NAV is one of the best all round Financial Reporting and GL systems I have worked with.

The power of NAV is in the dimensions. Companies with an changing environments should give NAV a hard look. Stop loosing all those staff hours creating 15+ number account numbers with your segment needs built in. NAV can handle these changes in minutes rather than hours or days. Excel integration is snap. Product can be easily modified (by your VAR) to give you that custom tweaks you need.

I use to install Navision (prior to the Microsoft purchase) of the product. I have done this in multiple environments (service, professional, distribution).

Navision is a unique system in that is presents its information in pure accounting form. Thus Sales would be show as a credit, Sales Returns as a debit; an overdrawn cash account as a credit, accumulated depreciation as a credit.

Almost all the screens are similar, thus learning the A/R module, you've learned about 95% of the A/P Module as well as G/L.

Drawbacks (in the versions I've used) - Inventory is funky, Bank Reconciliation non-existent, payroll a bear to install and maintain.

Advantages (in the versions I've used) - ability to drill down for data, abilty to link to Excel spreadsheets. its filters and built-in standard screens

I have implemented earlier versions of NAV (about 5 years ago) and while I know there are lots of positive changes in the new version, I would say that while the implementation and use of NAV is easier than SAP, there are a couple of downsides that should be looked at and that are as follows-

• I did not find a friendly user interface. To get to the point, one had to go through a couple of screens and despite having a menu for navigation, there were multiple pages one had to go through to connect and commit a transaction.
• I found that the inventory management is great for manufacturing. I was able to see some of the best practises available like getting an inventory consumption report with costing and variance analysis that analysed the variance between standard and actual in detail.. In other words, price, rate variances reports for each line items were available.

Overall a great system. I am now implementing the Axapta version of MS Dynamics in my retail company at present.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a great product to use for small and midsize business management. I have used the product for over two years with companies that were Microsoft Partners. It is very good to use to provide visibility and control over what is going on in the business so you know what if is working well or what work is need to make improvements for the company

We are in a service business and we installed MS NAV when it was Navision (circa 2000). It works fairly well for us, although we too paid for a lot of customization post implementation to accomodate our cost accounting requirements. Any data we need is easily extracted into Excel for further manipulation. We use Excel a lot because the user generated report writing capabilities in NAV requires some training - which is a skill set no one on my current staff has. My only beef with NAV is the cost of the annual maintenance and the fact that you must pay to add new capabilities after the initial installation. NAV has a fair amount of after market support, although it is best suited for a company that needs more than just Quickbooks, but mid-to-large companies wouild likely find it inadequate on the reporting end.

What I liked most
Data we need is easily extracted into Excel for further manipulation.

What I liked least:
Annual maintenance and the fact that you must pay to add new capabilities after the initial installation.

We purchased nav for 28 users looked like a great product but our company was purchased prior to implementation ... Originally from Europe with 90000 users world wide key is to get a good var for implementation