NAV 2013 Technical Documentation on What is New

Posted by on May 16, 2012 No comments

Just a quick note. If you don’t have this link already, here’s the MSDN article on what’s new in version 2013:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh174007(v=nav.70)?lc=1033

Cost Effective Microsoft Resources That You Did Not Know

Posted by on May 11, 2012 No comments

Overview
Microsoft is a technology organization. It’s their job to develope new technologies that business and individuals can use to improve upon their lives.

Having said that, there are A LOT of products that Microsoft releases and as an end user, it’s really hard to keep up with everything going on. Being in an IT professional, it’s even hard for me to keep up.

There are many times where the customers will go out and see a demo of something that can drastically improve their business. Being a Microsoft partner, they would come back and ask us to give them feedback on what our thoughts on it and how to implement it.

The Problem
The problem arises when we see the value of it for our customer as well.

Why? Being a Dynamics NAV partner, our sole focus is on NAV. The pros of doing this is that we really know what we’re doing and we’re really good at it. The bad is that we are not as diversified in the “Microsoft Stack”. Companies prefer to do business with partners they trust, since we worked hard to earn that trust, they want us to replicate that same kind of proficiency in other Microsoft products as well.

The Nightmare
As much as I want to take the money, I can’t and I won’t because I don’t have the confidence in the other Microsoft products. So the next question that the customer will ask is “who can you refer to us that does this?”

This question used to haunt me and I cringe everytime a client ask me this question. Before, I always refer them to local IT businesses that I met at trade shows. But the problem is that I do not know how they work or if they hold themselves to a high quality of standard that I owe to our customer. Referring them to a bad company is like me doing bad work for them. It damages the trust that we built with our client.

The Obvious
It occured to me that I belong to this program called the Microsoft MVP program. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a program that Microsoft awards to individuals that demonstrates their proficiency in a particular product through contributions in the community. In another words, they know their stuff. In the world of public community and forums, if you don’t know your stuff, you’re caught and hung right away.

For some reason, this program is not very well known. It’s almost as if people are trying to keep it a secret. I find this to be invaluable directory to the most qualified professional in their respective products.

After referring a couple of fellow MVPs in different product lines, I’ve gotten pretty good feedbacks from our clients. They obvious care about their product line so they know the ins and outs of the product and the pitfalls during implementation. I’m a happy camper also because the customer can continue to come to me to get reliable advice on anything.

The Cost Effectiveness?
I’m also assuming your time is valuable and you do not want to spend more time than necessary to complete certain tasks.

Most of the MVPs will command a high rate. So why is it cost effective? Consider the alternative. You can outsource to India or China where they’ll charge you $18.00 an hour (I may have gotten offers for lower), the headaches, overtime, downtime, frustration, missed deliveries, communication faiulres, plus everything else that executives won’t see in an IT quote will be a lot more expensive (both money and human resource) than if you hired a MVP to do it right the first time.

Of course, due dilligence has to be paid. Just because someone is MVP does not make them qualified nor does it make them “fit” for your company and your needs.

Anyways, here’s the link to the MVP Program.
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx

The Best Business Practice

Posted by on March 19, 2012 4 comments

The Hype
Often times when I go into an implementation, some clients will want to implement it based on the “best business practice”. The idea is that somehow using the “best business practice” will reduce their implementation cost. In reality, more often than not, enforcing “best business practice”, without proper analysis, ususally leads to go live problems that will plague your business for years and years.

Unforuatenly, there’s no such thing as best business practice. If it really exist, then all business would be ran the same way and software developers like me would not exist.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the chart of account or the financial statement of the companies in your industry. If “best business practice” really exist, they would look identical. All of the sales and analysis reports would look all the same. They would look for the same key indicators to run their business. With “best business practice” there will be absolutely no room to think outside of the box.

