It’s hardly any news for the lucky 21 countries which have had them by default for about two years, but for other 18 which haven’t, there is an alarmingly low awareness about three interesting NAV functionalities: Liquidity, Cost Accounting and Kitting.

These three have been named Local Functionality, which means they are a part of a localized version in some of the countries. For other countries, this functionality is not available by default, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be licensed or implemented for customers in other countries as well.

Here is a short description into each of these three (italics are taken from the documentation):

  • Liquidity: With the liquidity forecast from Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you can
    generate predictions of a company’s liquidity. The liquidity of a company indicates its financial solvency and reveals whether the company is in a position to meet its financial obligations in a timely manner.
  • Cost Accounting: With the cost accounting module, financial management from Microsoft Dynamics NAV is supplemented with operational accounting. It allows tracking cost by cost types, cost centers and cost objects, posting and transferring of cost entries, allocations (static and dynamic), all of this coupled with reporting and budgeting capabilities.
  • Kitting: Kitting is the assembly, grouping or packaging of several inventory items into a consolidated product. While in kit, items are not tracked individually but as an indivisible whole. Kits can be assembled and disassembled, meaning that items packed can be de-packed at any time (while retaining correct costing). Kits can be tracked with all sales order processing functions, including advanced functions such as order promising. More about kitting can be found here and here.

Useful features all three, no doubt to it. To learn more about them and how to put them to work, check this page which contains training manuals for all three.

Now, if you don’t live in any of the 21 countries which don’t have these functionalities, you can still license them and implement them on your projects for your customers, by following the procedure explained at Guidelines for Licensing Cross-version Functionality for Microsoft Dynamics NAV on PartnerSource.

Obviously, you’ll have to do the localization legwork yourself (Microsoft won’t help you with this), but this shouldn’t be too difficult. Anyhow, it should be less difficult (and less risky) than developing any of these from scratch.

To help you decide which country version you should start with, and take the base objects from, here is the matrix which shows which functionality is available in which country’s localization:

Country Liquidity Cost Accounting Kitting
Australia ü ü ü
Austria ü    
Canada     ü
France     ü
Germany ü    
India   ü  
Indonesia ü   ü
Malaysia ü ü ü
Mexico     ü
New Zealand ü ü ü
Norway   ü  
Philippines ü ü ü
Portugal ü ü  
Russia ü    
Singapore ü ü ü
Spain ü ü  
Switzerland ü ü  
Thailand ü ü ü
Turkey   ü  
United Kingdom ü  
USA     ü

 

It still beats me why these three haven’t found their way into the standard NAV W1 release. The matrix above tells me there is no rule about which Group (or Tier) these countries come from, so I suppose it was just about lobbying capabilities of each specific country :-)

Since I come from a country not listed above, I don’t have any direct experience with any of these three functionalities. How about you? What’s your experience? Take a minute and use the comment form below to share it.

Read this post at its original location at http://NavigateIntoSuccess.com/blog/liquidity-cost-accounting-and-kitting, or visit the original blog at http://NavigateIntoSuccess.com.