How to automate expense management in Navision

Key takeaways

• Dynamics NAV, long known as Navision, is the predecessor of Business Central; its final release is past mainstream support, but thousands of companies still run it on their own servers.
• NAV has no expense report or receipt capture module: out-of-pocket spend is posted in a general journal to the employee's account, and card spend is keyed as journal lines or purchase invoices.
• NAV reporting runs on dimensions: two global dimensions plus shortcut dimensions on journal and document lines.
• Vergo proposes the G/L account and dimension values from your history, texts for receipts and posts through NAV's published web services.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Navision integration
• What expense management software integrates with Navision?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in NAV, step by step?

1. Publish NAV's web services. Your IT exposes the standard web services once on the NAV server; from then on, connecting is our job.
2. Connect your existing cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Collect receipts by text. Employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Code each charge. Vergo proposes the G/L account and the department, project or location dimension values from how similar spend was posted before, with the reason.
5. Post to NAV. Confirmed card spend posts as journal lines; purchases on a vendor's account post as purchase invoices.

What does NAV need on each card transaction?

• G/L account: the expense account from your chart.
• Global dimensions: the two dimensions every report filters on, often department and project.
• Shortcut dimensions: extra dimensions shown on journal lines, such as location or cost centre.
• Balancing account: the card's liability or bank account, so the statement reconciles.
• Receipt: kept against the entry for audit.

Where does NAV stop and automation start?

NAV's automation is in posting, not capture. Recurring journals handle fixed charges, and the Payment Reconciliation Journal imports bank statement files and matches payments. Nothing in NAV collects a receipt, reads what was bought or picks the dimension values; a person does that line by line, usually at month end from the card statement. Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight.

A practical example

A distribution company on NAV runs three warehouses, with department and location as its dimensions. A branch manager buys pallet wrap and a replacement scanner on the company card. Vergo texts for the receipt, proposes warehouse supplies for the wrap and computer equipment for the scanner, both with the branch's location and the operations department, and shows that the last purchases from that supplier were coded the same way. The controller confirms, and two journal lines post to NAV.

Still on NAV, or moving to Business Central?

Many NAV companies are planning an upgrade to Business Central, the product Microsoft moved NAV customers to. Vergo integrates with both, so automating expenses now does not tie you to NAV, and the upgrade does not force a change of expense tool. Approval workflows are optional and fit how you already control spend: route by GL account, by amount, or by project — or skip approval flows entirely and let policy flags catch only what breaks a rule.