The Truth
The dirty secret is that software consultants will sell you the “best business practice” to cover up limitations in their software. The key is if you asked for a specific feature or functionality that the software is weak at or doesn’t cover, they will keep questioning you and make your request seem stupid or irrevelent.

A typical response if you request something they can’t do is:

  • “There are thousands of companies using our software that does it this way, why are you trying to do something different?”
  • “We developed the software this way because these are the requirement from [some successful] company. Why are you different?”
  • “All the other company does it this way, why are you doing it differently?”
  • “Of all the thousands of companies that I’ve implemented, nobody does it this way. Why are you different?”
  • “Based on our experience, this is how it’s done”

An easy response to these? Because you ARE different. As I’ve mentioned before, businesses are as unique as the people that are running them. The chances of another person who thinks like you, talks like you, has the same taste as you is slim to nil.

What About the Cloud?
Ah yes… The Cloud. We software developers created this to streamline OUR process. The key word here is repeatability. If I can package this industry specific solution into the cloud and sell it like I sell T-Shirts. I win. It’s the “best business practice” for me, not necessarily for my clients.

You want software as easily purchased as buying Angry Birds on the iPhone? We have it! BUT, you have to conform to what the software does. When’s the last time you “customized” Angry Birds?

Believe me, I really do wish this “best business practice” would exist. It would make my job so much easier. I would not have to train developers or implementators. I can just pre-record some training and package it up. Actually, come to think of it, there are partners out there that have this available already for their industry specific solutions.

To be honest, we’re moving towards that direction as well, for us it makes sense. We want to package our expertise and sell it like a t-shirt. We want to use the minimum amount of effort to obtain the maximum results and we’ll sell that to anyone that wants to buy it. That’s not to say that the consulting industry will disappear eventually.

The cloud in its current state is like the ERP software industry 20 years ago. Basically, when you’re buying ERP software 20 years ago, you take whatever you’re given. Customization is a no-no and/or very expensive. When there’s an update, everybody gets it whether you like it or not. Eventually, software came out, such as Navision (Dynamics NAV), with the ability to make it the way you run your business that appealed to a lot of people. I suspect the cloud, given another 5-10 years, will be as such.

However, at this point, I’m not sure pretty sure a company of significant size will want to  “Keep track of data if it can be enter, the rest we’ll keep track in Excel” mode. Again, based on my previous post, this concept makes perfect sense for startups and small companies.

Conclusion
This is not to say that the worlds coming out of our mouth is all BS. This is where your judgement and the understanding of your business and what your needs are comes into play.

Some processes in your operation are derived not by choice, but by circumstance. The worst mistake you can ever do for your company is to be sold on what your needs are without having a good understanding of what your actualy needs are FIRST.

Again, there are a bunch of people out there that will use big words to make themselves really smart. If consultants comes in and only tries to sell you the best business practice. Pack up your stuff and RUN!

The best business practice is the practice that works for YOUR business.

Why Your Inventory Cost is Wrong

Posted by on February 20, 2012 9 comments
The Problem
I hate beating a dead horse to death, but there are a couple of incidences that prompted me to write this article. Navision 1.0 has been out since 1996, yet it always astounds me when I walk into a company claiming that their inventory costing and cost of goods sold is incorrect because Navision is bugged.The first question I always ask is: Have you guys ran the Adjust Cost – Item Entries process? Most of the time, I get the blank stare asking what the hell I’m talking about.

The Mandate
Straight from the Dynamics NAV help:

The Adjust Cost – Item Entries batch job adjusts inventory values in value entries so that you use the correct adjusted cost for updating the general ledger and so that sales and profit statistics are up to date. The cost adjustment forwards any cost changes from inbound entries, such as those for purchases or production output, to the related outbound entries, such as sales or transfers.

Basically, it will update your COGS and the Unit Cost on the item card to the correct cost that the item was brought in. Simply put, you HAVE to run this process BEFORE you do any meaningful financial and costing analysis.

