Retiring Dynamics NAV means preserving agreed historical records and usable access before removing the source application dependency. For this scenario, prioritise ledger entries, dimensions and lot-to-posting relationships. Compare required reports and documents with source evidence, test permissions and obtain business acceptance before scheduling shutdown.

This guide covers the retirement questions, a mock-data ArchiveHub demonstration and the validation work needed to define a project scope.

What a read-only NAV costs you

Cost categories are a discovery checklist, not a guaranteed savings calculation. Verify support status, deployment, shared infrastructure and contract terms for the actual installation.

  • An unsupported Windows and SQL Server stack. Older NAV versions run on SQL Server and Windows Server releases that are now, or soon will be, out of support. Keeping them only for lookups is hard to justify to security.
  • The NAV client and service tier. To read the data the way users understand it, a matching client, service tier and licence file must keep working, often on a single remote desktop server.
  • Partner dependency. Customised reports, customer-range tables and C/AL code usually need the original partner, at partner rates, every time someone needs an answer.
  • Audit access. External auditors and food-safety inspectors need accounts, permissions and someone to show them where the Item Tracing page is.
  • Hidden data quirks. Confirm option labels and whether each NAV table is company-specific or shared. Preserve the relevant company context and metadata when interpreting extracted records.

Scope, versions and evidence

This is an illustrative workflow, not a customer case study. Confirm the source release, deployment, modules, customisations and extraction permissions before using the mappings below. Tables and report labels describe the demonstration catalogue; native-report equivalence has not been independently certified. Use agreed source reports and representative records for acceptance testing.

An archive is not a replacement for every operational feature of the retired ERP. Document required historical tasks, excluded functions and any archive-derived calculations.

Historical data to scope for Dynamics NAV

ArchiveHub keeps NAV's ledger-entry model intact. Each table arrives under its NAV name and table number, with the original SQL Server name (for example [<Company>$G_L Entry]) recorded in its description:

  • G/L Entry (table 17), G/L Register (table 45) and G/L Account (table 15), with G/L Budget Entry (96) and Accounting Period (50).
  • Cust. Ledger Entry (21) and Detailed Cust. Ledg. Entry (379); Vendor Ledger Entry (25) and Detailed Vendor Ledg. Entry (380), where Remaining Amount is the sum of the detailed rows, just as in NAV.
  • Item Ledger Entry (32), Value Entry (5802), Item Application Entry (339) and G/L - Item Ledger Relation (5823), the chain that links stock movements to their cost postings and makes item tracing possible.
  • Lot No. Information (6505), Item Tracking Code (6502) and Phys. Inventory Ledger Entry (281).
  • Posted documents: Sales Invoice Header/Line (112/113), Sales Cr.Memo Header/Line (114/115), Sales Shipment Header/Line (110/111), Purch. Inv. Header/Line (122/123) and Purch. Rcpt. Header/Line (120/121).
  • VAT Entry (254), Bank Account Ledger Entry (271), Check Ledger Entry (272), FA Ledger Entry (5601), Change Log Entry (405) and Dimension Set Entry (480).
  • Setup that explains the postings: General, VAT, Inventory, Customer and Vendor posting groups and their setup tables.

Option fields come with their captions from NAV's object metadata, held in a clearly labelled archive helper table, so a Document Type reads "Invoice", not "2". This demonstration also includes a custom payroll register (Payroll Ledger Entry, table 50010). This is an example customer-range customisation, not a claim of standard NAV payroll coverage. Field names and descriptions are kept, so "Entry No.", "Posting Date" and "Global Dimension 1 Code" still work in ad-hoc queries.

Explore the demonstration

General Ledger Entries list in ArchiveHub General Ledger Entries: every posted NAV G/L entry, filterable by account, posting date, document and dimension. ArchiveHub demonstration using mock data; not a native ERP screen or customer implementation.

General ledger entry detail page in ArchiveHub General Ledger Entries detail: a single archived NAV G/L entry opened from the list. ArchiveHub demonstration using mock data; not a native ERP screen or customer implementation.

Aged Accounts Receivable in ArchiveHub Aged Accounts Receivable: customer balances aged by due date at the archive cut-off. ArchiveHub demonstration using mock data; not a native ERP screen or customer implementation.

Explore the report reference catalogue

These mappings identify intended business workflows, not certified one-for-one equivalents. Confirm availability, source coverage, filters, currencies, dates and calculations for the selected release and implementation.

Finance

  • General Ledger Entries: reference workflow: General Ledger Entries, the G/L Account ledger drill-down
  • Chart of Accounts: reference workflow: the Chart of Accounts with balance and net change
  • Trial Balance: reference workflow: the Trial Balance report by fiscal year and accounting period
  • Budget vs. Actual: reference workflow: G/L Budget and the Budget report, budget against actual by account and department
  • Dimensions - Total: reference workflow: the Dimensions - Total report and Analysis by Dimensions
  • Customer Ledger Entries: reference workflow: Customer Ledger Entries
  • Vendor Ledger Entries: reference workflow: Vendor Ledger Entries
  • Aged Accounts Receivable: reference workflow: the Aged Accounts Receivable report, aged by due date at the archive cut-off
  • Aged Accounts Payable: reference workflow: the Aged Accounts Payable report, aged by due date at the archive cut-off

Audit

  • G/L Registers: reference workflow: G/L Registers and the G/L Register report, posting batches and audit trail
  • Change Log Entries: reference workflow: Change Log Entries, who changed which field, with old and new value
  • Reconcile Subledgers to G/L: reference workflow: Reconcile Cust. and Vend. Accs and Inventory - G/L Reconciliation, every subledger against its G/L account at year end

