The Value of Upgrading to NAV 2016

So now we want to share it with you because, frankly, these changes are impacting the entire ecosystem and it’s important for all NAV users (no matter what version you are running) to understand what that actually means.

Our Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 Blog Series is designed to give you a better understanding of the new features in NAV 2016 and what they look like from a user perspective. Our NAV team will be combining their expertise and walking you through different scenarios with these new features. This way you can decide for yourself if upgrading your NAV system is a good idea now or later. We will be covering the following areas:

• How to Create Permissions
• Power BI and Jet Enterprise
• Finance Improvements – Create and Post Month End Deferral Entries
• Finance Improvements – Posting Preview and Document Totals
• A Day in the Cloud – Experiences Using the Web Client

The new features in the latest NAV version are so robust that it’s clear Microsoft is fully invested in taking NAV to another level. NAV 2016 offers improvements not just found for end users, but consultants, developers, and ISVs as well.

• More functionality and visibility on a transactional level, through previewing results and clear indication of document totals
• Easier processes for accounting for deferred transactions
• Ability to have system-generated checks and balances to circumvent cheque and payment fraud vis-à-vis positive pay functionality

A more business-ready and ROI-achieving solution to meet more baseline and functional requirements, leading to a smaller footprint and a lower requirement for 3rd party solutions to ‘complete’ the offering

• Enhanced capacity to take on data-migration and integration processes through more generic importing protocols
• New areas to explore and develop with clients (i.e. workflows)
• Better ability to steward and manage the assignment of application security and permissions

A new way to develop solutions overtop existing base Objects with new a solution-deployment model (i.e. extensions)

• A newly-refreshed coding environment fostering more effective and streamlined coding processes, which helps shorten the development time
• A new paradigm for coding and working with Events for interacting with C/AL code and business objects/logic – makes the upgrade much easier!

The purpose of this blog post is to serve as an introductory guide to NAV 2016 and keep you aware of what’s now at your fingertips. Every week we will be posting a more detailed blog that goes more in-depth to each feature that you can ask questions on or inquire about. As you evolve with your own Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest functionality and to stay supported by Microsoft, even if you aren’t ready to upgrade. Awareness comes first and then you can make the call to move forward with this version or not.

One of the most innovative changes to NAV 2016 with the potential to impact a lot of midsized businesses is the emphasis on the cloud. NAV 2016 now has native integration to Azure SQL and CRM online, making it easier to fully migrate your business to the cloud.

Now that we know what the latest version has to offer, here are the top features that we are most interested in:

This blog post should get any accountant giddy! We will be highlighting some big features introduced to NAV 2016, including Deferrals, Posting Preview and Document Totals. Deferrals allow posting of transaction in the current period but defer the income or expense over a defined period, Posting Preview feature allows users to preview the entries before posting and its impact against all affected ledgers (i.e. general ledger, vendor ledger, customer ledger, bank ledger, etc.) and Document Totals, in the North American version, displays the invoice amount and tax on purchase and sales documents including quotes, orders, and invoices.   These improved features will save time on data entry and enhance the accounting user experience.

Mapping user group and group permissions in NAV 2016 has made some great improvements to simplify the process of adding and removing application permissions to users. This blog post will show you how you can now group users who share the same permission sets and assign permissions to the group instead of having to assign it to each user.

NAV 2016 now connects easily to PowerBI so you can benefit from the analytics, dashboards and data connections from the system. There are more queries that can be pushed out from NAV that Power BI can consume which will bring your reporting to a whole different level – and with the pre-baked NAV content packs online, you can be up and running with PowerBI in minutes! We’ll show you some examples in this part of the series.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate a few scenarios of where you can use workflows for Approvals, Notifications, and Trigger Actions. Enhancements have been made in the new version to improve customized automation around billing, financials and other critical functions.

With over 60 changes to the web client in NAV 2016, this blog post will focus on a few key ones that we want you to know about. The search function literally searches everything on the page so we’ll show you how to make the most of it. You can also take advantage of the HTML-5 based code to hide and show fields.

In this blog post, we will interviewing our NAV Team Lead, Blair Hurlbut, and CRM Team Lead, Andrew Rymes, to talk about the impact of the integration between Dynamics CRM and NAV 2016.