In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Understand Locations

This post is part of the In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… series and of the wider In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how do I… series which I am posting as I familiarise myself with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Locations in Business Central are physical or virtual places where inventory items are stored or tracked within your organization. Enabling the multiple locations feature allows you to manage and track inventory across different storage sites, such as warehouses, stores, or distribution centres.

Location cards represent each specific location in Business Central and contains information such as the location code, description, address, contact details, and any specific settings related to the location; multiple locations can be created for each physical or virtual storage site.

Enabling locations allows the tracking of inventory quantities and movements at a granular level, allowing monitoring of the availability and stock levels of each item in each location separately, helping you manage inventory more effectively.

Even taking into account the above, locations are not mandatory and you can use inventory in Business Central without them. The absence of locations simplifies the setup and configuration process and it can be suitable for businesses with relatively straightforward inventory management needs or those operating from a single location.

However, I still generally recommend to clients who only have one site or relatively simple inventory requirements, that they create at least one location and make locations mandatory. Across the last twenty years I have dealt with a few clients who originally said they don’t have any stock locations as such and don’t need to track by location, who, over time, had changing requirements and did then create more than one location.

If they’d started off with no locations, they’d have had to enable and create locations and then change their processes, including additional training for users; by having locations from the start, their processes already included the location and all they had to do was create an additional location and start transacting in it.