A customer calls asking about an order placed last month. You look through the order notebook — not there. You check the invoice folder — nothing. You call the warehouse — they do not remember the delivery note either. This scene plays out in many small and medium businesses every single week. Sales records live in three different places at once: a paper notebook, someone’s memory, and a spreadsheet. Navision Financials, the accounting and sales management software developed by the Danish company Navision for mid-sized businesses, addresses this problem directly.
The sales module records every step a transaction goes through from start to finish. It begins with a quote. When you give a customer a price, you enter it into the program. If the customer accepts, the quote converts to a sales order with a single keystroke. When goods leave the warehouse, the order becomes a delivery note (the document confirming goods have been dispatched). Stock levels drop automatically. When you need to issue an invoice, the delivery note is already waiting — you do not have to type anything from scratch. Quote, order, delivery note and invoice are all connected. Opening one takes you directly to the others.
The biggest benefit of this chain is that no sale slips through. In a paper-based system, quotes get forgotten before they become orders. Shipments go out without invoices being raised. The program prevents both. Every open quote, every pending order, every delivery note still waiting for an invoice appears in a list you can check at any moment. That same list becomes the starting point for collections. Which customers owe money, which invoices are past due — all of it visible from one screen without digging through folders.
The customer sales history feature makes pricing decisions considerably easier. You can see how many units of a product a particular customer has bought, what price was applied each time, and what their total purchases add up to. This matters when you are putting together a new quote. Whether to offer a volume discount, whether to extend open credit terms — these judgments become much more grounded when a real record is sitting in front of you rather than a rough estimate in your head. For a small garment maker or a spare-parts distributor, walking into a customer meeting with that kind of data changes the whole conversation.
Credit and collections tracking is another area where the program makes a noticeable difference. If you have agreed on thirty-day payment terms, the invoice automatically moves to the overdue list when those thirty days are up. The collections staff no longer needs to go through index cards every morning or flip through ledger books. They open the screen, see that day’s overdue invoices and pick up the phone. The total outstanding balance for each customer is also right there: open the customer record and the balance appears immediately. There is no need to run to the accountant or add up entries one by one to find that number.
Setting the program up and getting used to it takes time — that part is honest. Every member of the sales team needs to enter every transaction into the system. If half the records go into the program and half stay on paper, the chain breaks and the tracking stops being useful. The software also comes with an English-language core; the local authorised reseller handles the Turkish-language adaptation and alignment with local accounting requirements, but that process adds both cost and time to the project. Installation typically takes several weeks, and staff need hands-on support from the reseller to learn to use the program correctly. Since fast internet connections are not yet common, most of that support happens face to face or over the phone.
When deciding whether this program is right for your business, ask yourself a few straightforward questions. Right now, do you know how many of your open quotes have turned into orders and how many have not? How many delivery notes are still waiting for invoices? What is the total revenue from your largest customer over the past six months? If you cannot answer those questions within a few minutes, an integrated sales tracking system like Navision Financials will make a real difference. The investment is not small — budget is needed for the software licence, reseller support and staff training. But moving the sales process off paper and onto a single connected system reduces errors and gives you the solid ground you need when sitting across from a customer.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 21, 2000 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.