There are very few Microsoft Dynamics partners in the world that have Dynamics NAV consolidations expertise. Microsoft Dynamics NAV has financial consolidation functionality, but most companies using Dynamics NAV (Navision) as their primary ERP rarely use the financial consolidations module. There are many reasons for this including:
- The customer does not have subsidiaries.
- The customer does not have enough subsidiaries to induce them to setup and configure the financial consolidations module.
- The customer has limited financial reporting requirements or very little requirement to produce a consolidated set of financial statements.
Unfortunately, many companies that use Dynamics NAV do not fall in this category and they do have financial reporting requirements and would benefit greatly from using the financial consolidations functionality in Dynamics NAV. The #1 reason in all cases as to why they are not using the financial consolidations module in Dynamics NAV is:
They are unable to get the proper consulting, training, and support services to successfully configure, implement, and use the consolidations functionality from their Dynamics NAV Partner.
This is not a poor reflection on the NAV Partner. Financial Consolidations are more complex than typically assumed by most NAV financial consultants. Without accountants with significant experience with financial consolidations and all of the reporting requirements that go with consolidating multiple companies, a consultant and their client with unlikely be able to successfully configure and implement the financial consolidations module in a manner that will be useful, reliable, and audit-able.
These companies are typically exporting trial balances manually into Microsoft Excel and then performing consolidations manually in Excel. Using Excel for financial consolidations introduces serious control concerns:
- Excel does not enforce double-entry.
- Excel does not keep a journal entry audit trail.
- Excel does not keep user identification on postings.
- Excel does not support automated workflow approvals to support JE review controls.
- Excel does not have the security of Dynamics NAV and Microsoft SQL in terms of backup and other “loss of data” concerns.
More importantly Excel does not allow you to create automated reports of your consolidated data utilizing your dimension structures. In addition to producing reports with subsidiary and eliminations detail, with Microsoft NAV you can produce consolidated reports by geographic or business segment, customer group, department, cost center (cost centre), or any other data element that can be captured using Microsoft Dynamics NAV dimension functionality.
At EmergeNext, we have significant expertise with financial consolidations and utilizing Microsoft Dynamics NAV to accomplish this requirement. We can work with your Microsoft Partner to insure a stable implementation of the functionality. We have also developed a standard set of enhancements for Dynamics NAV related to consolidations and you can read about that here:
http://emergenext.com/microsoft-dynamics-nav-consolidation/
We have another related blog post on the topic here concerning exchange rates:
http://emergenext.com/microsoft-dynamics-nav-consolidations-fx-rates/
EmergeNext
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