Technology Management's Software Answers Blog

VAT Changes in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

The changes to VAT announced yesterday have left us with the challenge to get your systems updated to reflect the new VAT rate of 15% from Monday while still allowing the processing of historic transactions at 17.5%. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just creating a new VAT posting group, we need to run some routines to update g/l accounts / items / resources / item charges and open sales lines and purchase lines. We already have the required tools due to a recent  VAT rate change in Germany and we have already begun to test them on the UK versions of NAV. We will however need your assistance to test the process on your specific systems and in addition there will be some work for you to think about (for instance ALL part complete warehouse shipments and receipt documents linked to purchase lines or sales line have to be deleted prior to running the process!).

 

We are going to be doing some initial testing over the next day but need you to assist by getting an up to date copy of your system into  a test environment ready. Joy Hambridge will be managing the process this week, so if you have any specific queries please contact her (she won’t be on support during this process, so please respect this, as it’s an important issue for us all to get over).

 

I need you to think about when you will be able to switch over, as ideally we don’t want to be working all weekend, so if we can make a start on Friday it would be very much appreciated.

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The Changing Face of Software

I turned on my Xbox 360 last night and got the new Xbox Live experience, this is a completely new interface to interact with your Xbox and also your online friends and media. It's really user friendly and a very rich graphical experience. Although we may expect this with our entertainment devices, consoles, MP3 players and phones we are starting to see similar features appear in our business applications, and operating systems.

The next version of Windows, "Windows 7" is including loads of neat touches, if you wiggle your mouse all your open windows minimize in a rather nice way to clear your desktop. It includes the Windows Surface technology so we can interact with the machine in a more familiar way with our hands, rather than just a mouse and keyboard. Expanding pictures by dragging the edges of the windows or moving files around with our fingers, it all sounds a little farfetched, until you try it and it works great! Take a look at the surface site, http://www.microsoft.com/SURFACE/index.html having played with a unit in 2007 I was surprised how good and useful they were.

But we are also seeing major changes to ERP systems, Dynamics NAV 2009 has just launched and when you see some of the screens you wouldn't think it was a traditional business application. We see the quantity of items graphically allowing the user to get an immediate view of what's happening in parts of the business rather than trawling through pages of figures. (See below)

So it's clear we are changing the way we interact with software, from the command prompt days of DOS, through the early versions of windows where point and click was introduced through to graphical rich interfaces, it helps us be more productive, it allows us to see the impact our decisions will have on our business immediately and if we ignore it or dismiss it as just "bells and whistles" it make us as organisations and individuals slower to react...which can't be a good thing.

Liam

(my new xbox live avatar!)

Liam.walton@tecman.co.uk

Effective sales and marketing using Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Businesses are fundamentally tasked with meeting two objectives:

1. Finding and keeping profitable customers

2. Empowering employees to focus on and achieve the objective of finding and satisfying customers

With this in mind Technology Management is running a seminar on Wednesday 17 December in Wolverhampton that looks at how a software tool, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, can help small and medium-sized businesses reach these two fundamental objectives.

What makes Microsoft CRM attractive to SMEs is the ease with which it can be configured to unique requirements, its ability to be hosted on your server or ours and how it works like and with the Microsoft Office tools you're familiar with (Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word).

Registration is free and the morning's agenda can be found here.

And as it will be really close to Christmas I'm sure there'll be mince pies afterwards, too.