There are few things in the world that management and staff of an organization dread more than taking a physical inventory. While it is an expensive and time-consuming process, it remains absolutely necessary to achieve accurate balance sheet information, efficient use of sales resources and effective inventory management. Physical inventory is a particularly important process for most manufacturing and distribution businesses. It provides an opportunity to clean up inventory, identify discrepancies and make any adjustments to align what is on the books with what is in the warehouse.

As we developed our roadmap for creating add-on modules to address functionality gaps in Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform, improving the physical inventory process emerged as a key area for investment. While we can’t remove all the pain associated with the physical inventory process, we have addressed several key areas that allow enterprises using NAV to shorten and simplify the process. American Unit’s Physical Inventory for Microsoft Dynamics NAV assists organizations in increasing the accuracy of their inventory balances, system quantities and purchasing amounts, driving a minimization of inventory holding costs, identification and rectification of possible theft issues and a more accurate reflection of balance sheet asset values.

Having assisted a number of discrete manufacturing companies over the past several years with the Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementation, it became clear that an enhanced physical inventory capability could provide significant value. This led to the investment in developing an add-on module to augment NAV’s existing inventory management functionality. American Unit’s Physical Inventory module eases the creation of physical inventory cards and physical inventory tags for each location, control table and work center. It also makes it easier to assign tags to employees for the physical count of items. The objective in developing the module has been to ease data reconciliation, improve data auditing and simplify the posting of adjustments to physical inventory.

The Physical Inventory module is the fourth release in the American Unit manufacturing suite. More information can be found here.