Inventory

Path: Business functionality > Inventory · tier official · system inventory · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)

Overview

The Inventory section describes how to define and maintain items and keep stock accurate. It starts with item cards, item templates, categories, attributes, variants, catalog items and item references. It then covers daily stock work: physical counts, adjustments, reclassification, transfers between locations, reservations and blocking items from use.

Further pages cover item tracking with serial, lot and package numbers, including setup of tracking codes, assigning numbers on documents and tracing items forwards and backwards. Other pages cover availability overviews, bills of material for assembly and production, responsibility centers, and Copilot-generated marketing text for items. The Inventory analytics subtopic holds Power BI apps, built-in reports and ad-hoc analysis.

Start with “Managing inventory” for the overall picture, then “Create item cards for goods or services”. After that, go to the page for the task at hand, such as counting, tracking or transfers.

Key points

• Item cards set up item types, costing methods, pricing, replenishment, variants and substitutions; item templates speed up creation.
• Items can be organized with categories (including parent categories) and item attributes, which can be used to filter items and for web shop searches.
• Physical counts can use physical inventory orders with inventory recordings, or journals with cycle counting periods and expected inventory calculation.
• Item tracking codes set up serial, lot and package tracking, expiration dates, warranty formulas and warehouse tracking; items can be traced usage to origin and origin to usage.
• Transfers between locations use transfer orders or item reclassification journals, with standard or direct transfers and optional in-transit tracking.
• Items and item variants can be blocked for sales, purchasing, service, production or all transactions.
• Reservations work across sales, purchase, service, assembly, transfer and production orders, with auto reserve, bulk reservations and cancellation.
• Variants track sizes, colors or configurations under one item; item references map internal codes to vendor or customer terms, and support barcode scanning.

Subtopics

• Inventory analytics (56 pages)

More Learn pages

• Add marketing text to items: Write marketing text for items in Business Central.
• Count and adjust inventory: Describes how to count physical inventory and use inventory documents to adjust on-hand inventory.
• Count, adjust, and reclassify inventory: Learn how to do physical counting and make adjustments and reclassifications.
• Create and manage catalog items: Learn how to sell items that you don’t keep in your list of items.
• Create item cards for goods or services: You create item cards for services that you sell as hours and for physical products. Examples include assembly items and finished goods that you sell from your inventory.
• Get an availability overview: You can get information about the availability of items or stock across locations, per sales or purchase events, by time period, and more.
• How to block items or item variants from sales, purchasing, and production: You can block items and item variants from being entered on lines in sales or purchase documents, and from being posted in a transaction.
• How to reserve items: Learn about reserving items for sales orders, purchase orders, and production orders.
• How to work with responsibility centers: Responsibility center as administrative centers help companies set up user-specific views of sales and purchase documents related exclusively to each center.
• Manage product variants: Learn how you can record products that are almost identical but vary in color, size, or material as item variants.
• Managing inventory: This article describes how to manage the physical products you trade in by creating an inventory item card.
• Organize items in categories: To help you search for and find items, you can assign item attributes and organize items in categories.
• Set up item attributes and assign them to items: Describes how to set up item attribute values, for example, that can be used as search words, and assign them to items and item categories.
• Set up item tracking with serial, lot, and package numbers: Set up item tracking with serial numbers, lot numbers, and package numbers
• Trace item-tracked items: You can see where an item-tracked item was used, including how and when it was received, produced, or returned with Item Tracing and Find Entries features.
• Track items with serial, lot, and package numbers: You can add serial numbers, lot numbers, and package numbers to outbound or inbound document. The posted item tracking entries display on their item ledger entries.
• Transfer items between locations: Learn how to transfer items, inventory, or stock between locations by using transfer orders or the item reclassification journal.
• Use item references: Set up references between the descriptions, unit of measures, and variants that you and your vendor or customer use for an item.
• Work with bills of material: You create an assembly BOM or production BOM to specify the components or resources required to put together the item that the BOM represents.

Videos, posts and code changes

Linked by a Haiku matcher with a grounding quote from the item’s summary (link/topics.ts); machine-generated.

