A customer receives two invoices for the same delivery. Or the same payment gets recorded by two different staff members in two separate ledgers. Month-end reconciliation rolls around and the numbers simply do not match. The accountant works overtime, the owner is frustrated, and the customer is on the phone complaining. This scene plays out regularly in small and mid-sized businesses across Turkey. The root cause is almost always the same: sales, accounting, and warehouse each keep their own records in separate notebooks or separate programs. When information has to be carried from one place to another by hand, errors follow.
Navision addresses this problem with what is called integrated record-keeping. The program brings sales, inventory, and accounting under one roof. When a sales invoice is created, the stock balance and the accounting entry update automatically — no one has to re-enter the same figures into a second system. Think of it like a shop till where ringing up a sale simultaneously updates both the cash drawer count and the daily sales log, without the cashier writing anything twice. That is the logic Navision applies across every transaction in the business.
Why does duplicate entry cause so many problems in practice? Because two people entering the same figure at different times will not always write the same number. One types 1,250 lira, the other types 1,520 lira. Or one person records a payment and the other has not yet done so. These gaps surface at month-end, but tracing them back to the source can take hours. In Navision, a transaction is entered once and the system distributes that information wherever it needs to go. The opportunity for human error drops sharply because the second touch simply does not happen.
The damage a wrong invoice does to a customer relationship should not be underestimated. When a customer receives an invoice with the wrong amount, they call to dispute it. Time is lost on both sides. Trust takes a hit. In many cases the customer delays payment while the discrepancy is being sorted out, and that delay hits the company’s cash flow directly. In Navision, invoice data is tied to a single customer record. Issuing a duplicate invoice or entering the wrong amount becomes much harder because the system displays the full history of that customer’s transactions the moment you open their account.
Reconciliation differences cause similar damage to cash flow. Reconciliation means comparing your records against a supplier’s or customer’s records to confirm the figures agree. When they do not, someone has either missed a payment or lost track of an invoice. Finding the discrepancy means digging through old invoices, bank statements, and handwritten notes. In Navision, all of that information sits inside the program. Every movement on a customer’s account — invoices issued, payments received, outstanding balances — is visible on screen. A reconciliation that used to take half a day can be done in minutes.
Setting the program up is not a quick task, and that is worth saying plainly. Navision is not a simple bookkeeping tool that a new user can master in an afternoon. Before installation, the business needs to define its own processes clearly: who issues invoices, who records stock arrivals, who approves payments. If those questions are not answered first, the old confusion simply reappears in a new form inside the software. Working with an authorized reseller or implementation specialist is not optional — it is the part that determines whether the project succeeds. Installation typically takes several weeks, and staff training adds more time on top of that.
For an SME owner considering Navision, the right starting question is this: how many separate places does the business currently record the same information? If sales, accounting, and warehouse each keep their own records, how much time goes into reconciling those records every month? If reconciliation meetings run long, if customer complaints trace back to invoicing mistakes, and if month-end closing is consistently delayed, the integrated approach this program offers addresses those problems at their source. Before committing, ask an authorized reseller for a demonstration and walk through your own typical transactions to see whether the fit makes sense for your business.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 7, 2001 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.