Functionality in Dynamics GP Compared to D365 Business Central | Inventory

Learn how to perform common Inventory tasks in Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central. This session provides a detailed function-to-function comparison to help your transition from Dynamics GP to D365 Business Central.

Topics Covered:

Inventory

• Adding Items
• Entering Inventory adjustments
• Entering Stock counts
• Viewing Details of posted transactions

Transcript below:

– [Katie] Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar, “Functionality in Dynamics GP Compared to Dynamics 365 Business Central,” with the focus on inventory. My name is Katie, and I will be the facilitator today. So if you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the question area in the control panel on the right-hand side of your screen, and we’ll answer questions at the end.

This session will be recorded and posted on our blog, as well as shared with you early next week. Now, I would like to introduce today’s presenter, Don McNulty, who is a solutions architect here at Encore. Don, I will pass over to you.

– [Don] Thanks, Katie. Okay, good morning, all. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about inventory. This is going to be more about setup than it is actually about transactions, but it will give you an idea of the differences between the two as we move forward on this. Come on. There it goes. All right.

So what we’re going to cover today is we’re going to cover adding items to a system. We’re going to talk about posting groups and customer class, and item classes. So in GP, we have item classes. In Business Central, we have a thing called posting groups.

There is a thing called an SKU, which allows you to have different SKUs in different locations, which is something that you do not have in GP. And then we’re going to talk a bit about locations and dimensions and overlays, and things like that. We’ll try and get to an adjustment. We’ll do an adjustment, an increase and a decrease adjustment, and then we can talk about reporting if enough time is available.

I don’t want to waste a lot of time talking about PowerPoints and things like that, so let me go directly into here. So inside GP, when we talk about inventory, there’s really only a couple of screens that we need to deal with. There’s a lot of different screens.

The one difference between Business Central and Great Plains is the window-based system in Great Plains versus the grid-based system in Dynamics 365 Business Central. So when I go into my item card and I just grab an item card, I have a large number of…I have quite a few fields inside here, which allows me to bring things up.

And I’m going to bring up my ACCESS 2EAR. That’s the one I’m going to use today as my favorite item. So inside here, I’ve got different Class IDs. I’ve got different pieces of information from sales and things like that. I’ve got Shipping Weight and some other stuff that’s in here. This is the standard front card. Attached to this card inside GP, we have all of these different pieces.

And everything from the Item Currency down to the Item Resource Planning is available for all GP. And the Fulfillment, down to Standard Cost Changes, these particular ones here, is available if you have manufacturing loaded, okay? So this is a way you can set your currency.

This is where you list price by currency. This is where you set your price list. This is your Quantities and Sites. And then your purchasing, who you purchase from, and what their numbers are, the vendors who we purchase from, whether it’s a kit. Now, Business Central doesn’t have kits. There’s nothing in the system as kits.

It does have assembly, same as GP, but it does not support kits, where kits are things that get assembled at the very last minute, and you have to put all the items on. There’s some history information, which is just a drill-down on the actual items themselves. And then we have some resource planning. I won’t talk about the manufacturing side. So all these screens have got different pieces of information in them.

So, for instance, if I go to the Resource Planning screen here, I have my Fixed Order points and things like this. And all of this information that you see inside here is set by site. So inside here, I’m going to use the NORTH site. And this is what has been set up inside here. So these pieces of information inside here are used for MRP and for purchase order generation, and it allows you to pick what kind of replenishment you want to use inside the item.

All right. So let’s go over to Business Central now and take a look at pretty much the same information. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into the item card. So when we go to the Items, you get a list of the items. So here’s a list of the items. And I’m just going to maximize this to give myself some more screen real estate.

Now, instead of having to drill down on these different pieces and take a look at different ones inside here, what we can do is we can go to the same 2EAR inside here. And now we can see how many I have in inventory, what the unit cost is, what the unit price is. And then I can see across here, if I scroll over here, I could have a vendor number if there was one assigned. As I click into the item itself to give me more details on this, there’s some information on the side here as well.

Over here, we’ve got our standard inventory header. This matches the header that we’ve currently got. Do we have any variations and things like that? What kind is it? What’s the item code? What’s the purchasing code? And things like that.

You can show less, which just takes away a couple of the fields. I always go to Show More for these so that you can see all the possibilities. Underneath Inventory itself, now, once you’ve got the inventory, once you’ve got the item set up, the header part, you can then set up different things. Does it have a shelf number? Do we have a default shelf number? This would equivalent to a default bin inside GP.

This is the quantities that are outstanding. And I can drill on any of these. So I can drill down and take a look at how many are on POs, how many have I got on sales orders, project orders, and assembly orders. And this is my inventory. And if I click on the Inventory here, it will open up a screen that shows all of the receipts for that particular inventory.

There’s the item there. There’s the different document numbers and things like that. So it gives me the ability to look down through that information. Your Stockout Warnings and things like that, Net Weight, Gross Weight, as well as Volume, so that you can do calculations. We only have a weight in GP, whereas we have three weights here, a Net Weight, a Gross Weight, and a Unit Volume.

