Picture a mid-sized textile wholesaler. On the fifteenth of the month, three major customers owe payments. By the end of that same week, two suppliers need to be paid. All of this information lives in the owner’s head or on a piece of paper. If one customer is late, the supplier payment falls through. The bank account runs short. A check bounces. This is not a hypothetical — it is the weekly reality for a large share of small and medium-sized businesses operating in Turkey. Navision Financials approaches this problem from a different angle.
Navision Financials is an integrated accounting and business management program developed by a Danish software company. ‘Integrated’ here means that sales, purchasing, inventory, and accounting data are not kept in separate files — they are connected inside a single system. The program’s cash flow section lists all expected incoming payments and outgoing obligations in calendar order. When a bookkeeper opens the computer in the morning, they can see on one screen which checks are due for collection, which promissory notes need to be settled, and which invoices are reaching their due date in the next two weeks.
Why does this visibility matter so much? Because cash shortfalls almost always arrive as surprises. The owner may already know about the obligations in a general sense, but knowing and seeing are two different things. Information kept in memory or on paper tends to be incomplete or confused. In Navision, every time-sensitive transaction is recorded the moment it is entered. When a sales invoice is issued, the collection date drops automatically into the expected receipts list. When a supplier payable is entered, the due date appears on the payments schedule. Nothing slips through. A manager can sit down at the start of the month, pull a cash forecast report from the program, and plan the weeks ahead with actual numbers in front of them.
Check and promissory note tracking carries its own weight here. Commercial life in Turkey still runs heavily on checks and notes. A check received from a customer may sit in the safe for days before it is sent to the bank for collection. A note issued to a supplier must be ready on the exact payment date. Navision Financials tracks received checks and notes as a separate portfolio. Each check’s issue date, amount, and planned bank submission date is recorded in the system. This means the total value of checks held in the safe and their collection schedule is visible at any moment. Checks issued to others are recorded the same way, so the program can tell the manager exactly how much money must be in the account on any given day.
Entering bank movements into the program also shapes cash planning directly. The bank statement is entered into the system by hand, either daily or weekly. As this is done, the balance shown in the program can be compared against the actual bank balance. Any difference shows up immediately. ‘The bank shows more money than the program — why?’ The answer surfaces quickly: either a payment was not entered or a receipt was missed. This comparison process is called ‘reconciliation’ in accounting terms, and done by hand it can take hours. The program makes it considerably faster and less error-prone.
None of this works without discipline, and that is the honest part of the picture. For the program to give accurate cash forecasts, every transaction must be entered completely and on time. A sales invoice issued today must be entered today, not tomorrow. A check received must be logged immediately. If this habit is not built into daily routines, the program’s forecasts stop reflecting reality and the manager ends up making decisions based on a false picture. Building this discipline takes time, especially in smaller offices where one person handles multiple roles. The local reseller or implementation partner must provide proper training and stay close during the first few months. Without that support, the program sits installed but underused while old habits continue.
For a small business owner evaluating Navision Financials, the most useful question to ask is this: do we know our cash position every morning, or do we only find out at the end of the month? If cash shortfalls keep arriving as surprises, if check and note tracking is still done on paper, and if bank reconciliation takes days, this program is built to solve exactly those problems. But buying the program is not enough on its own. The whole team needs to use it correctly and consistently. Companies that manage this shift stop asking ‘do we have money?’ in the middle of the month and start answering ‘how much comes in and goes out this month?’ at the beginning of it. For a small business, that difference is not small at all.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on March 13, 2000 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.