Picture a small trading company where the accountant arrives in the morning to find two separate stacks of paper on the desk. One pile holds sales receipts, the other expense slips. Each stack gets typed into a spreadsheet first, then transferred by hand into the accounting ledger. When month-end arrives, producing a trial balance means checking the same numbers three times over. It takes hours. Mistakes creep in. This is exactly the problem Navision Financials is built to solve.
Navision Financials is an integrated accounting program that keeps all financial records in a single central system. The word ‘integrated’ here means something specific: information entered in one place updates other records automatically, without anyone typing the same figures a second time. When a journal entry — the daily record of financial transactions listed in date order — is posted, the program updates the relevant accounts on its own. The accountant does not need to repeat the same entry elsewhere. Think of it like a shop till that updates both the stock count and the daily sales report the moment a product is scanned; one action, several results at once.
Understanding how the program works requires only one basic accounting concept: double-entry bookkeeping, meaning every transaction is recorded on both a debit side and a credit side. Navision Financials has this rule built in. When an invoice is entered, the program posts both the debit and the credit simultaneously. The user selects the amount and the account code; the program handles the rest. Once the chart of accounts — the complete list of all the company’s accounting codes — is set up in the system, every subsequent entry falls into its correct place automatically.
The most direct benefit of this structure is the elimination of duplicate entry errors. In a manual system, the same invoice sometimes gets written down twice, or sits waiting to be recorded until it gets lost entirely. In Navision Financials, every entry posted is reflected in the accounts immediately. At month-end, producing a trial balance takes a few clicks; the program displays debit and credit totals for every account in a single table. A task that used to take most of a day is finished in minutes. The figures balance because no information was written in two separate places by two separate hands; everything comes from the same database, the central store where all records are held.
A second clear benefit shows up in day-to-day reporting. Checking the balance on a specific account, viewing the position at a particular date, comparing two months side by side — all of this becomes straightforward. In a manual ledger, comparing past periods means flipping through pages one by one, and if a totalling error is hiding somewhere, finding it can take hours. In Navision Financials, account movements can be listed on screen and printed out. These reports give both the owner and the accountant a clear picture of where things stand; there is no room for argument about what a particular account balance actually is.
That said, getting the program running properly carries its own difficulties. The most critical step is loading the chart of accounts correctly at the start. If this is done wrong, every entry that follows is misclassified, and untangling the mess later is painful. Without support from an authorised reseller who installs and configures the system, most small businesses struggle to get past this stage on their own. The program also requires Windows and reasonably current hardware; older machines slow it down noticeably. There is a learning curve for the accountant as well. Sitting in front of an unfamiliar screen for the first few weeks, it is normal to feel uncertain. Many firms run parallel records for the first few months, keeping both the old ledger and the new program going at the same time. It is extra work, but it is a sensible way to build confidence before relying on the system completely.
For a small business owner considering Navision Financials, the deciding question is a practical one: does the current accounting process genuinely slow things down at month-end, and do manual errors cost real time to fix? If the answer is yes, this program delivers measurable savings in both time and mistakes. The benefit only materialises, however, when the chart of accounts is set up correctly and entries are posted consistently. Buying the software and leaving it unused helps no one. The decision should come with three commitments: working with an authorised reseller from day one, making sure at least one person in the office is properly trained, and committing to entering records regularly rather than leaving them to pile up.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on January 24, 2000 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.