Navision License - what is an "employee"

What is an "Employee" for purposes of Navision licenseing?

I spoke with the Orders group and they told me that the maximum number of “employees” for Navision Standard is 500. Our client has 4 users and 200 or so employees.

BUT

Their business involves benefits administration, so they have customers that they use Navision to process payroll for. These people are “customers” not “employees”.

What I’m trying to verify is that the Navision Standard License is sufficient….since they have fewer than 10 users and 500 employees.

I called the Orders group to get clarification of this and they said the following:

“I think if you process payment for someone, they are an employee. So you should use Navision Professional.”

I asked them to point me to where it says that, or to give me some authority other than “this guy at Microsoft told me so” and they transferred me to presales……who was unable to help me since we’re registered, not certified.

Presales gave me the number to the PRD. PRD referred me to the Orders group/R.O.C.

so, here are the questions:

1 - what is an "employee"? and what is the authority or citation to this definition?

IF it turns out that the definition doesn't matter because the system will count people that our client processes payroll for (their customers, really) as "employees", even though the license language doesn't make it clear then is there a way to avoid the purchase of the Professional license?

so, here's an idea

2 - what happens if this client creates additional companies (one for each client) and has fewer than 500 "employees" per customer?


thanks for taking a crack at this...