What's new in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015?

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is quick to implement, easy-to-use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that helps more than 100,000 companies worldwide manage their accounting and finances, supply chain, and operations.

Here we explore the new features in Microsoft’s 2015 release.

What’s new in Dynamics NAV 2015?

RapidStart Implementation and Upgrade

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 offers enhanced upgrade tools which help partners like Sysco significantly lower the cost and time required to upgrade customer implementations to the current version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. RapidStart implementation services helps Sysco create, set-up, and initialise new installations of Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Tablets

Microsoft Dynamics NAV for tablets and touch-optimized user experience enables you to access your company data and processes regardless of location or what device you choose to use. With this release, new Microsoft Dynamics NAV tablet applications are available now from the Windows, Apple and Google app stores.

User Experience Enhancements

Faster access to information that matters with personalised home pages that let users view their most important business data and key performance indicators in a glance. Sophisticated colour coding and live data help users prioritise actions and stay productive – in BI dashboards and focused actions in the Role Center. Increased productivity by only showing what is relevant to the user, depending on the user permission sets.

Office 365 Integration

Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides interoperability with Office 365, which enables customers to drill down, analyse, share and collaborate with peers. And with new usability enhancements that make their solution easier and more familiar to use, customers will enjoy working seamlessly and effortlessly across all applications.

In Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Microsoft continue to optimise deployment in the cloud on Microsoft Azure and with Office365 to lower costs, increase flexibility, and boost employee productivity – new enhancements include:

• Simplified email messaging via SMTP including Office 365
• Sign in to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Windows client using your Office 365 account

Document Reporting

Radically simplified invoice design and production through new interoperability with Microsoft Word. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 Microsoft Word is used as layout editing option for document reports. A single report can now have many layouts. Power users can now create customized, branded invoice templates on their own in Microsoft Word without having to engage a technical consultant. 

Cash Management

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 also helps customers collect cash faster and spend less time managing it with new capabilities for electronic payments and automated account reconciliation. These enhancements include a new Bank Data Conversion Service delivered on Microsoft Azure by AMC Consult A/S that enables automated processes for electronic payments, payment reconciliation and bank account reconciliation right within Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

• Bank integration
  – simple and uniform across borders
  With the new Bank Data Conversion Service feature users get electronic bank statement files converted into data that can be imported into Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Reversely, users can also use the conversion service to export payment information to electronic payment files in the format that their bank requires. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 supports electronic bank files of major banks in over 25 countries.
• Incoming and outgoing bank payments
  – fast and reliable automatic registrations
  A new feature called Payment Reconciliation Journals enables users to import bank transaction data into a dedicated UI and automatically apply to open entries representing customer and vendor documents. The features includes advanced record matching, strong review tools and the possibility to freely define the payment match tolerance and to modify the generic matching algorithm.
• Create and Manage Electronic Payments
  – more information and better control
  Improvements in the Payment Journal and the Credit Transfer Registers enable users to better manage the payment creation and export process and to track the payment history. Users that do not want to post payments until they have actually been processed at the bank can more efficiently control which open vendor documents to pay and avoid paying vendors wrongly or paying duplicate amounts. Also, the information about previous payment exports makes partial-payment scenarios easy to manage. Finally a new function allows users to create payments where posting date (execution date in the bank) is automatically calculated with point of departure in due date for the underlying documents.

Power BI

Microsoft Power BI for Office 365 is a collection of features and services that enable you to visualize data, share discoveries, and collaborate in intuitive new ways. Self-Service BI features in Excel – such as Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View and Power Map – extend the data specific features and capabilities of Excel 2013. Through the use of ODATA web services, these Power BI features can integrate with data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015. Visualizing and sharing your Microsoft Dynamics NAV data using Power BI will give you a better overview of your business and will result in better decision taking.

Social Listening

Your customers and stakeholders are talking about you somewhere on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. How do you learn about it? Well, you can get powerful social insights by connecting Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to Microsoft Social Listening. Microsoft Social Listening collects data from social media websites and presents it to you in easy-to-consume charts and graphs that you can use to spot emerging trends in people’s comments, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.

You can drill down into the data and see who is mentioning you, where they posted the comment, and exactly what they said. Armed with these insights, you can pinpoint what you’re doing right, and address potential issues before bigger problems arise.

With one of the first cumulative updates, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 will include a control Add-in, which will enable you to embed cloud hosted services, like Microsoft Social Listening, into Microsoft Dynamics NAV pages.