Posting Preview: Great feature of Russian localized NAV for many years

As most of the ERP, when you post a document or financial journal, you won't be able to modify that (at least, by normal user means; you can of course go to tables and make changes, but it is strongly not recommended and may lead to data inconsistency in the system). All that a normal user can do is to reverse the transaction or post a credit-memo, then generate a new correct posting.

This is one of the main fears of the Russian accountants that you will have to fight with when making an implementation in Russia or planning a roll-out of your solution. The thing is that most of the Russian accountants got a habit of working with the local accounting system 1C (I wrote about it in more details in some previous blogposts). Being accounting system, it allows users to post a document, then easily open it, make changes and post it again. In typical ERP, when you make a posting, this means that some other users got notifications and start doing something based on your posting - this is why you can't just open the document and make some changes the day after you posted it. However in the accounting system users are kind of alone, where the posting itself does not involve other users actions, and such behavior is more safe. That is why 1C allows users to make whatever changes to posted documents (however there is an option to close the period for changes).

Thus, accounting users of 1C have a habit of not valuing the fact of the posting. This means that when they start to use ERP solution, the fact that they can't make any changes to posted documents puts them to a shock.

There are several methods of dealing with that:

- train them to value the posting; think three times before posting a document

- teach them how to reverse transactions and tell it is not bad, but vise versa: there is always an audit trail who had done what and when

- show them Posting Preview feature!

Yes, it is a very good option for accountants to use the Posting Preview of the documents and journals. It as been a feature of Russian localization for many years starting from the very old versions. Now it is available for other countries, too, for NAV 2016 version. Basically, it generates all the posted books (G/L Entries, VAT entries, Customer/Vendor Entries, etc.) and you can see what exactly will be the result of the posting, you would be able to see the actual transactions, but they will not be posted in the system yet. So, if the result is not good (e.g., you had made a mistake in VAT posting group or whatever other mistake), you can close the preview, make changes in the document and then preview the posting again. If it matches your expectations, you can make the actual posting.

To allow user to have this feature for the posting of journal batches, you can make a corresponding setup for the particular user in the User Setup page:

On the Navigate tab, choose "Journal Posting Preview" option to select the needed journals and journal batches that would be available for that user in Posting Preview mode:

Select Journal Template, Journal Batch, and activate the checkmark for Enable Posting Preview option.

Having that, the user will always be prompted the following question when doing the posting from that journal batch:

If user selects "Post", the journal will be posted in a standard fashion. However if user would select "Preview", the system will show the user the results of the future postings:

User could immediately see the future G/L Entries, as well as he can check the other ledgers, e.g. the VAT Entries or Value Entries by selecting corresponding ledgers in the Home menu. So, it is a sort of Navigator for the pre-posting of transactions. Other documents (e.g., Purchase and Sales Orders) are also available.

Having this feature, users will do considerably less mistakes when posting the documents. This could be a good psychological tool to transfer the accountant's thinking from his habits of using 1C accounting postings to ERP postings.