Microsoft Dynamics NAV Compliance

Enhance accounting processes and controls to aid compliance
Growing companies face increasing financial accounting challenges each year. Depending on industry, markets, geographic location, and financing needs, an organization may be subject to local generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and one or more of:
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), a U.S. law passed in 2002 to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures.
• The International Financial Reporting Standards section of the European Union’s International Accounting Standards (IAS/IFRS), which went into effect in 2005 and sets forth international accounting standards for recognition, measurement, consolidation, and reporting.
• The New Basel Accord (Basel II), enacted in 2006 to address issues of financial institution risk and to promote greater stability in the overall financial system.

Enhance good practices with technology
Compliance depends not only on accurate information and appropriate accounting processes, but also on the people who set up and administer those processes. An effective business management solution can facilitate compliance by helping to manage valid and accessible information through transparent processes that have been set up in compliance with industry and regulatory standards.

Realize the benefits of an integrated business management solution
Microsoft Dynamics NAV delivers real-time, integrated operational and financial information from across your organization, so you can:
• Track financial data through custom account schedules for cash flow, revenues, balance sheets, fixed assets, capital structure, key performance indicators, and more.

• Help safeguard accuracy with role-based security and configurable application controls that prevent invalid or duplicate data entry.

• Quickly and easily generate financial reports in accordance with applicable regulatory standards.

• Maintain comprehensive audit trails with drill-down and drill-around functionality and change logs.
Manage compliance to the standards that matter
Deliver integrated information, aligned processes, and easy-to-use tools to help your people meet the financial management expectations and standards that matter to your specific business.

Tailor account schedules to your needs
• Define the structure of your company’s chart of accounts based on business requirements and applicable regulatory standards.

• Create accounts and handle complex processes related to a spectrum of business activities, including inventory valuation, foreign currencies, segment reporting, and departures from local GAAPs.

• Control the level of detail for each recorded transaction and select detailed registration for specific types of transactions, such as fixed assets and accounts payable.

• Tailor schedule calculations and display for financial reporting, or export the information to Microsoft® Office Excel® for further analysis.

Improve information validity
• Configure data fields to accept only information in the correct format, such as the correct number of decimal places or alphanumeric patterns.

• Help ensure information is complete with application controls such as requiring a vendor invoice number to be entered before a purchase order can be posted.

• Reduce the risk of inaccurate information or tampering and help protect sensitive information with access to information based on job role.

• Prohibit access, provide read-only access, or enable full-access users to add, edit, or delete information.

• Easily identify and resolve discrepancies with a reconciliation feature that retrieves current bank account and transaction information and compares it to general ledger posts.

• Schedule manual or automatic backups to help protect information from electronic failures.

Sarbanes-Oxley: Validating Data and Processes The Sarbanes-Oxley Act establishes standards for all U.S. public company boards, management, and public accounting firms, including evaluation and disclosure of the adequacy of the company’s internal controls over financial reporting. Documenting and testing critical manual and automated controls represents a huge commitment of time and resources for companies. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is especially suited for subsidiaries of larger organizations, and can help support small to mid- sized businesses in complying with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Comply quickly with discovery requests and reporting demands
• Save time when you create standard reports that use common business parameters and criteria to satisfy typical reporting needs, ranging from order summaries to aging accounts receivable.

• Perform complex reviews with basic or advanced business analytics functionality.

• Create reports and displays using an interface similar to that of the familiar Microsoft Office Outlook®.

• Speed transmission of financial information to customers, shareholders, regulatory agencies, and the public with XML-based XBRL documents that support the exchange of financial information across different software and technologies, including the Internet.

Help ensure clear audit trails
• Trace documents and information both forward and backward through the system, from the original source to final financial statements and back.

• Identify how, when, and by whom information was entered or edited, and to what account financial entries have been posted.

• Look up database changes, including previous and revised data, in the solution’s Change Log.

• Increase audit trail transparency and usability, and speed information access for third-party auditors with drill-down, look-up, filtering, register, and navigation

IAS/IFRS: Recognition and Measurement Standards
Depending on the local GAAPs currently in use, one of the major recognition and measurement changes for IAS/IFRS is extended use of fair-value principles instead of historical cost. Microsoft Dynamics NAV can help companies calculate fair-value and net present value (NPV) concepts, which are focused on current and expected cash flow streams rather than historical purchase price. On the reporting side, it can provide segment reporting by business unit and geographical location.

