Dynamics 365 Business Central: Locations, Where is my Inventory?

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Locations, Where Is My Inventory?

Locations, locations are complicated in business central or in general in Businesses. But when you sign in to Cronus in Business central, they have made it very simple for you. If you start interacting with inventory, it all goes into the black locations. What we are going to do is explain to you how complicated locations can be. Just briefly. Also, show you how you can move inventory into some location or different locations rather than just being in the blank locations. I’m sure you were wondering when we were doing the videos on supply and demand and purchasing where the inventory was going, so I’m going to show you that. Let's look at a diagram.  

 A Location is basically a container of inventory, you can receive product into the location and you can ship out of the location, so if you set up locations in business central, you don’t know where inside the location your inventory is, but you know it is at that location. In the beginning, when you work with business central and Cronus and you just receive inventory and ship inventory, it goes into a blank location which is just a normal location with no name.  It's obviously not good to work with that if you have multiple locations. We are going to show you how to move out of the blank location and into named locations.   

Break up locations in business central 
If you are interested in knowing where inside the location your inventory is, you  would have to set up something called Zones and zones are set up for a purpose, in this case, we have the receiving zone, we have to storage zones and a shipping zone, so this would be a fairly simple setup of zones inside the warehouse, further you can setup bins inside the zones. So, for example here in the receiving zone, we have 3 bins and that usually corresponds to the doors of the warehouse, so if you have receiving doors. Here we have 3, B1 B2 B3, you can tell where the inventory is coming in form. Then the inventory would get moved into storage and then picked into shipping and shipped out of one of the shipping doors. You can manage your inventory by bins all the way through.  

This is much more complicated than we’ve gotten into yet and we are not going to go into that in the video, at least not this one, we might do in further videos, but it will give you an understanding of how you can break up locations in business central.  

Let's look at the application if we go into the search and go to locations. We get a list of locations, here we have three normal locations and two not as normal locations. The normal locations are East, West, and Main. These are normal locations that although they don’t have bins or zones, they are proper locations. The outsource logistics and Own logistics, these are in transit locations and they are only locations for transfer orders which we will cover later.   

What we want to do is move our inventory of the coffee mugs form the blank location into the main location. Let’s go ahead and go into items and I’m going to view by tiles because I want the pictures here, I can see that I have 20 pieces of my inecta coffee mug and all I have to do is go into an item, adjust inventory and I can see here that I have inventory 20, but it's an unspecified locations, so this is how business central handles when you are not specifying the location and you are allowed to actually post into a blank location. If you only have one location and you really don’t care about location management, you could run the entire system on blank location and never set up the locations.

Change the Inventory Location
However, we are going to get more sophisticated so I’m going to change the inventory to 0 on the unspecified location and put in into the main location and just hit ok.  Now the system moves the inventory, it registers a negative adjustment to blank and positive adjustment to Main. So, if I go into my coffee mug again here, I go into navigate and see the availability by location and I can see now that I have in the main location, I have 20. So, this has been moved into a proper location which is good.   

Now let’s quickly look at locations again. If I go into one of the locations, for example, the Main and look at that, I can see that we have information about where it's located who is the contacts etc. Here is a checkbox, use as in transit, now if this is checked, this location becomes unusable for normal transactions, it will only be usable when you are transferring inventory from one location to another.  

This serves as the inner location and we will touch on that later, also there is a whole lot of setup about bins and I showed you in the diagram how we can get into zones and bins, so for example up here, we could start setting up a bunch of bins for the location and start interacting with that. Again, that’s something for a different video as well so, stay tuned to get deeper into locations once we get to that. But for now, you know to get it into a normal location from a blank one.