Unit Volume is good because there are times where you need to do the calculation for freight calculations based on volume, not based on weight, or a combination of the two. If the weight is over this, you pay by the pound. Otherwise, we pay by the volume. As we go down to the Costing, this is part of the same thing, the FIFO, whether it’s FIFO.

Again, you got FIFO, LIFO. You have Specific costing, in other words, individual items. That would be used primarily with serialized items and things like that. You have an Average and a Standard. Now, one thing that’s completely different inside Business Central is the way that they calculate average costing. So average costing inside Business Central is done on a… It is not done on a location basis.

It is done on a location basis, whereas the average inside GP is a global basis. So if I have items in Toronto and I have items in Vancouver, and I use average costing, they will both have the same average cost. Any changes to the cost in Toronto will also affect the cost in Vancouver. In Business Central, those costs can be segregated based on the SKUs that you use, which is one of the features that we have inside Business Central.

So whether it’s invoiced, what was the last cost? My last cost was $49. What’s my unit cost? There’s my unit cost. Was $41.98. And then inside here, these are the different average cost calculations that I’ve got inside here if I want them. When I go down to my pricing, here’s my unit price, profit, etc., allowed discounts, and things like that.

Subscription, whether it’s a subscription, without subscription. It has some subscription pieces built into it, which is something that GP does not. You can also create service-style parts as well. Under the Replenishment, this is the same as what we just saw from the mins and the max.

So if I hit the Show More, you’ll see I’ve got assemblies and things like that. What’s the purchase order number? And there’s the replenishment. As I go down into here, I have my different order tracking, my reorder points, my overflows, and things like that. So I have all the pieces of information that I need in order to do that same kind of work that we were doing in GP using the Item Resource Planning.

We now put it on the standard main screen here, and then lot for lot. If you’re tracking, you can actually do pieces inside here. Underneath your Tracking, you have different options inside here, LOT and SERIAL number, or blank. If it’s blank, it’s just a regular item. This particular item is non-serialized, so I’m going to keep it that way. You’ve got your serial numbers.

And when we go into lot numbers and serial numbers, you can attach different serial number sequences and different lot number sequences to the item or to groups of items. We then have a Warehouse. We have information about the warehouse put-away codes and things like that. There is some built-in barcoding available within Business Central.

In other words, with the SKUs, it does support the individual barcoding of things, and with this, you can use some barcode systems or hook in very, very easily. A lot easier than they did inside Great Plains. All right.

So when I go up to the item inside here, I’ve got a number of different things up top here, and basically, we have a whole bunch of different structures and Cost Shares, and things like that, and Substitutions. We can edit substitute items, and things like that. Items by Location. If I click on the Items by Location, it will bring up my items by location. Give it a second to pop up.

There it is, there. There’s my 2EAR. And you’ll notice that if I expand this out, I have a large number of… So I got 28 on hand in my NORTH. These are all the different locations. I currently have my system set to not make locations mandatory. In GP, locations are mandatory.

Once the system expects locations, there is no way of turning it off, and you must put a location against every inventory. It is not that way inside Business Central. You can make them mandatory. It is a toggle in the setup of the inventory itself. So let me go back.

So inside here, as I go through all of this, this is what I’ve got from that point of view. Now, the costing-wise and this inside here, all comes down to these areas inside here, which is your GP, your Posting Group, and your Inventory Posting Group. And I’m just going to go into the posting groups and talk about this a bit.

So what we’ve got is I’ve got RETAIL, and let me just go…let me just bring this up and go to Show Details, and we go Setup. So when I go into the setup for retail, here’s a list of all the retail, and this right now is showing all the different sites that I have in my system. So I have a large number of sites because I have set up trucks, but there’s my NORTH site there, and you’ll notice that I get an Inventory Account.

I get an Inventory Account, and then I get a WIP account, and then I’ve got all my different materials like this, so that it knows where to put the information if I’m using manufacturing, but most importantly, we have an Inventory Account and an Inventory Account (Interim). The interim ones are when we receive product.

Unlike GP, it does not put the product directly into inventory when you receive goods from a purchase order. So when I get a purchase order and I receive the goods, if I wanted to post a G/L entry prior to getting the invoice, which is what we covered in the AP session of this, it needs to go to an interim account because it sits in the interim account until you get the invoice, and then when the invoice is matched to the actual receipt, the actual dollars from the invoice are put into the inventory account, and the inventory interim account is offset.

So what happens is it reverses the first entry and puts in a new one so that you’ve got the right cost in your inventory control. So that’s basically what it looks like by inventory set, but by the posting setup. So if I look at my other posting setup, which is the two pieces that are required, the other piece is the General Product Posting Group, which I’ve got set to just GP, and I will show details on it.

And again, this one came migrated. This data set is…so there it is, there. There’s my GP. I’ve got it filtered down to GP and GP, and this is where we set things such as our sales accounts and our credit memos, and things like that. And then we also have the purchase account as well as the purchase lines, the purchase debits, and things like that.

