Elementary costing 2: Know your costs

  • Reading time:9 mins read

When you buy a sheep, how much is it worth to you, what is its value? For starters, its value is at least what you paid for it, but that’s not quite it. Say you paid a hundred dollars for it. If you want to sell it now, how do you determine your selling price? A hundred-twenty? A hundred-fifty? Obviously, you need to increase the price by some percentage over whatever you paid initially, but regardless of what you increase your price, if you don’t know your true costs, you might be at loss.

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Elementary costing 1: Sheep and bricks

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Unless you are a non-profit, the point of the business is making money. It is surprising how many different ways of making money there are out there, but if you are in business, it is extremely likely that you make the money the easiest and the most common way around: by selling goods.

There are many ways goods come to be, but from perspective of a single business goods can be either purchased, or manufactured. But even companies manufacturing the goods they sell have to somehow get hold of the raw materials used to produce their goods. The most common way to get the raw materials for your manufactured goods is to purchase them. So in the end of the day it comes down to the simple fact that the most common way of making money is by purchasing and selling goods.

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Much ado about nothing

  • Reading time:1 min read

There is really nothing special with this post. I just wanted to let you know that I updated my About page, and I added some more information to the sidebar to the right. Nothing spectacular, but I hope all of this would both help you know me better, and also help you get in touch with me otherwise than posting comments here.

While I must admit I seem somewhat lazy lately, with no relevant posts whatsoever, there is some real stuff coming soon. For now, I’m finished with face-lifting, and nothing serious is going to happen to this blog from presentation perspective, at least not until I move it to its own domain, which is something I plan to do soon. See you later!

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Look and feel update

  • Reading time:1 min read

I decided to upgrade the look and feel of this blog, so I start with the new header picture. I am not a designer, and I don’t have a clue about why graphics are good or bad, I just have a gut feeling which tells me what is nice, and what is not. This one looks nicer to me, and leaves some room at the bottom to implement page navigation later on. If you think the old one was better, please let me know, I value your opinion as much as my own 🙂

This is just a first step in facelifting this blog with new look and feel, new navigation, new information, etc. As most of other things here, neither will this come all at once, but please be patient, and stop by frequently.

And last but not least, thank you all for making this blog alive, for reading it, commenting on it, giving suggestions and opinions. I’ve never thought this blog would live long enough to see this kind of traffic and interest, so this blog is what it is as much because of you, as it is because of me!

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Why are “mandatory” fields baaad?

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Last time, I gave you a recipe on how to do a bad thing. If you really need to do something bad, I figure it’s better to do it the way that would hurt the least, or the way that isn’t so bad after all. I wouldn’t have dreamt of a comment on that blog post, but Ian came, and gave the perfect example which really explains why things like that *ARE* bad. Funny thing is, how many customers really go for such a requirement, and even funnier, how many consultancies give in. I gave in once, most of you probably did. But, why are mandatory fields so bad after all?

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Master data completeness validation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Microsoft Dynamics NAV has a very consistent user interface, that helps user get used to it pretty fast. Yet it has its own ways, that aren’t so intuitive to most of typical business application users. There is one specific feature which causes a lot of confusion, especially with those users only starting to use NAV. It’s the data persistence: as soon as you enter something in a form, it is automatically saved, you don’t need to press any Save button. Nor is there any Cancel button to forget the changes entered.

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Accounting vs. ERP: The saga continues

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Running a business using only accounting data can be pretty much the same as driving a car using rear-view mirror only. The purpose of accounting is to provide accurate and reliable overview of financial situation to interested parties. What this financial overview consists of is the stuff that has happened in the past, in other words: history. However, there are many drivers of business success other than just history of events that contributed to wherever you are at the moment.

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Accounting vs. ERP: Sticks and carrots

  • Reading time:8 mins read

When referring to their ERP systems, it is pretty common that customers refer to it as accounting software. While it is true that every ERP system embeds some accounting functionality, there is a major difference between these two categories of software. It starts with two things: what computers are good at, and the goal of accounting as a discipline.

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Automated version management? Of course!

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Imagine that whenever you edit an object in C/SIDE Object Designer, and save it, the system automatically saves it in the version history. Imagine that it never simply overwrites your previous version, but keeps all of them there for you. Imagine that you can see all of the modified versions of any object, then make any version the current version by doing as much as a single mouse-click, no tedious imports and exports needed. Imagine that this is true for all of the developers on your team. Imagine that it is completely, fully automated.

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Native vs. SQL: The Delta

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Early versions of SQL Server option for Microsoft Dynamics NAV (then called Navision) didn’t scale up as high as one would expect. Although SQL Server itself could scale up to thousands and tens of thousands of concurrent users, running a production environment of an ERP system is way different from running generic lab tests.

SQL Server 2000 brought many improvements, and finally outperformed Navision Database Server at any level of user concurrency. SQL was gaining momentum, and became the platform of choice for new implementations of Navision. When SQL Server 2005 came out, and when support for it was included in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0, it could outperform the native database platform as much as 35%.

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