Another pop up window provides a very clear and sophisticated view into the availability of each item, such as the swivel chair shown below. Buttons at the bottom of the screen make it easy to view availability by day, week, month or year. This view is very important to businesses who promise goods to customers on a daily basis. Without it, it is easy to over promise and ultimately generate customer dissatisfaction and ill-will towards your business.  

Still another pop up window is the item picture window shown below. With this window, you can insert photographs of each item or even exploded diagrams of how the item is constructed (useful for manufacturing shops to provide access for diagrams to workers in the warehouse through warehouse terminals). This same technology is provided throughout Navision and can be used, for example, to keep photographs of employees on file (for use by the security guard in allowing an employee to gain entrance into the building, for example).    

Job Costing 

Another strong module in Navision is the Job Costing module, especially when coupled with the Resources module. To start with, presented below is the Job Cost main menu. As previously noted, this menu is consistent in design with other menus and is intuitively easy to use. Selecting jobs from the main menu launches the Jobs dialog box show below, which gives you access to job information and job settings. The jobs tabbed dialog box provides views into general job information and settings, posting information and settings, and duration information and settings. This screen is shown below:  

The bottom of the jobs dialog box contains quick buttons that pop up menus for access to more job information. These popup menus are shown above.  

Some of the information available through these pop up menus is shown both above and below this text. The screen above displays job budget information whereas the screen below displays realized job information. As you can see, these screens do a good job of providing a clear view to this information.  

In addition, another pop up menu option provides a view into the transaction detail posted to the job. The Drill Down feature can then be used to follow this information to its originating source documents. The screen below provides an example of this transaction detail information.  

The Posting tab dialog box provides the user with the options to control how the job information is posted and how the gains and losses are calculated. This screen is shown below:  

Navision provides a unique approach to the utilization of resources. Specifically, the resource module (shown in the screen above) allows you to set up all of your resources including personnel and assets. From here, these resources can then be allocated to various jobs, thereby allowing the user to see resource availability. It is a rather unique approach not offered by most other accounting software packages.

Filters

The functions “View”, “Field Filter” and “View, Table Filter” provide a window that can display only the accounts, customers, entries or other records that fulfill a particular condition. For example, you can have the system display only the customer cards on which the Salesperson Code field contains the code PS (for Doug Thomas ). When you browse forward or back in the collection of customer cards, no other cards are displayed. You can also set and remove this type of restriction on any field on a record as filters remain in effect until you remove them or replace them with new ones. Please note that field and table filters are window-dependent, so if you see the same table in another window, the filter is not automatically in effect there. On the other hand, the filter will remain in effect in the window where you entered it until you remove it. To remove a filter, select the function View, Show All.  

A restriction on one field is called a field filter. To filter more than one field at a time, you can use the table filter function. The field filter and table filter performs exactly the same function. However, the field filter places a filter only on the field that contains the cursor when you choose the function. If you are in the habit of using only field filters, it can be good to use the table filter feature occasionally to get an overview of all the filters that have been placed on a window. When you enter a filter, you can use all the numbers and letters that you can ordinarily use in the field. In addition, you can use some special symbols or mathematical expressions. Here are the different formats that you can usually use:

 You can also combine the various format expressions:  

It is important to enter only meaningful filters. For example, it is possible to specify an interval that does not exist, and the program does not check this for you. In order to enter meaningful filters, you must know the sorting rules that the program follows. To use the Field Filter, choose Main Menu, Sales & Receivables, Customers. Next click the Salesperson Code field. Then from the menu bar, choose View, Field Filter. In the window that appears, enter the conditions the field contents must satisfy. To begin with, the filter field has the same contents as the field on the card, but just type over the contents. Enter PS, and click the Apply button. If you browse through the customer cards now, you will see only cards that have PS as the salesperson code. The other customers are still in the database, but you won't see their cards until you remove the filter by selecting from the menu bar, choose View, Show All.

Click here to view more Navision user screens

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