Cash Management

  • Bank Account Ledger Entries: reference workflow: Bank Account Ledger Entries and Check Ledger Entries
  • Bank Account Statements: reference workflow: the Bank Account Statement list and report, the posted bank reconciliations

Sales

  • Customers: reference workflow: the Customer Card and the Customer - List report (Report 101)
  • Posted Sales Invoices: reference workflow: Posted Sales Invoices and the Sales - Invoice document
  • Posted Sales Credit Memos: reference workflow: Posted Sales Credit Memos, including returned lots and recalls
  • Customer/Item Sales: reference workflow: the Customer/Item Sales report, quantity, sales and profit by customer, item and year

Purchasing

  • Vendors: reference workflow: the Vendor Card and the Vendor - List report (Report 301)
  • Posted Purchase Invoices: reference workflow: Posted Purchase Invoices
  • Posted Purchase Receipts: reference workflow: Posted Purchase Receipts with lots received, with the purchase order printout attached

Inventory

  • Items: reference workflow: the Item Card with inventory, item tracking and expiration settings
  • Item Ledger Entries: reference workflow: Item Ledger Entries with lot numbers and the Value Entries drill-down
  • Inventory Valuation: reference workflow: the Inventory Valuation report, opening, increases, decreases and closing by item and year

Food Safety

  • Item Tracing: reference workflow: the Item Tracing page, tracing a lot from supplier receipt to every customer for recall and audit
  • Lot No. Information: reference workflow: the Lot No. Information List and Card, with quality status, certificate of analysis and block flag
  • Item Expiration - Quantity: reference workflow: the Item Expiration - Quantity report at the archive cut-off, in 30-day buckets

Fixed Assets

  • Fixed Asset - Book Value: reference workflow: the Fixed Asset Card and Fixed Asset - Book Value report with FA Ledger Entries

Tax

  • VAT Entries: reference workflow: VAT Entries, the VAT Statement and Calc. and Post VAT Settlement (sales tax, GST and VAT)

Human Resources

  • Employees: reference workflow: the Employee Card with qualifications, absences and pay history
  • Payroll Register by Department: reference workflow: the payroll import posted through the General Journal, a register by department tied to the G/L (customer-range Payroll Ledger Entry table)

Source documents stay attached

Document types below illustrate the intended scope. Include source attachments and external repositories explicitly, and test retrieval and record linkage before decommissioning.

ArchiveHub keeps the documents next to the entries they belong to. Purchase invoices, purchase orders, sales invoices and sales credit memos carry their PDFs; lots carry their certificates of analysis; VAT returns, fixed asset cards, customers, vendors and employees keep their files. In a recall, the trace and the certificate sit on the same screen.

Beyond the reports

Confirm these capabilities, configuration requirements and limits during the demonstration and scope review; the report catalogue alone does not validate them.

  • Ad-hoc query builder across the configured archived NAV tables, with NAV field captions and suggested joins such as Item Ledger Entry to Value Entry on Item Ledger Entry No.
  • Retention rules and purge with approval, so employee and payroll data can be removed on schedule while ledger entries remain.
  • Legal hold for anything tied to a dispute, a recall or a tax inquiry.
  • Personal-data governance: agree the lawful retention, access and deletion requirements with the responsible privacy and records teams. Product features alone do not establish regulatory compliance.
  • Access controls: define and test permissions for the required companies, records and sensitive fields. Do not assume that system-level roles reproduce the original ERP permissions, particularly for payroll and HR data.
  • OData feeds into Excel, Power BI and SAP Analytics Cloud.

How a NAV decommissioning runs

  1. Extract each company's tables, plus the object metadata that gives option fields their captions.
  2. Validate. Row counts per table, then the balances: customer and vendor ledgers to their posting-group accounts, inventory valuation to the inventory accounts, FA ledger entries to the G/L and the trial balance to G/L Entry totals.
  3. Parallel read access for finance, quality and audit users while NAV is still available.
  4. Retire after acceptance. Obtain documented sign-off for data reconciliation, document retrieval, user access, retention and legal holds, recovery and remaining integrations. Retire only the approved components; shared infrastructure may still be needed. End or reduce subscriptions, licences and support only where the contract permits. Budget for archive operation and any residual costs.

Questions about Dynamics NAV retirement

Is a customer-range payroll table standard NAV coverage?

No. A customer-range table can represent a local or partner customisation. Inventory its fields and business rules separately; the example payroll table in this demonstration does not establish universal NAV payroll coverage.

Why preserve option captions and company context?

Codes and integers are difficult to interpret without their labels and configuration. Retain the metadata needed for the selected tables, distinguishing company-specific records from shared data.

What does this ArchiveHub demonstration prove?

The screenshots illustrate how selected records can be presented using mock data. They do not prove production completeness, customer outcomes or parity with every Dynamics NAV report. Request a demonstration against your own approved scope and acceptance cases.

Related retirement resources

For the broader project approach, see Legacy application retirement planning. To evaluate how users will find transactions, follow relationships and retrieve documents, explore archived data reporting. These resources complement this Dynamics NAV-specific scope rather than replace source-system validation.

Evidence and further reading

The report catalogue and screenshots originate from an internal mock-data demonstration. They are not vendor certification or customer implementation evidence.

Use Microsoft Dynamics documentation to locate the documentation for the installed release. This is a documentation entry point, not verification of every table or report mapping in this article.

Fixed-price Dynamics NAV retirement engagement

ArchiveHub offers a fixed-price engagement for Dynamics NAV retirement and historical data access, based on an agreed scope, deliverables and acceptance criteria. Request a scoped proposal covering your source systems, data, documents, reporting and validation requirements. The proposal should specify included services, exclusions, ongoing platform or hosting charges, and how scope changes will be handled.

Discuss your Dynamics NAV retirement requirements with ArchiveHub

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is a trademark of its respective owner. ArchiveHub is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.