Tracking saleable resources within a business is vital for company success. Doing so can be quite complicated, with many different posting set-ups for different business purposes. Items within Business Central come in three different types. Inventory, Non-inventory and Service. Within these three are a ton of different supported elements.
Depending on the use case, you can select which type is the most useful for your business from the above charts.
Inventory Options
Focusing on inventory options first, there is a lot of control in Business Central to make an item within the system reflect the item you have on your shelves. In the first section of the item card, we identify what kind of item this is for our business. Does it come in pieces? Boxes? Pallets? Business Central allows you to select a default base unit of measure that you are most likely to use for the item. If that unit is not what you need for a particular invoice or usage of the item, that can be changed at the document level. If your company requires a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), that is provided for, as well as additional codes and identifiers that will help with reporting and tracking particular types of product within your business.
Moving down to the inventory portion of the item card, there is a large variety of tracking items that will help record what quantity of masks there are in relation to all the possible inventory related documents. From the item card, we can adjust stock out parameters as well as control how negative inventory is handled within the regular sales cycle.
Posting Groups
From a finance perspective, the next two tabs track inventory items. Here, we can control the costing, posting setup, prices, and sales policy. The costing options are fairly straight forward, giving options for FIFO, LIFO, Specific, Average and Standard costing. Where Business Central differentiates is in the Posting groups. An understanding of posting groups is critical to using these groupings to implement items in Business Central, and more broadly successfully using the product in general. The posting groups dictate how your items will be input into your chart of accounts. Instead of the accountant or inventory manager being tasked with selecting the appropriate account for revenue, cost of goods sold, etc..., the individual setting up an item only needs to select a posting group. Similar to the base unit of measure as discussed above, posting groups can be changed on a document by document basis depending on what the business requirements are for that particular set of inventory.
Replenishment
Moving on to replenishment, Business Central allows for a variety of options to ensure that an appropriate level of inventory is stocked at each location. We can select what system of replenishment makes sense for the item. By default, items are set to be replenished when purchased, but the full list of options are Production Order, Transfer and Assembly. Selecting different options enables or disables the corresponding functionality. As an example of this, Assembly must be selected for an assembly policy to be impactful.
Planning & Item Tracking
Planning and item tracking are also important pieces for a business when making sure we are controlling the inventory we have on hand, plus, making sure that we have a policy that will enable the appropriate levels of inventory to be on hand in the future. With the reordering policy field, the following options are available:
Fixed Reorder Quantity, Maximum Quantity, Order and Lot-for-Lot. This, coupled with the replenishment section, combine for powerful tools to ensure the appropriate level of inventory is always maintained.
Item tracking is an often forgotten but vital section of the item card. Enabling item tracking codes, serial number and lot numbers will enable businesses with precise inventory needs to keep track of mission critical items with a greater degree of specificity. Setting up serial numbers as an example, will allow a business to track that item across all documents which relate to it.
Finally, warehousing presents businesses with the warehouses or need for a warehousing module to manage their inventory with put-away codes, special equipment codes, warehouse class codes and information about the last physical count.
If you would like to learn more about setting up items in Business Central, please contact us at Rimrock and one of our consultants would be happy to help.