In order to use Dynamics NAV, all organizations have to use the Financial Management area. It is the epicenter of the whole application. Any other area is optional and their usage depends on the organization's needs. The sales and the purchase areas are also used in almost any Dynamics NAV implementation.

Actually, accountancy is the epicenter, and the general ledger is included inside the Financial Management area. In Dynamics NAV, everything leads to accounting. It makes sense as accountancy is the act of recording, classifying, and summarizing, in terms of money, the transactions and events that take place in the company.

Every time the warehouse guy ships an item, or the payment department orders a transfer, these actions can be written in terms of money using accounts, credit, and debit amounts.

An accountant could collect all the company transactions and translate them one by one to the accounting language. But this means manual duplicate work, a lot of chances of getting errors and inconsistencies, and no real-time data.

On the other hand, Dynamics NAV is capable of interpreting such transactions and translating them to accountancy on the fly. In Dynamics NAV, everything leads to accountancy, so all the company's employees are helping the financial department with their job. The financers can now focus on analyzing the data and taking decisions, and they don't have to bother on entering the data anymore.

One of the first things you will face when working with Dynamics NAV is the inability to modify what has been posted, whether it's a sales invoice, a shipment document, a general ledger entry, or any other data. Any posted document or entry is unchangeable.

This might cause frustration, especially if you are used to working with other systems that allow you to modify data. However, this feature is a great advantage since it ensures data integrity. You will never find an unbalanced transaction.

If you need to correct any data, the Dynamics NAV approach is to post new entries to null the incorrect ones, and then post the good entries again. For instance, if you have posted an invoice, and the prices were wrong, you will have to post a credit memo to null the original invoice and then issue a new invoice with the correct prices:

As you can see, this method that is used for correcting mistakes always leaves a track of what was wrong and how we solved it. Users get the feeling that they have to perform too many steps to correct the data with the addition that everyone can see that there was a mistake at some point. Our experience tells us that users tend to pay more attention before they post anything in Dynamics NAV, which leads to making fewer mistakes in the first place.

So another great advantage of using Dynamics NAV as your ERP system is that the whole organization tends to improve their internal procedures, so no mistakes.

Dynamics NAV does not have any kind of Save button anywhere in the application. Data is saved into the database while it is being introduced. When you enter data in one field, right after you leave the field, the data is already saved. There is no undo feature.

The major advantage is that you can create any card (for instance, customer card), any document (for instance, sales order), or any other kind of data without knowing all the information that is needed.

Imagine you need to create a new customer. You have all their fiscal data except their VAT number. You could create the card, fill in all the information except the VAT Registration No. field, and leave the card without losing the rest of the information. When you have figured out the VAT number of your customer, you can come back and fill it in. The not-losing-the-rest-of-the-information part is important.

Imagine that there actually was a Save button; you spend a few minutes filling in all the information and, at the end, click on Save. At that moment, the system carries out some checks and finds out that one field is missing. It throws you a message saying that the customer card cannot be saved. So you basically have two options: