In this blog post I’ve outlined some of the key new features of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 that I discovered while attending the Directions EMEA conference in Germany.
Phone Experience
New Phone optimised apps for iPhone, Android and Windows phones – you can perform keys tasks on the Phone App such as update customer cards, view KPI charts and drill down. You can also run any financial report, creating a PDF. You can also take advantage of the phone’s GPS to get directions to a customer. You can also use the phone/table camera to create an incoming document process.
Fig1: Phone App Home Page
Fig2: Phone App Using GPS to Customer Address
Workflows
A set of workflow templates will be provided with NAV 2016 “out of the box”. For example approvals for purchases using a pool of approvers where 2 or more people need to approve an invoice before it can be posted.
You can also extend workflows for automation and smarts such as automatically creating a payment journal after posting a purchase invoice. Or once an invoice is approved by a manager it can automatically be posted.
Fig 3: Workflow templates
Fig 4: Customer credit limit approval workflow
New Web Client
In 2016, the Web client is much more feature rich and can completely replace the need for a windows client. With over 60 new features, some key improvements are:
* On demand scrolling
* Column selecting
* Freeze pane capability
* Hide/Show fast tabs
* Ability to Change company / timezone / Language
Also, most of these enhancements have been carried across to the Tablet App.
Fig 5: Web Client role centre
Fig 6: NAV 2016 Tablet App Homepage
Fig 7: Web client customer card
New Finance Feature
* Posting Preview
You can now view what ledger entries will be created before posting – a great way to check if the correct accounts and values will be posted to avoid reversals and credit notes.
Fig 8: Posting Preview
* Vendor Pre-payment Report
When you have a vendor payment journal with one payment line that covers multiple entries you can run a report to show all the applied entries (similar to a test report) but you can see all related entries and any warnings or errors will appear (before posting).
Fig 9: Vendor Pre-Payment report
* Deferrals
Allows the deferring of revenue/expenses over a pre-defined schedule. When for example a sales invoice covers a 3 month period, you can setup a deferral schedule to split the posting across 3 months between unearned income and sales revenue. You can customise the calculation method, for example Straight Line, Number of days, or User defined. You can set this up for Items, G/L Accounts and Resources.
Fig 10: Deferrals Template
Native CRM integration
With simple setup, you can link CRM Online to Dynamics NAV 2016. For example, you can now view CRM opportunities and cases direct from the NAV customer card fast tabs. You can also drill down from NAV and launch CRM online to find out more details about the customer. Similarly in CRM you can view the customer balances and have NAV activities appear in the CRM feed, for example when Invoices have been posted.
Fig 11: CRM Integration setup in NAV
Fig 12: CRM and NAV Customer Cards
E-Everything
* Currency Exchange Rate service: You can auto update the exchange rates using services such as Yahoo. Job queues can be setup to sync on any frequency.
Fig 13 Exchange rate service
* OCR Recognition: You can take advantage of the tablet/phone camera to take a photo of an Invoice and upload this as an Incoming document in NAV. Which can then make use of an OCR service to detect the correct vendor and invoice value.
Fig 14: Incoming Documents
Power BI
Power BI will be compatible with NAV 2013 R2 and 2015 also. A NAV Content pack is available on powerBI.com that contains an out of the box KPI power BI dashboard that can be customised.
Fig 15: Power BI NAV Content Pack
