Functionality Improvements in NAV 2017

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 comes with newer, greater and better functionalities, and has been released by Microsoft on October 24th, 2016. So, let’s take a sneak peek at the new features provided by Microsoft in the latest version of NAV which will help you assess and decide whether you should upgrade from your previous NAV version to NAV 2017 or not.

Let us look into some of the exciting features in NAV 2017.

Before starting off, it is productive to know that the look and feel are almost the same as the NAV 2016 but it is always a great experience to use a new version.

Now let’s jump into the new key features:

1. Integrate your NAV 2017 with Dynamics 365 (CRM)

With the previous versions of NAV, users had to work an extra-hand to maintain the business logic and information both in NAV and CRM, which was time-consuming as well as inefficient. Now, with native integration, users can choose to work within the system they prefer, in real-time, with complete access to customer information and processing reports, without manually transferring data.

Real-time synchronization between CRM and NAV also gives a breakthrough to information sharing between these two platforms. You can keep track of the prices and items in Dynamics CRM, using the mapping and synchronization for currencies, units of measure, items, and resources by creating a Dynamics NAV price list within Dynamics CRM. Users can make better and optimal business decisions and develop stronger customer engagement through CRM tools and stay on the top of order processing and financials with NAV. By using these resources the user’s lead-to-cash process becomes more efficient and effective and a much bigger and useful picture of customer engagement becomes available.

2. e-Everything

The features of Dynamics NAV 2017 in the field of Finance makes it easier for your customers to pay online invoices by including hyperlinks to the payment services, such as PayPal. Users can now even provide PayPal Standards payment links in invoices and support multiple ways of accepting payments, including credit cards and PayPal accounts.

3. Power BI

Building upon an already powerful integration with Power BI, you can now easily create insightful charts and reports, and then embed them within your Dynamics NAV 2017 role center. A dashboard display will keep you and your team informed with the easy-to-share reports including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Inventory/Sales/Order Status.

4. Item Attributes & Categories

If you want to integrate your e-commerce store with an ERP, then NAV 2017 is the right choice for you – NAV 2017 allows you to create items having attributes and categories just like the items that are created in the e-commerce store. You can conveniently set up the particular attributes that you want to use by specifying a name, a type and the unit of measure (the type controls what values you can enter).

Also, various attributes and categories can be readily added to an item.

The item category table has been made multilevel so that a hierarchy can be defined in the list of item categories. This kind of functionality eliminates the need of using the product groups codes that previously were subgroups to the item category codes. It is important to note that the default costing method and posting groups have been removed from the item category table (with the templates to creates items those might be redundant now).

This is a great addition to NAV 2017, but what is even more helpful is that you can define what item attribute will be applied to each of the item categories. So now, whenever a new item is created and the item category is selected, NAV itself populates the list of attributes which that item should have so that the user gets to know what attributes to enter.

5. Cancel the Posted Credit Memos

A cancel function has been added for the posted sales and purchases credit memos. With this feature, you can reverse credit memos that have been created to reverse respective invoices (such as the ones that are created when a posted invoice is canceled). So, this feature is actually added so as to reverse something that has been previously reversed.

6. Redesigned and Simplified Pages

In NAV 2017, lots of pages have been redesigned to make it more user-friendly. In the ‘ItemCard’ and ‘CustomerCard’ section, a new field has been added to insert images.

Given below is an example of an item card. On the displayed page many of the fields are set to be additional (so they only show up when you choose to see more fields) and more tabs have been added to group the fields (the Inventory, Price & Posting tabs are examples below).

7. Create Purchase Invoice from Sales Order

Well, this is definitely new one… A User can now directly create a new Purchase Invoice from the Sales Order page itself in Dynamics NAV 2017.