Basel II: Implications for Reporting and Analysis Basel II, developed by the Bank for International Settlements, helps ensure safety and security in the financial system in three key areas: minimum capital requirements, supervisory review process, and market discipline. Although the accord applies to financial institutions and does not target small and mid-sized businesses, Basel II may have some implications for these organizations in reporting and analysis.

“The ability to customize reports has been tremendous. That’s what most impresses us about Microsoft Dynamics NAV: the ability to customize reports in compliance with federal reporting requirements.” —James Pratt, Controller, Muscogee Creek Nation

Microsoft Business Intellgence - About BI

Microsoft leads the industry in business intelligence solutions.


Microsoft business intelligence solutions are scalable and designed to evolve with your business. With continuous innovation since initial release, Microsoft business intelligence solutions are built on open, industry-wide standards – making integration with your other systems easier and less costly than the alternatives.

BI Benefits

Improve organizational effectiveness
Microsoft business intelligence enables you to create and manage information through an integrated system that includes core business productivity features, such as collaboration tools, search capabilities, and content management. The workplace becomes highly efficient, resulting in cost savings and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

BI In Action

Accurate, integrated data empowers success at Northumbria University
Stakeholders at Northumbria University use Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions to gain access to near real-time, streaming reports to support effective decision-making.

"Within one year the team was able to launch the full decision support system, a user friendly web-based portal, called Northumbria World. It includes dashboards, scorecards, KPIs and advanced drill-down capabilities. We almost surprised ourselves with the rather quick and smooth implementation process -- it really exceeded expectations every step of the way." Eugene McCrossan, Financial Planning Director for Northumbria

Enable IT efficiency while reducing costs

With Microsoft business intelligence, you can cut costs and reduce complexity by leveraging existing IT investments to extend the reach of technology you already own.

Because Microsoft Excel, SQL Server and SharePoint are integrated and inter-operable, you can rely on your existing IT resources and skill sets for faster implementation and lower total cost of ownership.

Conceptus Achieves Effective, Integrated Solution at Half the Cost
Conceptus deployed Microsoft business intelligence solutions to achieve increased visibility into key data and trends at half the cost of a competitor.

"By choosing Microsoft, we gained an effective BI solution at half the cost of an alternative. We were able to use our existing CRM and ERP systems and our existing data warehouse for building the OLAP cubes." Jeff Letasse, Vice President of Information Technology and Business Systems

http://www.pargesoft.com/ Microsoft Business Intelligence Partner

Industrial Distribution - Increasing profitability and competitiveness

Industrial Distribution
Increasing profi tability and competitiveness Global competition, shorter product lifecycles, lean economic conditions, increasing customer demands—these and other challenges put enormous pressures on industrial distributors.  The escalating requirements of large customers present a particular challenge. Demands for lower prices, improved packaging, specific labeling, and tight delivery requirements create tough conditions—especially for any distributor still tied to conventional supply chain systems and processes. These
large customers want value-added supply chain services such as collaborative planning and vendor managed inventories. In some cases, the demand for Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) can force industrial distributors to implement new business processes on top of old systems that do not provide adequate support.

The challenges increase substantially with outdated IT systems. Simply put, older, infl exible systems create internal ineffi ciencies that are hard to overcome. It can be diffi cult for you to forecast accurately enough to manage your inventory effectively. Left unresolved, these issues lead to discounts, lost orders, higher inventory costs, and unhappy customers.

But with the right technology, being competitive gets easier. If  you have the right business solutions in place, you can adapt to evolving market and customer demands by improving supply chain operations, effectively managing branch locations and sales staff while keeping costs low, and creating service-related income.

Managing the supply chain Installing a fl exible, robust IT environment is the best way  for you to create an effi cient, smoothly functioning supply chain that manages integrated contracts and delivers comprehensive service-level commitments. That, in turn, can help you increase your profits.

If your company focuses on improving the systems that control supply chain operations, then you’re on the path to obtaining competitive advantages that result from reducing the cost of distribution with systems that support new business requirements and processes.

