Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

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Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

Hey guys,

We're using NAV 2009 R2, which might be fairly old compared to most of the questions I see here, but since this is the official Dynamics User Group I thought I'd ask.

We notice in NAV that there's a lot of info available for a product, besides just "quantity on hand":

I notice that clicking "quantity on hand" pulls up Item Journal Lines, whereas the quantity on sales order pulls up sales lines and so on.

What happens right now is, let's say a customer orders 100 of a part but we only have 16 on hand. We would buy 84 more, keeping the 16 in stock until we have 100 - and then ship all 100 out to the customer.

If we enter in a purchase order (which is supposed to happen, though I'm not the one doing it, I'm just the programmer), then I suppose you would see 16 on hand, 84 on purch. order. Depending if the order was already entered or not, you might also see 100 on sales order.

Now, let's say somebody isn't paying attention, and we get an order for 15 of those parts. They might simply see 16 on hand and go "Great, we can ship this today!" and go ship it out. Nothing is preventing them from doing that - and it's happened. Then when the 84 come in, we realize somebody already shipped some of our 16 and we're totally out of luck.

To add insult to injury, we've started up an e-commerce website that displays the "quantity on hand" for a part. So a customer might see that we "have" 16, order all 16, and expect it to be shipped the same day. Even if our sales reps ARE paying attention and pull up the part, and see that the 16 aren't actually "available" per se, and we're just waiting on 84 more... the customer won't know that because NAV says we have 16 on hand!

So basically, what we'd like to do is have some sort of option to "reserve" quantity on hand for a sales order, which essentially removes them from being on-hand. That way, the website will update and say we don't have any in stock, and if another order comes in, we would know we need to buy however many the customer requested.

This also applies to kits, though the reserve option still applies. A situation that just happened which is what prompted my supervisor to ask me to do some research is that we ordered a bunch of parts which were going to be used to build a kit, and they were received as the individual parts - therefore NAV said we have quantity on hand for several different parts, and our sales reps thought it was fair game to sell those parts.

If we had "reserved" all of the kit components, then when the inventory was received it would have cleared the reserve and left our quantity on hand at 0.

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

Right. It is not actual field but flow field.

This mean, it is display field, which accumulate the data from other tables and show the sum at Item Master (i.e. Sales Order or Inventory data ).
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

Sounds like we just need to get used to looking at all the information before placing orders.

I think the biggest detail would just be to subtract the quantity reserved for sales order from quantity on hand and make that the actual "inventory" number that people see.

From a programming standpoint, is that an actual field? I notice on the page in NAV, it's not a text box you can edit - it rather acts like a lookup and just opens an associated view (like sales order lines for Qty. on sales order)
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

Yes. You can consider Inventory as Quantity on Hand - Reserved Qty. on Sales Order.

Here are some more details.

1) You already have inbound quantity available (like Purchase Order, Inventory etc.) in your system. Create the Sales Order > System would automatically reserve the inventory against the same

2) You do not have any inventory or inbound documents available, create the sales order, system would not reserve anything as you do not have any quantity available.

Later, lets assume that you create purchase order. Here you have manual option to reserve this PO quantity against all the available Sales Order quantity.

Hope this helps.
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

Ah, OK. So basically, what I should be doing for the website is (Quantity on hand - Reserved qty. on sales orders)?

I can play around with it some more. If quantity is reserved like that, will it automatically assign the inventory to that sales order when inventory is received?
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

If you see Reserved Quantity field, in Sales Line, it is showing 10.

Reserve functionality will not change Quantity On Hand value, however it will not allow other people to consume that much inventory.

Try creating another order with 10 quantity and see the impact.

There is one field called "Reserved Qty. on Sales Orders" available in Item Master. You need to add this Item Card Page. This way, you can see your inventory and the "Reserved Qty. on Sales Orders" on same screen.
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

OK, so that seemed like a good idea, but sadly it doesn't seem to work.

I changed it to Always:

And in this particular item we have 14:

Now when I go to make a sales order, if I do 10 of them, I notice "reserved quantity" is also 10 - and it's not an editable field like the normal quantity.

But then if I go back and look at the item again...

It still says 14!

Did I do something wrong?
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

Yes, There is a field called as Reserve available at Item Card. There you have 3 options i.e. Never, Optional & Always.

Default value is Optional and hence you need to change the value to Always to meet your requirement.
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

That sounds like a plan, but how do I actually reserve the items? Is it an attribute on the item itself?
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RE: Reserving stock for an order - best practices question

In your scenario, you can use Reserve as Always. This would work First in First Out basis and items would be automatically reserve.

If you need to change the priority of the delivery, one would require to remove the reservation manually and then would require to ship the items against another order.