It doesn’t matter what your costing method is. Doesn’t matter what your setup is. You HAVE to run this if you want to do inventory costing analysis in Dynamics NAV (Navision).

Here’s what the process looks like in RTC:

Adjust Cost - Item Entries RTC

 

Here’s what the process looks like in Classic Client:

Adjust Cost - Item Entries version 5.0

Note that the Adjust Cost – Item Entries will look different depending on the what version of Navision you use.

If you do not run this, no analyst in the world can begin to figure out what exactly the cost should be and address any incorrect inventory values you may have.

Side Effects
Note that if your company has never ran this before, or have not ran this in a long time, there may be detrimental affects on your inventory and COGS. Here’s a partial list of what you may encounter:

1. Your COGS on the G/L will go wild. The reason for this is that most companies, when they do not run the adjust cost, will use the general journal to “calculate” what the COGS should be. So when you do decide to let NAV do what it’s suppose to do, you will need to reverse these journal entries.

2. Your Inventory on the G/L will go wild. The reason is the same as above. The journal entries will need to be reversed.

3. Your item unit cost will go wild. The reason, again, is the same as above. A lot of times when you make an inventory journal adjustment to “take out” the inventory with the incorrect cost and positive adjust in the item with the correct cost, you are only doing it on the surface. The way NAV allocates and applies the inventory entries will most likely be different than what you adjusted.

Why Bother Going Though the Trouble?
Looking at the side affects, you may be wondering, why do I want to bother going through this process if I’m running fine as it is? The answer is simple, but it will reduce time and free up your company’s human resources to focus on important things.

Think about the manual spreadsheets and human memories that your salespeople need to figure out what cost the item should be before you can quote a competitive price to your customers. Think about the time it takes your internal accounting staff to figure out what your bottom line should look like on the financial statement. Think about if those times are freed, what other amazing things your employees can come up with to make your business even better.

Conclusion
A lot of companies will give their Trial balance to their CPA and let them make do the calculation. But realize that what they’re doing is just an estimate. It is NOT accurate. The CPA’s priority is to make the number seem reasonable so he/she can do your tax return and having paper trail if there’s an audit. His/her goal is not to get the accurate inventory cost.

Ask any good accountant, reconcilation is one of the most time consuming and useless tasks.

Ask any good salesperson, having a quote rejected because they cannot get the competitive price to the customer is not only a colossal waste of time on the company, but also for the customer. It reflects on the reputation of your company

Ask any good business owner, not having accurate profit and loss for each transaction… Well, you get the idea.

Let Dynamics NAV do its thing so it can help your business can do its thing.

Import Budget into Excel in Dynamics NAV RTC

Posted by on December 20, 2011 2 comments

When you’re working in the RTC environment in the G/L Budgets, the standard NAV function is that you can export the Budgets into Excel, edit it, then import it back in in the same Excel format. This works fine in the classic client, however, when you try to import the budget in Excel in the RTC environment, you get the error message:

Dates have not been recognised in the Excel worksheet

The problem, as explained by my local Microsoft rep, is caused by the Dynamics NAV server recognizing the field in Datetime instead of just regular date. The solution to this problem is to modify report 81 with the following object.

Report81RTC

The code for the changes is found here:

http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=46932&p=247791#p247791

Auto-hide Taskbar Does not Autohide in Windows 7

Posted by on December 20, 2011 No comments

This post is not Dynamics NAV (Navision) related, but I hope it’ll be extremely helpful because real estate space is really scarce on the desktop. Especially when you’re trying to cram all that data on to your screen.

This was troubling me for the longest during one of my demo sessions. Basically, I set my start menu to use auto-hide because I want to utilize all the space on my screen. The taskbar really gets in the way of everything we do.

Sometimes, the taskbar will not auto-hide. After browsing Google, the problem is caused by some notification or processes running in the background. What troubled me was that this only occurs every so often.