For example, you can take advantage of capabilities that  facilitate easy and effi cient real-time access to inventory, customer order status, sales, purchasing, and fi nancial information across multiple locations. You can streamline the flow of information across your organization so that every department in the company works with the same data for real-time decision making.

And you can increase on-time delivery with powerful customer / supplier integration, planning tools, and company-wide inventory visibility.

By using effective supply chain management solutions,  industrial distributors can use business automation as a substantial competitive advantage. When coupled with inventory control technology, on-time customer shipments improve, lead times decrease, and there is an increase in inventory turns and accuracy of order-fill rates. These capabilities can help reduce costs drastically and gain a strong position as a low-cost, preferred supplier while
creating additional value to your customers.

Improving branch operations
If you run or are part of a large distribution company, then the
effectiveness of branch operations and your sales staff are top
priorities. With the right business solutions in place, you can make sure that operations beyond company headquarters are running smoothly and contributing to profi tability.

This starts by using technology to help you become a trusted advisor who has a comprehensive view of the customer to assist in customer service coordination. With an integrated accounting and customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can ensure that the CRM tasks performed by salespeople include important information such as quotations, billings, and shipment deadlines.

You can also tighten delivery times and schedules by  integrating specifi c customer requests into your business software so human errors are reduced or eliminated. And you can coordinate all aspects of a customer’s profi le when multiple personnel are communicating to that customer on a regular basis.

Increasing profi tability With collaborative, tightly integrated software and systems  in place, there is greater potential for bigger profits. Industrial distributors can easily identify and eliminate areas of wasted activity because they no longer have to deal with separate “islands” of information that require extra resources to manage or that operate outside of a global view of company operations. It is easier to support and take
advantage of Automated Data Collection (ADC) systems to lower costs—while improving customer service.

And with integrated systems, industrial distributors have smart  knowledge management tools at their disposal to identify opportunities for new products and services that can be offered to customers most likely to need them.

Optimal performance with Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft DynamicsTM provides a set of strong applications that deliver a compelling suite of technologies for industrial distributors. Our integrated tools can help give your organization the critical capabilities you need to support new business practices, shrink inventory and warehouse management costs, respond quickly to customers, and comply with changing and unique customer demands. We can help you achieve real-time visibility across the global supply chain and deliver customer-focused solutions that help grow their
business and set it apart from the competition.

The Microsoft Dynamics platform can help your organization to assemble a complete, integrated set of leading-edge business applications. These integrated applications can be deployed quickly and inexpensively without complicated customizations and drawn-out implementation projects.

Microsoft Dynamics solutions support:
• Speed order picking with powerful and integrated ADC solutions.
• Real-time reports and alerts to management and customers.
• Effi cient response to customer demands such as specific packaging and shipping requirements.
• Implementation of customer-specifi c shipment, packaging,
technology, and reporting requests.
• Customized business reports that help improve business performance.
• Accurate demand forecasting models.
• Easily implemented Web-based systems for customer communications.

Innovative integration
Microsoft Dynamics provides a fl exible set of solutions that can be easily adapted to your operational needs. Built on the Microsoft® Windows ServerTM platform, Microsoft Dynamics helps you take advantage of technologies such as Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services for knowledge management and collaboration, Windows Terminal Services for extending access to data and processes, and Web services that can enable visibility into your customers’ and suppliers’ systems. Microsoft SQL ServerTM delivers a solid foundation for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data across your
company’s systems. And deep integration with Microsoft Office System applications, such as Microsoft Excel®, Word, Outlook®, Internet Explorer, SharePoint, and Visio®, can help you better understand inventory, plan production and lead times, design reports, and use data required to make accurate and cost-effective decisions.

COMPETITIVE Partners with industry expertise  Microsoft Dynamics solutions are delivered by a network of partners with expertise in industrial distribution. They can provide local, personalized service—from planning and implementation, to customization, to ongoing support and education. That means you get world-class business solutions
from professionals who understand your business and will be  there as your business conditions change.

Plan for growth
Organizations need systems that can deliver a strong return on investment (ROI) in meeting current needs, while providing for the opportunity to scale dramatically to account for organic growth, acquisitions, changes in business focus, and other foreseeable future changes to the business. Microsoft Dynamics, along with Microsoft server technologies and productivity solutions, offers tremendous fl exibility and scalability to implement the solution to meet today’s
requirements and to allow for substantial future growth and change.

