Preface

Let me start out by saying congratulations on your decision to work with Dynamics NAV. When I started working with Dynamics NAV (formerly known as Navision) back in 1999, Dynamics NAV was nothing more than an accounting system out of Denmark. After a couple of releases, acquisition by Microsoft, and a couple more releases, Dynamics NAV has become a full ERP (enterprise resource planning) software with rich functionalities. With every release, we see improvements in the technical aspect as well as the functionality aspect. And they're not done yet.

At the time of writing, Dynamics NAV's installation base is 110,000 companies. No other ERP software for the small and medium-sized market comes close to that number.

In addition, Dynamics NAV has a wide range of add-on solutions available. Most of these add-ons are built directly within the Dynamics NAV environment with the same user interface. So, using these add-ons, your company will not need to learn any other new software.

One of the main selling points of Dynamic NAV from the very beginning is the ability to customize it exactly the way you run your business. Because of its flexibility, you can find a lot of tutorials and explanations on how to develop specific tasks, but not a lot of tutorials on how to create a project from scratch.

To take advantage of the flexibility that's built into Dynamics NAV, a deep understanding of the standard application is required. Just because you're able to completely rewrite Dynamics NAV does not mean you should. Without knowing what you have out of the box, you may end up creating a function that's already part of the standard system, wasting your valuable time and resources.