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Working out available inventory for an order today?

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Posted on by BCgs

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I am trying to work out what available stock i have for a Sales Order i want to put on Business Central, currently i am looking at...

item inventory at specific warehouse?

This look at stock up until the point it is invoiced, so that is no good as you might have stock already on sales orders due to go out. (more for accounts)

Planning and Inventory reports?

This takes into account all of the sales orders however also the purchase orders that are on the system to, so will show there is stock but it might not be coming in for a month

So how do i work out what can ship today?

I need to see available stock in the warehouse minus the sales orders (excluding the purchase orders as they have not arrived yet)

Does anyone have the same issue, as there must be some sort of way to handle this as i would assume this is something fairly common?

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Bryan Tschosik on at

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Hello,
Thank you for posting your question on communities.

If you pull up the fact box on the right side of the Sales Order and go down to the Sales Line Details area....we have a field called 'Item Availability'.

Say I have 10 quantity on hand of my Lamp, Item 1500.
I enter the sales line (no qty) and I can see I have 10 in my BLUE location. (MM/DD/YYYY) with a Shipment Date of today 05/01/2020.

If I set my Quantity to 3, my Item Availability goes to 7.

I can create another Sales Order with same Shipment Date, or for ease of showing this, I can just add another line below...for 5 Quantity and my Item Availability goes to 2.

In regards to an Purchase Orders out there, I can add one as long as my 'Expected Receipt Date' is later than my shipment date on the sales Order, it will exclude this from my calculation...as you can see here.... My Purchase for 10 more qty... (Item doesn't show, but promise it is my Lamp )

My Sales Order will still show as it did last time 'Item Availability' = 2 still....and NOT take into account the Purchase Line that will be coming next week.

But, If I go ahead and set my Expected Receipt date to 5/1/2020 or prior, then it would increase my Item Availability in my Sales Line Details Fact Box to 12 and show my Scheduled Receipt of 10.... Like this...

Hope that helps. Have a nice weekend!
Bryan

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BCgs 470 on at

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Thanks Bryan - that's a huge help, i'll see how I get on with that - is there any way to look at it as the whole order or just line by line?

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Bryan Tschosik on at

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Hi BCgs,

Sorry for delay here. It would just be line by line in this case....as you can have many different items on an order.

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Bryan Tschosik on at

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Hi BCgs,

Also, wanted to make sure you know about the 'Item Availability by' functionality on the Sales Line, or Item card as well. You can see the different views there. Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but it may be helpful. BTW - if any of these answers are helpful, please Verify.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/inventory-how-availability-overview

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John Ray Patajo 837 on at

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Inventory levels should be checked per line item.

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BCgs 470 on at

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Hi all, that's fair enough. Just when you have a sales order with 1000 lines it's not really feasible to click on each line to see the info.

It's frustrating as the information required is on there but you just cant get hold of it.

Scenario: customer sends you a purchase order that has a 1000 lines on it asking you what can you supply, you can't go through each line and manually fill in the quantity as it would take all day.

We ended up building a solution to solve this using the web data so we can export the available stock in the warehouse and then lookup the released sales orders with open lines on them to work out "Free stock" and then you have a better understanding of what you actually have available.

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Anita75 1,165 on at

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It would be nice if there is some kind of screen with visibility of all orders and lines with some filtering criteria for customer, warehouse etc.

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BCgs 470 on at

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It does seem Business Central is pretty awful when it comes to managing things like orders/backorders/stock.

We ended up developing some solutions with our web partner who created our Business Central website API integration.

Essentially all of the information is available on the web services so you can query and process it outside Business Central, things like...

- Website picking screen - loops through available stock and orders to identify what orders are available to pick on a takeaway style screen that refreshes every 1 minute.

- Stock reports - view on screen and look at stock/available stock/sales 30/60 days and so on

- Daily sales - Dashboard to see sales broken down by territory and brands as well as adding in targets to see percentages achieved and so on.

They are called sequel.co.uk saved us really as we made the leap from Sage 200 to Business Central in the new year and didn't quite realise how limiting the software was in some respects. As technically as the information is there you just need to be able to present it clearly.

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BCgs 470 on at

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I just wanted to update as I have come up with the solution for these issues.

In my opinion availability is a bit of a short coming when using out of the box with Business Central. Typically you would turn Reserve=Always on the admin for each customer then you would allocate the stock to each order. However this gets messy if you need to then amend reserved stock as you have to do this by the item line. Trying to do this with an order with 100s would take ages to update and really unnecessary as the information is just presented wrong.

What we ended up doing is exposing the reservation table into a menu item so you can access from the search to list everything (and added in additional data like customer name and so on) so we can now see a full list of all the reserved items and the customers they are linked to. This can also be exported to excel to modify the values to publish back with the excel add-in.

We have also modified the "Sales Reservation" report to take the grouping out so it makes things a lot clearer to understand when filtering. Now we are in a position where we have completely clarity on what stock is available to ship today as we are using the reservations correctly.

Using this alongside our B2B & B2C website API and the warehouse screen we developed to loop though available orders to split ready to pick and backorders we now have Business Central running absolutely perfect!

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Shan 20 on at

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Have you tried using Available-To-Promise (ATP)?

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