To learn more about Microsoft Dynamics integrated  solutions that can help industrial distributors succeed, visit http://www.pargesoft.com/

Pargesoft Microsoft Dynamics AX, NAV and CRM Global Partner

Sarbanes–Oxley Act 11 Titles

Sarbanes–Oxley contains 11 titles that describe specific mandates and requirements for financial reporting. Each title consists of several sections, summarized below.

1. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)
   

   Title I consists of nine sections and establishes the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, to provide independent oversight of public accounting firms providing audit services ("auditors"). It also creates a central oversight board tasked with registering auditors, defining the specific processes and procedures for compliance audits, inspecting and policing conduct and quality control, and enforcing compliance with the specific mandates of SOX.



2. Auditor Independence
   

   Title II consists of nine sections and establishes standards for external auditor independence, to limit conflicts of interest. It also addresses new auditor approval requirements, audit partner rotation, and auditor reporting requirements. It restricts auditing companies from providing non-audit services (e.g., consulting) for the same clients.



3. Corporate Responsibility
   

   Title III consists of eight sections and mandates that senior executives take individual responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of corporate financial reports. It defines the interaction of external auditors and corporate audit committees, and specifies the responsibility of corporate officers for the accuracy and validity of corporate financial reports. It enumerates specific limits on the behaviors of corporate officers and describes specific forfeitures of benefits and civil penalties for non-compliance. For example, Section 302 requires that the company's "principal officers" (typically the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer) certify and approve the integrity of their company financial reports quarterly 



4. Enhanced Financial Disclosures
   

   Title IV consists of nine sections. It describes enhanced reporting requirements for financial transactions, including off-balance-sheet transactions, pro-forma figures and stock transactions of corporate officers. It requires internal controls for assuring the accuracy of financial reports and disclosures, and mandates both audits and reports on those controls. It also requires timely reporting of material changes in financial condition and specific enhanced reviews by the SEC or its agents of corporate reports.



5. Analyst Conflicts of Interest
   

   Title V consists of only one section, which includes measures designed to help restore investor confidence in the reporting of securities analysts. It defines the codes of conduct for securities analysts and requires disclosure of knowable conflicts of interest.



6. Commission Resources and Authority
   

   Title VI consists of four sections and defines practices to restore investor confidence in securities analysts. It also defines the SEC’s authority to censure or bar securities professionals from practice and defines conditions under which a person can be barred from practicing as a broker, advisor, or dealer.



7. Studies and Reports
   

   Title VII consists of five sections and requires the Comptroller General and the SEC to perform various studies and report their findings. Studies and reports include the effects of consolidation of public accounting firms, the role of credit rating agencies in the operation of securities markets, securities violations and enforcement actions, and whether investment banks assisted Enron, Global Crossing and others to manipulate earnings and obfuscate true financial conditions.



8. Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability
   

   Title VIII consists of seven sections and is also referred to as the “Corporate and Criminal Fraud Act of 2002”. It describes specific criminal penalties for manipulation, destruction or alteration of financial records or other interference with investigations, while providing certain protections for whistle-blowers.



9. White Collar Crime Penalty Enhancement
   

   Title IX consists of six sections. This section is also called the “White Collar Crime Penalty Enhancement Act of 2002.” This section increases the criminal penalties associated with white-collar crimes and conspiracies. It recommends stronger sentencing guidelines and specifically adds failure to certify corporate financial reports as a criminal offense.



10. Corporate Tax Returns
    

    Title X consists of one section. Section 1001 states that the Chief Executive Officer should sign the company tax return.



11. Corporate Fraud Accountability
    

    Title XI consists of seven sections. Section 1101 recommends a name for this title as “Corporate Fraud Accountability Act of 2002”. It identifies corporate fraud and records tampering as criminal offenses and joins those offenses to specific penalties. It also revises sentencing guidelines and strengthens their penalties. This enables the SEC the resort to temporarily freeze transactions or payments that have been deemed "large" or "unusual".

    www.pargesoft.com Microsoft Dynamics Global Partner
    .