You can tell a great
deal about an accounting system by setting up a single inventory item.
In this section, we can see some of the inventory screens and reports
within Navision, and will look at some of the features that make
Navision Financials 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.
To begin our
evaluation of Navision’s Inventory, we first select the Item List shown
below. Users can sort this listing by any column in ascending or
descending order. An additional button allows users 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.
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 click of your mouse. 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, prior year, and life-to-date comparisons. For example, in the
screen it is easy to tell what the profit percentage for swivel chairs
over different periods of time. If the percentage has changed one way or
the other, 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. Most high-end
accounting systems can deliver this information – but only with a
significant amount of effort. Often, because of the complexity involved
in extracting this data the result is companies seldom get around to
reviewing this information. With Navision, this information is close at
hand and companies are more likely to benefit from these insight.
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 of
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).
A good way to
differentiate accounting products is to count the number of data fields
associated with each inventory item. Many low-end accounting packages
such as QuickBooks will provide approximately 30 fields of data while
other mid-range systems such as Macola Progression and MAS 90 provide
about 80 to 85 fields of data for each inventory item. In Navision, the
Inventory module provides a total of 168 data fields for each inventory
item. In a 2004 review of almost one hundred top accounting systems
based on the 350 most important features in accounting software,
Navision was found to have more inventory features than MAS 500, ACCPAC
Advantage, Great Plains, Solomon, MAS 90, MAS 200, Axapta, Made2Manage,
and many other respected solutions. Presented below are some of the
screens which show these extensive features:
Several of these
features stand out as unique. For example, on the second tab (invoicing)
shown above, notice that there is an option to define the price to
profit relationship. One option is what you would expect: where the
profit equals the price less the cost. However, the other option allows
you to indicate that the cost plus the profit equals the price. In this
manner, you can indicate that you desire a 34% profit on this item.
Thereafter, in the future, each time this item is sold, the new price is
calculated to yield a 34% return no matter what you paid for the item.
This feature provides “price protection” especially when you are selling
items whose cost fluctuates widely. A glimpse at some of the other
tabbed dialog boxes is shown below:
As previously
mentioned in this chapter, Navision offers strong support for multiple
languages and multiple currencies. The screen above shows the screen
where the user defines the language to be used related to this inventory
item. It is interesting to note that the language can be controlled on
an item-by-item basis.
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