Picture a wholesale textile supplier. The warehouse manager walks in on a Monday morning and counts twelve rolls of fabric on the shelf. But the accounts book from Friday shows twenty-two. Where did the other ten go? Maybe goods left without a delivery note. Maybe someone miscounted during a busy afternoon. Maybe the entry was simply never made. The result is two different numbers: what is actually on the shelf, and what is written down. This gap between the two is one of the most common and costly problems in small and medium-sized businesses — and it almost always ends up hurting the bank account.
Navision Financials is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software — a program that brings a company’s accounting, purchasing, sales, and warehouse operations into a single system. Its inventory module handles every movement of goods in and out of stock. When a delivery arrives, the entry goes into the program. When goods leave for a customer, the program deducts them. Because every movement passes through the same system, there is no separate warehouse ledger sitting on a desk and no separate accounts book waiting to be updated later. The number in the accounts and the number in the warehouse come from the same source at the same time.
In most small businesses today, stock is tracked like this: the warehouse keeper writes on paper, hands the paper to the accountant, and the accountant processes it when time allows. Between those two steps, a day or a week can pass. During that time goods keep moving. A new order ships out before the previous paper has been entered. A supplier delivery arrives and gets written down by hand, but the accounting entry waits until month-end. This delay and disconnect is exactly where the gap between real stock and recorded stock is born. Navision Financials removes that gap by recording each movement once, in a single screen, and updating both the warehouse count and the accounts entry in the same action. No second step, no second ledger.
The effect on cash flow is larger than it first appears. If a business believes it still has stock of a product that actually ran out weeks ago, it will not reorder in time. When a customer asks for that product, the answer is ‘yes, we have it’ — and then moments later, ‘actually, we do not.’ That situation damages customer trust and loses the sale outright. On the other side, if a product is showing as low in the records when it is actually plentiful in the warehouse, a purchasing manager might place an unnecessary order, tying up cash in goods that are already sitting on the shelf. Navision Financials’ integrated tracking reduces both risks: when records reflect reality, decisions about buying and selling become far more reliable.
The program also allows a business to set a minimum stock level (the lowest quantity of a product that should be kept on hand at any time) for each item it carries. When the stock of a product drops to that threshold, the program flags it on screen. The purchasing manager or warehouse keeper can see first thing in the morning which items are getting low and need to be reordered before they run out entirely. This replaces the habit of walking through the warehouse with a clipboard and guessing, or worse, discovering a shortage only when a customer asks for something that is no longer there. The alert comes from the system automatically, based on actual recorded movements — not on memory or habit.
Stock valuation — calculating the total money value of goods held in the warehouse — is another area where manual tracking breaks down quickly. When the same product has been purchased at different prices across several deliveries, working out what the current stock is actually worth requires careful calculation. Navision Financials handles this calculation according to a defined method, applying it consistently to every movement. Getting this figure right matters: an incorrect stock value affects the balance sheet and ultimately the tax calculation at year-end. Doing it by hand leaves room for small errors that compound over time. When the purchase price of every delivery is recorded in the system at the moment of receipt, the valuation is always based on real, traceable data rather than a best estimate.
A business owner considering Navision Financials for inventory management should ask a few honest questions before deciding. First: how many people currently maintain stock records, and how often do those records disagree with what is physically in the warehouse? Second: in the past year, how many times did a stock mismatch either cost a sale or lead to an unnecessary purchase? Third: is there a local authorised reseller who can install the software, set up the correct parameters, and train the people who will use it daily? That last question is not a small detail. A program that is installed but not properly configured or taught will be abandoned within months. If the answers to the first two questions are unsettling, integrated inventory tracking is not an optional improvement — it is a straightforward business necessity.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 14, 2000 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.