In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Enable Processing of Inventory Using Bins

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.

In a previous article, I covered basic inventory with bins and why you might use bins to keep track of where stock is within a warehouse. Whereas locations can be used without locations being mandatory (although I don’t recommend it), bins must be made mandatory before bins can be used.

If you try to process stock into a bin at a site where bins are not mandatory then you will receive an error:

Bin mandatory must have a value in Location: Code=RED. It cannot be zero or empty.

Bins are enabled per location, meaning you can operate bins in some warehouses and not others. For some of the clients I have worked with, this would be useful as they may track stock in bins at the warehouse location, but not at branch or other locations (I’ve worked with more than one client who held stock in vans which were all created as a site).

To enable bins for a site, use Tell me what you want to do and search for Locations; on the Locations list page, select the site in which you want to enable bins and click Manage » Edit.

On the Warehouse fasttab, toggle Bin Mandatory to the on position:

If you are enabling bins at an existing site, then before you can do so, you need to make sure that there are no open transactions for the site. If there are, then bins cannot be made mandatory.

The next step is to add bins to the location, which can be done in more than one way, which I’ll be taken a look at in future articles.