• #10150 [Bug 617189] Clarify strict expiration posting tooltip (code change): “Strict Expiration Posting in Item Tracking Code now clarifies that it uses”
• #9180 Copy record links to posted Phys. Invt. Order and Recording headers (code change): “Record links attached to physical inventory order and recording headers are now copied”
• #9531 [Master]- Report 152 “Calculate Low Level Code” terminates with error: “Cannot add instance as another with key %1 has already been added.” after upgrade to v28.1 (code change): “items with multiple SKUs sharing the same Production BOM”
• #9602 User experience for adding attribute in item categories is wrong (code change): “The user experience for adding attributes to item categories was corrected by modifying the item category attributes page”
• #9631 [Main]- “Filter by Attribute” action does not apply the filter under specific circumstances (code change): “The ‘Filter by Attribute’ action on the Item List page now preserves user-applied filters”
• #9705 [master] Transfer Order header deletion blocked by reserved quantity — inconsistent with line deletion and all other document types (code change): “Transfer order headers can now be deleted despite having reserved quantities”
• #9745 [main] Implement item variant caching in calculate inventory (code change): “The Calculate Inventory report now caches item variant information to reduce redundant database lookups”
• #9810 [master]-Edit in Excel fails with false duplicate error when creating new Item Variants (code change): “Item Variants page no longer fails with a false duplicate key error when creating new variants”
• #9961 [Extensibility Request] issue 30381: expose page sender to filter subscribers (code change): “Item Availability by BOM Level page”
• BC Friday Tips #69 Item Blocked Fields (community post): “Item table in Business Central has multiple blocked fields”

Business Central pages and reports

The pages, reports and queries this hub’s Learn pages name (ms.search.form, API reference), joined to the code by exact object id (data/index/docs-objects.json); a page shows the table it runs on.

