Navision invoice import: how to automate it

A number of Lithuanian companies still run on old Navision (Financials). The system is dependable, but incoming supplier invoices usually reach it by hand. The same loop repeats every month: someone opens the PDF, retypes the supplier, dates and amounts, picks the cost account and the VAT, then checks that no figure slipped. This article covers how to automate that work — and what you actually get back.

Where the time actually goes

Reviewing an invoice takes seconds. The time disappears around it: hunting for the invoice in an email thread, retyping lines, working out which site or project the cost belongs to, and then, at month-end, working out why the totals disagree. In a company receiving a few hundred invoices a month, that easily becomes several working days.

Automation here does not mean "the computer decides everything for you". It means a different split of the work: the system does the routine retyping, and the accountant reviews the result and rules only on what genuinely needs a decision.

How an invoice reaches Navision

The supplier emails the invoice exactly as they do today — nothing changes on their side. Ezura reads it, recognises the supplier, dates, lines and VAT, assigns dimensions according to your rules, and prepares the record for review. Once you approve it, the system produces a Navision-ready import — separately for sales and purchases, because Navision expects them in different shapes.

The practical part that matters: the file is prepared the way your Navision expects it. Lithuanian characters arrive intact, and the import doesn't break halfway through on a formatting problem — the two most common failures on the manual route, and the ones that usually only surface after upload, when they are expensive to fix.

Cost accounts and items — line by line

A real supplier invoice is rarely uniform: some amounts belong straight in costs, others against specific items. Ezura decides that per line, following your rules, rather than applying one treatment to the whole document. Entering "the whole invoice the same way" by hand is precisely why the books disagree later.

Dimensions: site, project, department

It is not only amounts that reach Navision — the analytics travel too. Assigning a cost to a site, project or department is mostly done by the system according to your rules, and the accountant reviews only the exceptions. You own those rules, not us: when your cost-allocation logic changes, you change it yourself.

VAT per line, not per document

VAT is assigned to each line separately. That matters because real invoices mix different rates, reverse charge, or items outside the scope of VAT within a single document — and those are exactly the invoices that take longest to enter by hand and attract the most mistakes.

What gets checked before you ever see it

By the time an invoice reaches your review, it has already been checked: the supplier's details are verified against the business registry and VIES, and a repeated document is recognised rather than let through twice. With an import-based workflow that is especially valuable — there, a mistake is usually spotted after upload, when it costs the most to undo.

How we know this works

This path is not theoretical. It was built against real Navision requirements and proven by an actual import — invoices were loaded successfully into a client's live Navision in June 2026. Old Navision is distinctive enough that generic "export to CSV" solutions tend not to work with it; it needs a system that has already done it.

What if it gets something wrong?

That is the first question every accountant asks, and rightly so. The point is that nothing is posted without you: the prepared record always waits for review. When the data is clear — which it is for the large majority of routine supplier invoices — that review takes seconds. When an invoice is unusual, or the scan is poor, it shows up as such and asks for your attention instead of quietly reaching the books wrong.

The second safeguard is the rules. The longer you run it, the more of the repeating decisions it takes over: the same supplier, the same site, the same cost account. So review gets shorter over time, not longer.

What it gives you in a month

• •A hundred invoices prepared in minutes rather than hours
• •The accountant reviews what's questionable — not every line
• •Month-end no longer waits on whoever enters the last invoices
• •Cost analytics are in place as you go, instead of being reconstructed at close

If you work with Navision and want to see how this would look on your own suppliers' invoices, a few sample PDFs are usually enough — we show the result on your real documents.