My last two posts have been a detour from my regular themes, into something that might remind you of human resources. I’ve explained what Microsoft Dynamics consultant does, and how it looks through phases of Sure Step implementation, and I promised to conclude this journey with explaining what I believe to be the 5 most important qualities every great Microsoft Dynamics application consultant must posses. So, here you go.
They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor.
One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting up items. If you remember my rant about mandatory fields, and how I said they were baaad, there might be an even more baaad kind of fields: the default value fields. Because the system simply inserts a value into these fields without asking for your say, and if anything is easy, it’s only so easy to overlook these. Yep, you have a chance to voice your oppinion on these, but having got to hurry for a cup of coffe with Mary from accounting, admit it, you’re gonna leave that default FIFO costing method for an item every once in a while, even though it should really have been Average. Then you’ll start posting. Then your phone rings and starts screaming at you about a moron who screwed up items again.
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.
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.
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.