Every morning the bookkeeper sits down to a pile of invoices and bank statements. Dozens of entries need to be posted by hand. When month-end arrives, the owner wants a balance sheet, but pulling the numbers together takes days. This is the daily reality for a large number of small and medium-sized businesses. Integrated accounting programs like Navision Financials step in at exactly this point. The program brings scattered records into one system and puts reports on screen in a few clicks instead of hours of manual calculation. If you are reading this and asking yourself whether this kind of software is right for your company, the answer lies mostly in understanding what the program actually does and how it is built.
Navision Financials works on a modular structure. You do not have to buy the entire system at once. Depending on what your business needs right now, you can start with the finance module, add the sales module, and bring in inventory management later. Think of it like buying office furniture piece by piece: you buy the desk today and add the shelving unit when the budget allows. A small trading company can get started with just the finance and sales modules and bolt on warehouse management or production tracking later. For a business watching its spending, this kind of flexibility matters. You pay for what you use, and you grow the system as the company grows.
The feature that tends to get the most attention is the flexible chart of accounts, which is simply the organized list of all the account codes your business uses for bookkeeping. Most standard accounting programs hand you a fixed list and give you little room to change it. In Navision Financials you can shape the chart of accounts around the way your business actually works. A feature called Dimensions lets you tag every transaction from multiple angles: which branch, which project, which cost centre. A company with a head office in Istanbul and a branch in Ankara can track income and expenses for each location separately. When the owner asks which branch performed better this month, the bookkeeper runs a filtered report rather than spending half a day building a manual table.
Multi-currency support draws particular interest from businesses that buy or sell in foreign currency. The program holds records in more than one currency at the same time — Turkish lira, US dollar, Deutsche mark, or whichever currencies your business uses. When you enter the exchange rate, the program recalculates receivables and payables automatically. For a company that imports goods from a foreign supplier or invoices export customers in dollars, this saves real time. The bookkeeper no longer has to work out the conversion by hand for every transaction. Currency differences are recorded in a separate account, so the effect on profit is visible and clean. Keeping exchange rate records accurate is especially important for businesses operating under high inflation conditions.
On the reporting side, the program gives users a wide range of options. Standard financial reports such as the income statement, balance sheet, and aged receivables analysis, which shows how long outstanding invoices have been waiting for payment, are all built in. Beyond the standard set, you can build your own report layouts and save them for regular use. Most accounting programs give you a fixed report that you cannot adjust. Here you can modify the layout to match what each department actually needs to see. The sales manager opens a report sorted by customer turnover; the finance manager looks at the cash position report. Each department pulls its own view from the program without waiting for the bookkeeper to build a custom spreadsheet. In a company with a small team, that reduction in internal requests adds up quickly.
That said, there are real practical hurdles to prepare for. Setting up the program correctly requires serious technical knowledge. Building the chart of accounts, configuring dimensions, defining user permissions — none of this is straightforward without guidance. Getting the system running properly without a qualified reseller or implementation partner is extremely difficult. After installation, staff need time to learn the new way of working. A bookkeeper who has spent years working from paper ledgers or a basic accounting program will face a genuine adjustment period when moving to Navision Financials. Posting bank statements correctly, entering exchange rates on time, closing accounting periods without errors — these are all steps that need to be learned properly. A poor installation or incomplete training cancels out most of the advantages the program offers.
When you sit down to evaluate Navision Financials, the most useful question to ask yourself is how quickly and accurately your current accounting system gives you the information you need to run the business. If producing a month-end balance sheet takes weeks, if you cannot see profit and loss by branch or project, if currency calculations are still done on a pocket calculator, this program is designed to address exactly those problems. But the real value only appears when the setup is done right and the people using it have been properly trained. Arranging a demonstration through an authorised reseller and visiting one or two reference companies before signing anything is the most sensible step before making a decision. The technical feature list is less useful than asking how the program handles your own specific business processes, and that question is best answered by watching it work on data that looks like yours.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on February 28, 2000 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.