Most software teams start with a backlog. A feature request, a bug report, a roadmap item someone put on a slide six months ago. We start somewhere different.
We start with a question: Does this make someone’s life better?
That’s not a tagline. It’s a filter. As the R&D team at Njevity, we hold every decision up to it — before a single line of code gets written, before a design gets approved, before a release ships. If we can’t answer that question with a clear yes, we go back to the drawing board.
Our mission puts it this way: to improve the life and success of our Customers and Partners by providing exceptional business application experiences that simplify, inform, and delight.
This post is the first in a series where I want to pull back the curtain on how R&D actually works at Njevity — not just what we build, but why we build it and how we decide. If you’re a GP customer, you deserve to know what’s driving the decisions that affect your day-to-day work.
"Exceptional" Has to Mean Something
It’s easy to say you care about experience and leave it at that. We don’t get to leave it at that. Our customers run real businesses on this software. Payroll runs. Reconciliations close. Vendor payments go out. When we build something that gets in the way of any of that, we’ve failed.
So when we say exceptional experiences, we mean three specific things.
Simplify
Business software tends to accumulate complexity. Workarounds become permanent. A process that should take three clicks ends up taking twelve. Our job is to push against that. When we’re evaluating a feature, we ask: is this as simple as it can be while still doing what the customer actually needs?
Take PowerGP Banking. The reconciliation experience in GP works, but it requires real manual effort — downloading statements, matching transactions by hand, hunting for discrepancies. So we built a download connection that pulls transactions directly from your bank, and then an Auto-Match engine that matches them against your GP records based on check numbers, amounts, and date ranges. What used to take an hour now takes minutes. That’s what simplify looks like in practice.
Inform
Your business decisions are only as good as the data behind them. If software surfaces information in a confusing way, or buries what you need behind extra screens, that’s not just a UX problem — it’s a real cost to your business. We think about what information you need at each step and whether we’re putting it in front of you clearly.
Delight
This one is harder to put a number on, but it matters as much as the other two. Delight is what happens when software does exactly what you expected — or better. It’s a process that used to grind through your afternoon finishing before lunch. It’s noticing that someone clearly thought about how you’d use this, not just that it works. Delight is the difference between software people use and software people can’t imagine working without.
It Has to Come From Customers
Here’s something worth being direct about: we don’t decide what to build in a vacuum. Every feature in PowerGP Banking, PowerGP Import, and PowerGP Connect started with a customer telling us something wasn’t working the way they needed it to. Real conversations. Real GP environments. Real problems.
When customers on PowerGP Banking told us their financial institution didn’t support direct downloads, we didn’t file it as an edge case. We built CSV import — a guided workflow where you export transactions from your bank and bring them in manually, with column mapping you can save and reuse. No customer locked out because of who they bank with.
PowerGP Import and PowerGP Connect keep evolving for the same reason. The ways our customers integrate GP with other systems — Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, external platforms — keep changing. We want to be ahead of that, not catching up to it.
The pattern is always the same: someone’s work day could be better, and we can make it that way. That’s where the roadmap comes from.
What 2031 Means for R&D
Customers ask us about this regularly, so here’s a straight answer.
Microsoft has announced that Dynamics GP will reach end of support in 2031. For the R&D team, that date changes nothing about our commitment. Our development roadmap extends well past it. We’re building PowerGP Payments right now — a new application in the PowerGP Online suite — because customer payments deserve a clean, modern interface, a setup process that doesn’t require a consultant, and pricing that doesn’t come with an enterprise price tag.
PowerGP Banking, Import, and Connect will all continue to evolve. We’re not in maintenance mode. We’re actively investing, shaped by what customers tell us they need.
And we’re paying close attention to where the broader technology landscape is going. AI and automation capabilities that were theoretical two years ago are practical today. Our customers deserve access to those as they become genuinely useful — not as a pitch, but as something that earns its place by passing our question: Does this make someone’s life better?
Why This Series
Our mission is the why. But how we actually make decisions — how we work through hard calls, handle tradeoffs, stay accountable to each other and to customers — that’s shaped by something more specific.
Njevity has five core values: Caring, Courage, Commitment, Community, and Curiosity. Over the next five posts, I’ll walk through each one and show you what it actually looks like inside our R&D team. Not as a values exercise — as an honest look at how we operate.
Understanding why we build what we build is one thing. Understanding how we decide to build it — that’s the rest of the story.
Up next: Caring — what it means to actually give a damn about the people using your software.