• Page 30 “Item Card” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 31 “Item List” · captioned “Items” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 32 “Item Lookup” · captioned “Items” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 35 “Item Translations” · on Table 30 “Item Translation”
• Page 157 “Item Availability by Periods” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 342 “Check Availability” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 346 “Item Picture” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 353 “Item Availability Lines” · captioned “Lines” · on Table 925 “Item Availability Buffer”
• Page 491 “Items by Location” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 492 “Item Availability by Location” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 499 “Available - Sales Lines” · on Table 37 “Sales Line”
• Page 500 “Available - Requisition Lines” · on Table 246 “Requisition Line”
• Page 501 “Available - Purchase Lines” · on Table 39 “Purchase Line”
• Page 504 “Available - Item Ledg. Entries” · on Table 32 “Item Ledger Entry”
• Page 515 “Item Avail. by Location Lines” · captioned “Lines” · on Table 14 “Location”
• Page 908 “Assembly Availability” · on Table 900 “Assembly Header”
• Page 909 “Assembly Line Avail.” · captioned “Lines” · on Table 901 “Assembly Line”
• Page 925 “Available - Assembly Headers” · on Table 900 “Assembly Header”
• Page 926 “Available - Assembly Lines” · on Table 901 “Assembly Line”
• Page 1378 “Select Item Templ. List” · captioned “Select a template for a new item” · on Table 1382 “Item Templ.”
• Page 1383 “Item Templ. List” · captioned “Item Templates” · on Table 1382 “Item Templ.”
• Page 1384 “Item Templ. Card” · captioned “Item Template” · on Table 1382 “Item Templ.”
• Page 1872 “Item Availability Check” · captioned “Availability Check” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 1873 “Item Availability Check Det.” · captioned “Details” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 5401 “Item Variants” · on Table 5401 “Item Variant”
• Page 5404 “Item Units of Measure” · on Table 5404 “Item Unit of Measure”
• Page 5414 “Item Availability by Variant” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 5415 “Item Avail. by Variant Lines” · captioned “Lines” · on Table 5401 “Item Variant”
• Page 5416 “Item Availability by UOM” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 5417 “Item Avail. by UOM Lines” · captioned “Lines” · on Table 5404 “Item Unit of Measure”
• Page 5530 “Item Availability by Event” · on Table 5531 “Inventory Page Data”
• Page 5716 “Item Substitution Entry” · on Table 5715 “Item Substitution”
• Page 5717 “Condition Entry” · captioned “Condition” · on Table 5716 “Substitution Condition”
• Page 5718 “Item Substitution Entries” · on Table 5715 “Item Substitution”
• Page 5719 “Sub. Conditions” · on Table 5716 “Substitution Condition”
• Page 5720 “Item Substitutions” · on Table 5715 “Item Substitution”
• Page 5730 “Item Categories” · on Table 5722 “Item Category”
• Page 5733 “Item Category Card” · on Table 5722 “Item Category”
• Page 5839 “Modify Marketing Text” · captioned “Edit Marketing Text”
• Page 5871 “Item Availability by BOM Level” · on Table 5870 “BOM Buffer”
• Page 9091 “Item Planning FactBox” · captioned “Item Details - Planning” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 9231 “Items by Location Matrix” · on Table 27 “Item”
• Page 99000896 “Available - Transfer Lines” · on Table 5741 “Transfer Line”
• Page 99000902 “Item Availability Line List” · on Table 99000832 “Item Availability Line”
• Page 516 “Sales Lines” · on Table 37 “Sales Line” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 5119 “Sales Cycles” · on Table 5090 “Sales Cycle” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 9300 “Sales Quotes” · on Table 36 “Sales Header” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 9301 “Sales Invoice List” · captioned “Sales Invoices” · on Table 36 “Sales Header” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 9305 “Sales Order List” · captioned “Sales Orders” · on Table 36 “Sales Header” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 36951 “PowerBI Reports Setup” · captioned “Power BI Reports Setup” · on Table 36951 “PowerBI Reports Setup” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37022 “Inventory Overview” · captioned “Inventory Overview (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37023 “Inventory by Item” · captioned “Inventory by Item (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37024 “Inventory by Location” · captioned “Inventory by Location (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37025 “Purchase and Sales Quantity” · captioned “Purchase and Sales Quantity (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37026 “Item Availability” · captioned “Item Availability (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37027 “Gross Requirement” · captioned “Gross Requirement (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37028 “Scheduled Receipt” · captioned “Scheduled Receipt (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37029 “Inventory by Lot” · captioned “Inventory by Lot (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37030 “Inventory by Serial No.” · captioned “Inventory by Serial No. (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37031 “PowerBI Bin Contents” · captioned “Bin Contents (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37032 “Bin Contents by Item Tracking” · captioned “Bin Contents by Item Tracking (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37056 “Inventory Valuation Overview” · captioned “Inventory Valuation Overview (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37057 “Inventory Valuation by Item” · captioned “Inventory Valuation by Item (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37058 “Inventory Valuation by Loc.” · captioned “Inventory Valuation by Location (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37064 “Inventory Report” · captioned “Inventory Report (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37065 “Inventory Valuation Report” · captioned “Inventory Valuation Report (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37110 “Inventory Forecasting” · captioned “Inventory Forecasting (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Page 37111 “PowerBI ABC Analysis” · captioned “ABC Analysis (Power BI)” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 704 “Inventory - Transaction Detail” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 705 “Inventory Availability” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 706 “Status” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 707 “Inventory - Availability Plan” · captioned “Inventory - Availability Plan (Obsolete)” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 708 “Inventory Order Details” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 709 “Inventory Purchase Orders” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 711 “Inventory - Top 10 List” · captioned “Inventory Top 10 List” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 713 “Inventory - Customer Sales” · captioned “Inventory Customer Sales” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 714 “Inventory - Vendor Purchases” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 716 “Inventory Cost and Price List” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 718 “Inventory - Sales Back Orders” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 719 “Inv. Availability Plan” · captioned “Inventory - Availability Plan (Excel)” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 720 “Item/Vendor Catalog” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 723 “Item - ABC Analysis” · captioned “Item - ABC Analysis (Excel)” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 813 “Inventory Picking List” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 1001 “Inventory Valuation” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 5701 “Item Substitutions” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 5806 “Item Charges - Specification” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 5807 “Item Age Composition - Qty.” · captioned “Item Age Composition - Quantity (Obsolete)” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 5808 “Item Age Composition - Value” · captioned “Item Age Composition by Quantity and Value” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 5809 “Item Expiration - Quantity” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 6625 “Item GTIN Label” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 6626 “Reference No Label” · captioned “Reference No. Label” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 6627 “SN Label” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 6628 “Lot No Label” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 7150 “Item Dimensions - Detail” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 7151 “Item Dimensions - Total” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 7313 “Whse. Shipment Status” · captioned “Warehouse Shipment Status” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 7319 “Warehouse Bin List” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 7320 “Whse. Adjustment Bin” · captioned “Warehouse Adjustment Bin” · via Inventory analytics
• Report 99001048 “Planning Availability” · captioned “Planning Availability (Obsolete)” · via Inventory analytics

Learn also names 3 objects with no object page: page/5390, page/5540, report/990003804.

Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.