When Dynamics NAV ERP system is introduced to financial department of Russian company, it is often neglected by the users who got used to a different (local) accounting software. In order to mitigate this risk and increase end-user satisfaction, you should try to meet their expectations, especially if there is very little cost to implement some features that accounting users expect from a “normal” accounting system in Russia. Below you can find the list of the features, usually expected by financial users, and provided out-of-the-box as part of standard Microsoft localization of Dynamics NAV 2017 for Russia.
Automatic update of currency exchange rates (Central Bank) on a daily basis
Russian Central Bank provides web-service for update of currency exchange rates to Russian ruble for those currencies that you will use in your ERP system. Standard Russian localization supports built-in integration with this web0-service, you need just to setup a link to Central Bank and establish automatic update on a daily basis, e.g. schedule NAV service to run this feature every night: normally in Russia the currency exchange rates are known before 16:00 for tomorrow.
There are heavy reasons to make the currency exchange rates upload scheduled on a daily basis. It is inevitable that there will be a currency rate at every day, as by law it is required that currency transactions and transactions in conditional units (https://community.dynamics.com/nav/b/russianerpexperience/archive/2016/04/16/conditional-units-russian-alternative-to-currency) are posted also in Russian rubles at the rate of the posting date. Numerous currency exchange rate differences are calculated automatically based on those daily rates, including realized and unrealized currency exchange rate gains and losses, as well as currency prepayments (https://community.dynamics.com/nav/b/russianerpexperience/archive/2016/06/30/russian-specifics-of-processing-currency-invoices-exchange-rate-differences-and-advance-paymentsand) related postings.
You can still have an option of manual input of currency exchange rates into your system, but it would be quite unexpected process by Russian accounting team, and there would be a huge risk of mistakes that would result in incorrect postings and even incorrect sales documents to customers, which is a serious issue.
There has been a good post about setup of currency exchange rates upload for Russian localization of NAV: https://community.dynamics.com/nav/b/katsonsnavblog/archive/2017/03/25/how-to-setup-import-of-currency-rates-in-nav2017ru-Russia
Automatic integration with electronic payments banking system
There are over 600 active banks in Russia at the moment. Practically all of them are using the same data format (.XML) for exchange with accounting systems, which is a sort of industry standard for Russian market.
There are three major options of organizing the accounting flow of banking operations:
- Create payment orders in electronic payments banking system, process payments there and then manually input the payment data into NAV financial journals for posting. This method is strongly not supported by Russian accountants, as they very much got used to automated integration. If you would offer them this method, this most likely very much reduce the level of user satisfaction.
- Create payment orders in electronic payments banking system, process payments and then export a daily bank statement from there as .XML file, which you would later on upload to NAV system as a bank statement for future reconciliation, transfer to financial journal and posting.
- The third option, the most preferred one, is to create vendor payment orders in NAV system, and then export them to electronic payment banking software as .XML file. When next day the bank statement is updated, you will export the confirmed bank statement and import it to NAV system back (as there are customer payments received and sometimes payments to vendors are not going through due to some errors in details or lack of money in the account