The problem is caused by the SQL Server Management Studio. You know, the annoying notification that asks you to give them your opinion on SQL Server. It turns out, you can’t just ignore that or else your taskbar will never autohide. The way to resolve it is to do this:

Basically, you have to set the Behavior of the SSMS notification to Hide Icon and Notifications. After changing this, my Auto-hide taskbar is working again.

If you don’t have SQL Server running in the back end, then I would suggest hiding the Icon and Notification for the different programs to see which one is causing it.

Price does not find the Lowest Price

Posted by on November 2, 2011 4 comments

Working with Navision for the last 12 years, there are certain functionality that you assumed worked a certain way. I was under the impression that Navision always finds the lowest price whent he sales order is entered. Recently, one of our customer pointed me to the contrary.

Note that this scenerio will only occur if an item has a Sales Price and a Sales Discount setup. If the Allow Line Discount is checked off on the Sales Price, NAV will not use the best price for the customer if a Line Discount gives a lower price for the customer.

It will always use the price on the Sales Price. The reason, from the explanation I got, is that the contract price (on the Sales Price table) should take precedence over any discounts given to the customer.

For our client, it doesn’t make sense because as a service to their customers, if they promised the lowest price available it should be the lowest price available. Again, we had to create extra logic to consider the discounted price as part of the lowest price given to the customer.

So if your client gives special pricing and a discount, you will need to ask the client whether the special price takes precedence.

Abnormal Item Charges

Posted by on October 31, 2011 No comments

Overview
Dynamics NAV is a ERP software that’s built on best business practice. However, that’s not to say that the users of Navision operates on best business practice.

This post describes what I would like to call Abnormal Item Charges. Again, as with what I’ve described with Abnormal Posting Date, don’t bother looking it up on any GAAP dictionary or NAV website. It’s a term that I made up because I lack the vocabulary to think of a better name. English, afterall, is my second language.

What is Abnormal Item Charge?
Abnormal Item Charge are posted item charges that are applied to the open Purchase Order that has not been received or invoiced.

An Example
A lot of times when a company orders some items from factories, they will buy the finishes of the goods that you want to order, i.e. special metallic paint. Because of the competitiveness of factories, they will sometime offer the company to pay only partial (or no payment at all) until the products are successfully manufacturered. The special finishes they will have to pay now.

So at the time of the PO creation, the company will only have paid for the special metallic paint. The company wants to pay for the paint while allocating the cost of the paint to the inventory that they will possiblity receive in the future. So an item charge line is created on the PO and allocated the cost of the paint ot the purchase lines.

The Effects on G/L
As we discussed previously, this item charge will post to the following G/L accounts:
+ Inventory
- A/P
+ Item Charge G/L Account (Purchases)
- Direct Cost Applied

So the additional cost of the item is correctly accrued to the inventory value.

The Problem
The additional cost components of the item has been allocated and correctly posted to the G/L. The problem is, there’s no inventory for the additional cost to apply to.

This means that the value entries will be created, but it will not reflect on the inventory valuation report until the items are received.

The Solution
In version 6.0 (NAV2009), they put out a fix for this in codeunit 90. Now if you try to post an item charge when there are no item ledger entry, it’ll give an error. However, this solution causes problems for the business case described above.

The solution for this was to comment out the code in NAV2009, then create a report that captures the additional cost posted to the G/L that did not have the corrosponding item ledger. We call this report the Abnormal Item Charge report. It’s a pretty simple report. If your company has the same problem, let me know. I’ll send you the report.

EDIT: One of my colleagues reminded me that we can also use the Prepayment Functionality in the US version to handle this. Basically, we would set the item charge line prepayment percentage to 100. Doing this will post the transaction into the prepayment account instead of the inventory account.

Conclusion
Again, NAV is designed to be best practice. This cause in particular forces us to break that best practice because it makes business sense. Note that I don’t usually like to break NAV’s built in best practices, but in this situation, it was a frequent part of the some of our client’s business, especially when factories are competing for orders in a down economy.

