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How does Sales Order Agent (SOA) search for items in Item Availability? (Item No. vs Description)

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Posted on by CU25031311-0

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working with the Sales Order Agent (Copilot) in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and trying to better understand how it performs item lookup when creating sales orders from customer POs.

Scenario

A customer sends a Purchase Order (PO)

The agent extracts the item name from the PO

It then attempts to find the item in Business Central (e.g., Item Availability / item lookup

However, I’m running into issues where:

The agent removes punctuation from the item name during extraction

The resulting string does not exactly match the item in Business Central

As a result, the item is not found

Question

How exactly does the Sales Order Agent perform item search internally?

Specifically:

Does it search using Item No.?

Does it rely on Description or Search Description?

Does it use any kind of fuzzy matching, or is it strict lookup?

Is the Item Availability lookup tied to the same logic as the standard item lookup in sales lines?

Additional Observation

When I try to manually search for the same item:

Even if I enter the exact Description, the item sometimes does not appear in the lookup

This makes me wonder whether Description is actually used in search, or if the system primarily relies on Item No. / Search Description

What I’m trying to understand

I want to clarify:

What fields the agent depends on for matching items

How to structure item data so that AI extraction can reliably find the correct item

Whether this behavior is a limitation of SOA or standard Business Central lookup logic

Categories:

Dynamics 365 Business Central

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Teagen Boll 1,376 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello, hopefully this gives you a good starting point. A lot of the agent features are a bit locked down but there are a few configuration settings we can modify.

The Sales Order agent searches for available items using the following fields from the Item table:

No.

Description

Description 2

Search Description

GTIN

Vendor Item Number

It also looks at Item Variants (Code, Description, Description 2), Item References, Item Attributes, Item Categories and Item Translations - Sales Order Agent overview - Business Central | Microsoft Learn

For structuring your data I would make sure to at the very least include No., Search Description, Description and Vendor Item Number.

As for the item lookup availability it uses those fields, but if you don't have available inventory then it won't suggest those items. You can change this in the settings here:

Best,

Teagen

Catapult ERP

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YUN ZHU 99,055 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi, This is explained in detail in the documentation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/sales-order-agent?wt.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004336#finding-productsitems

Thanks.

ZHU

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Andrés Arias 5,166 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello,

You can find the information you need at the following link:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/sales-order-agent?wt.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004336#finding-productsitems

In addition, you could also try creating your own agent to validate different searches.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Andrés

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Khushbu Rajvi. 22,128 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Adding this too: https://community.dynamics.com/forums/thread/details/?threadid=ba650385-7757-f011-877a-7c1e52593308

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/sales-order-agent-item-availability

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OussamaSabbouh 12,803 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hello,

Sales Order Agent does not rely only on Item No. or exact Description; per Microsoft Docs it searches across multiple fields/tables including Item No., Description, Description 2, Search Description, GTIN, Vendor Item No., Item References, Variants, Attributes, Categories, Translations, Item Identifiers, and Extended Text, so the matching is broader than the normal sales line lookup and can work with vague/incomplete descriptions, but it still depends heavily on how good your item master data is; after it finds a match, it then runs availability as a separate step, and Microsoft also notes indexing can take up to 15 minutes for new data to become searchable, so in your case the behavior is likely a mix of SOA matching limits + standard BC lookup limits, and the best way to improve reliability is to maintain Search Description, Item References/aliases, attributes, and clean item text, instead of depending only on Description.

Regards,
Oussama Sabbouh

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