Dynamics 365 Business Central: Catalog Items

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Catalog Items

Hey everyone, I trusted you read those 330 pages from Microsoft already if, not right away get on it, it's important. 

Today we're going to get into catalog items, if you're an old NAV user it was called non stock items, today we call it catalog items which I think is a way better name for it. It works very similar, we're going to go through it in Business Central just so that you're up to speed on it. if you're unfamiliar with it it's a way to keep items in the system without cluttering up your inventory list so, separate lists for items that you use occasionally maybe a catalogue that came from your vendor and you would like to look that up you know for any type needs that you know for items that you don't use that often. 

Let's look at the system, basically what we're looking at now is something called catalog items, and if I go into that, I have a list of items that are not in my item list, so I don't want to clutter my item list. Let's say for example you're vendor has a catalogue of thousands of items that you can sell from the vendor, but you don't want to get all of those items into your item list because that was just clutter it up, so you only want to add these items to your item list when you're actually using them on a quote or an order.  

I'm going to go ahead and create a new one here, this is from the Acme manufacturer it's coming from Fabrikam their number is this, we're going to call this Super Bowl because Super Bowl is this weekend and we have them by the peace, the price is going to be $10 and we're going to set up a template here so, I'm going to say this is the item with no sales tax, just take a look at here a little bit. You can set up substitutions for this item in here, you can set up comments for this item, you can create the item so this will then become an item in your item list but I don't I'm not going to do that right now, I'm going to show you how to do that straight from the quote.  

In any case the idea behind this is that you have this huge list, not huge here in my demo, but it would be huge list coming from your vendor, you would just upload it through Excel, and you would have access to all of these items. I'm going to close that out and go into the sales quote and let's say we're going to quote the Super Bowl coffee cup, we create a new one and we're going to quote that to adatum. 

In here, if you used non stock items in old NAV, you would be familiar with the non-stock items and you'll be able to put them on a sales quote. So, the way you do is in Business Central, you go into more options here, so there's something called select catalog items, I go into that, I get a list of catalog items and then I can click on the Superbowl coffee cup. This is not part of my item list right, it's in this catalog list and if I click on it and say ok ,it brings it into the quote so I could go ahead and quote this to say here hundred cups and if I now look at my item list it is part of the item list. so, it got created instantaneously as I put it on to the quote.  

It's a good way to separate things out some industries have catalogs from vendors there are humongous and you definitely don't want to see that in your item list, because when you are scrolling through your item list looking for something if it contains a lot of items you've never sold and possibly will never sell, that would be very annoying so, this is a great way to bring it in, know about it and you can just pick it up when you actually need it and it'll automatically create as you put it onto a document like our sales or a sales good.