Dynamics NAV 2009 Reporting Book Released

Posted by on October 26, 2011 2 comments

Looks like I jumped the gun when I wrote about the book release on this post.

For real, the Dynamics NAV 2009 reporting book is now officially released. Again, you can buy a copy of the book here:
https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-dynamics-nav-2009-for-professional-reporting/book

Back when I was asked to review this, I knew this was going to be a must read book for any people out there wanting to develop reports in Navision. After the final product is delivered to me, I have to say that the final book blew away even my original expectations!

Aside from the content it provides, Steven Render (the author) really made an effort to document all the necessary steps to create good looking and complex reports with step by step examples, and… PICTURES! For all of you future NAV book writers, it really doesn’t matter if you can construct the most beautiful sentience in the world. Well done pictures will always win. Better yet, draw/write within the pictures, as what Steven has done in his book.

I’m not alone on this as Eric Wauters (Waldo), a fellow NAV MVP, also had some good things to say about this book here.

As I mentioned before, this book really patches up the lack of documentation on the reporting side for NAV2009 and its capabilities. The information here is definitely not something you can just download from Partnersource or Customersource.

Recap of Directions 2011 for Dynamics NAV (Navision)

Posted by on October 15, 2011 4 comments

Overview
This post is an overview of my experiences at Directions 2011 – Connect Learn Execute. Again, if you don’t already know, Directions is THE single event that any partner dealing anything with Dynamics NAV (Navision) absolutely has to attend. Not only do they preview a lot of new stuff, it’s also a great place to learn from what other partners are doing and the challenges they’re facing in the market.


The Vibe
The event itself was spectacularly put together by the Directions people. Everything was very organized and well put together. Having been to Directions since 2006, every Directions I attended since had been better than the previous. There were always incredible key takes aways and new friendships that are made.

However, this year I felt something missing. In particular, the energy level to be low. The problem wasn’t the event itself, rather, it was the attendees lacked enthusiasm and energy. In addition, I significantly noticed a lot of partners that I’d use to see (even until last year) did not come to this year’s event.

There are a number of theroies on why I think the energy level is low:

  • The presenters from Europe speak and present with no emotions, like robots. If there’s a competition for monotone speak, the European presenters would be clear winners, no doubt. 
  • There was a couple of presentations that I would like to call the “Doom and Gloom”. Basically, we have to significantly change our business model to be volume based seller. 
  • RTC. Apparently, many partners are still struggling with this.

Demos Dynamics NAV 7 (Navision 7.0)
Looking at Dynamics NAV 7, Microsoft really made significant improvements in usuability, development environment, performance, etc. etc. They’ve addressed everything (and I do mean everything) that I thought was a problem with Dynamics NAV 2009. It’s really a product that everyone can really be excited about.

The reason I can’t blog much about Dynamcis NAV 7 is because as a Dynamics NAV MVP, I’m under the NDA. And since Dan Brown mentioned that everything we saw in Dynamics NAV 7 is not to be made public in the beginning of the event, I have to follow it. Fortunately, not everyone in the conference cares about what they signed, so you can find a lot more about Dynamics NAV 7 if you did a Google search.

One thing I found strange on this event was how Microsoft showing off freely how Dynamics NAV 7 looks and works, even though the product release date is scheduled for Q3/Q4 2012. I can tell you also that Dynamics NAV 7 that I saw in the MVP program is different than the Dynamics NAV 7 they showed at Directions.

Within one year, anything and/or everything can change. After seeing Dynamics NAV 7 in its current form, and knowing people and rumors will start of fly about Dynamics NAV 7, I really hope Microsoft can release it sooner than later.

Key Take Away
Microsoft has moved to the cloud. Dynamics NAV is moving to the cloud. From the sessions in “Doom and Gloom” series, the message was clear: “Move to the Cloud or DIE!”

Yeah… They were fun sessions to attend…