Picture a wholesale trading company. Hundreds of product lines sit in the warehouse, and finding out how many units are left means tracking down the warehouse worker. Invoices live in one folder, collections in a separate ledger. At month end, the accountant gathers all that paper and tries to make sense of it. This picture is familiar to many small and mid-sized businesses in Turkey. Navision steps in at exactly this point: it brings sales, stock, and accounting together inside a single computer system.
Navision is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) program developed by a Danish software company. ERP means software that lets different parts of a business — sales, purchasing, stock, accounting — work from the same database at the same time. Inside the program, separate but connected sections handle each area of the business. These sections are called ‘modules.’ Which modules a company buys determines what the program can do for it. Because trading, service, and light manufacturing businesses have different needs, what each of them expects from Navision is also different.
For a wholesale or retail trading business, the first real benefit comes from the sales and inventory modules. When a customer invoice is issued, the program immediately reduces the stock count for that item. On the purchasing side, a supplier order entered into the system updates stock automatically when goods arrive at the warehouse. The answer to ‘how many do we have left?’ is ready on screen without asking anyone. The accounting module runs alongside all of this: when an invoice is raised, the corresponding accounting entry is created by the program itself. The accountant no longer has to enter every invoice by hand into a separate ledger. For a trading firm that issues dozens of invoices a day, this saves a serious amount of time.
Service businesses — consulting firms, maintenance and repair companies, freight forwarders — work differently. They have little or no warehouse stock; the core of the business is people and service processes. The biggest benefit Navision offers these firms comes from customer tracking, job management, and billing. Which customer received which service, when, at what price, and whether payment has been received — all of this is visible from one screen. Think of a maintenance and repair company: a technician completes a job in the field, returns to the office, and enters the work into the program. The program builds the invoice for that customer and creates the accounting entry. At month end, a report shows exactly which customers still owe payment.
Light manufacturing businesses — small workshop-style factories, assembly operations — get the most from Navision’s inventory and production modules. These firms buy raw materials, process them, and sell finished goods. Navision connects all three steps. How much raw material is in stock, how much is needed to fill a particular production order, what the finished goods inventory looks like after production is complete — all of it stays on record inside the program. For a firm that makes more than one product and uses the same raw material across different items, keeping track of this by hand becomes very difficult very quickly. The program makes that complexity manageable.
Across all three sectors, one benefit stands out: accounting entries are now a natural result of business transactions, not a separate manual task. When an invoice is raised, goods are received, or a payment goes out, the program creates the accounting record in the background. The accountant reviews those entries, corrects them if needed, but does not have to start from scratch. Preparing a balance sheet or income statement at period end becomes much less of an ordeal. Reports are pulled from inside the program and printed out. The owner’s question — ‘how much did we sell this month, how much did we earn?’ — no longer requires days of calculation to answer.
There are also honest questions to ask before committing to Navision. Getting the program installed and running properly is difficult without a qualified local reseller. At the start, transferring existing data — customer lists, product cards, open balances — into the system takes real effort. Staff need dedicated training time to learn the program. The licence cost is not a small line item for a compact business. On top of that, making the program work correctly within Turkish tax and accounting rules requires careful local setup. Taking all of this into account, Navision makes sense as an investment for a business that issues at least fifteen to twenty invoices a day, has at least two or three people working in accounting and sales, and plans to grow. A smaller operation running at a lower volume may find a simpler standalone accounting program a better fit for now.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 14, 2001 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.