Adjusting the No.of decimal property for Quantity field in Dynamics Ax

Few months back i posted this question on the Dynamics community forum “How can i change the number of decimal places to three for Price and Quantity”

As customer asked as for more decimal places we initially thought of modifying th number of decimals property but only to know that it could be in vain. The best way is to find the alternate for it. Here is Denis Patrakov reply to my query in the community.

You should not change EDTs or something like that. Yes, AX uses two digits precision by default and you should get used to it. As to prices and amounts, there are just too many places in the AX application where an amount is rounded to two digits (especially in the financial module) that you just can’t do anything with it. In case your customer wants to deal with copper in tonnes with a kg precision he sould use kg at least as a storage unit for copper. A storage unit for an inventory item should always be the least possible unit in which an item can be measured with at most a two digits precision. To set a price agreement for a tonne with a “three digits precision” you should use PriceUnit greater then 1, f.e. set a price of $50000,45 for a tonne with the PriceUnit of 10 – this will give you an actual price of $5000,045 for a tonne. See also Setting up item price to accept more than two decimal places.

Note also that you can’t just go and change an inventory item storage unit. AX stores quantity in all inventory transactions in the storage unit and it does not store the unitId itself! So if you have a copper measured in tonnes and have a transaction with a qty of 10 (tonnes) then in case you change the copper’s stoage unit to kgs the transaction will become interpreted as with a qty of 10 kgs. So in case you deside to change an item’s storage unit you should create another item with the storage unit you need, block the first item and use the second item ever after. You can also setup the second item as an alternative item for the first one and you should use loss & profit and count journals to “pass” the stock from one item to another.
Once again: you just can’t make AX to use a precision of more then two digits throughout the application, there are other means to accomplish your task.”

This is what we finally we what we went for and the customer in fact was quite happy.   It is always better to use the Price unit field to adjust your quantity decimal places then to fight for increasing the number of decimal places.

To understand the decimal places concept in detail refer to this nice post  with experiments to figure out what the no of decimals really mean.http://sjakalax.blogspot.com/2010/11/noofdecimals-property.html