So this is where all of those accounts that you are currently storing in your item class and your customer class, and your vendor class, a lot of those accounts are all stored underneath these general posting groups, and there’s a product posting group and a general posting group. So there can be both of those if required. And then you can change those accordingly.

So those match up to… When I’m in Items inside here, when I click on my Class, they match up to these accounts, which is the Inventory, the Cost of Goods, the Sales, the Markdowns, and things like that. These are the same G/L codes.

In GP, these are stored at the class level on the item. They are then stamped on the individual item. There is no G/L code attached to an individual item inside Business Central. The G/L codes are attached to posting groups, and posting groups are attached to items. So there is no one-to-one relationship. You would have to set up a different posting group if you wanted a different G/L code for specific items.

So you’d have different posting groups, much like classes. Very few of my clients or of our clients use inventory without using the classes, and those classes dictate the G/L codes. The fact that they’re actually stamped on the item is just a function within GP and is not actually used by the individual companies.

In other words, we don’t go into those G/L codes and make changes on an item-by-item basis under the accounts. We do it at the class level and roll it down to all the items that are affected. So all my accessories get this, all of my retail gets this, all of my finished goods get this, and things like that. So that’s what that is. This back page here, this is what…

On the inventory card, you saw all the stuff like the revaluation and the fixed and the variable overheads, and WIP, and things like that. That’s where all this comes from. That’s part of manufacturing in GP, but it’s built directly into Business Central because manufacturing is part of Business Central. The only difference is that it requires a premium license versus a standard license. So I’ll just get out of here for a second.

We’ll go back to the posting groups here. All right. And we’ll come back out of here. So you can put pictures and things like that in here, and the marketing, and you can draft some information. You can draft based on the items attributes with Copilot and things like that. If you’ve got more information, you can write things and have it automatically populate towards what attributes do I have, and forecasting is done through here.

We can turn that bar off and give ourselves more room, like so, just gives us more space, and then we can move up and down accordingly. The shelf that you see here is the bin. Now, inside Business Central, you can bin some items and not bin other items, whereas in GP, the bin system is such that once you turn it on, it is on for all items.

It’s an all-or-nothing toggle. You turn it on in the inventory setup, and once you turn it on in the inventory setup, you must use it for all items and all sites, whereas Business Central is much more flexible in that regard because it says you can have shelf numbers and you can have bins based on locations and things like that.

So the next thing I want to talk about is locations themselves. So when I go into here and I go into my Item site inside here, and I’m just going to grab… As you can see, I got a lot of… There’s my NORTH site. There’s NORTH. I’m putting it to Account Segment number 300, and that’s going to do the overlay. So as I move product through this inventory into this NORTH site, it’s going to go to the inventory control account 1300-300.

Now, in my… And then I’ve got different planning and things, for instance. So underneath my Planning, I have my different bins, my reorder points. This is the planning side. And then if I go to my bin side, when I go to my bins, I have my different receipts, my put-aways, and things like that, which we saw on the main sheet inside here. So that’s how a site is set up inside GP.

And then if I go over to here for my locations, and we just go to Locations, and there’s my NORTH site again. Now, the difference on this site is that I have attached it. So inside here, I’ve got a number of different things. I’ve got my Code, Name.

This is where I can set my taxes on. So my taxes can be different from Vancouver than they are in, say, Ontario, where I’ve got Ontario HST in Ontario, but I’ve got BC PST and GST in Vancouver, or whatever tax it happens to be if you happen to be in the U.S. Your tax exemption number, if you are exempt from purchasing and things like that, and what tax area code, and things like that.

Inside your Addresses, you got your name, address, and telephone number. This will show up on the purchase orders if you wish. So you can grab your purchase order as you put your purchase order out. I’m ordering for the North Store. You can put this address on that PO so that the vendor knows who to deliver to, because you’ve got multiple locations. In your Warehouse, inside here, you’ve got do I require receive, shipment, and put-away?

So this is where I… So I could require one. And if I click this and put it like this, it means that I must put it through that process. I’ve left mine all turned off so that I can do what I like inside my demos, but a lot of people will turn this on, directed on that. Is the bin mandatory? Do I want this item to always go to a bin? I can turn that on or off over here.

And again, that is item by item or site by site, and then we can make it. And then by item, we can set it as well. How do I consume it? Warehouse Pick (optional), whatever it happens to be. I’m just going to put in the no-handling. We’re not doing any handling right now, but handling is built into Business Central. When I click on my Bins here, I get my different bins, Receipt Bin, Shipment Bin.

Those match those bins that we just saw inside here. Basically, they’re the same ones inside here. You’ll see Receipt Bin, Shipment Bin, Purchase, and Sales Order Fulfillment. They have different names, but they do exactly the same thing.

So they functionally allow you to do that. There are Bin Policies as well, which allow you to do things. So you can check capacity and things like that. Always allow breakbulk, create, etc. And do I always put it into a pick bin? Or how do I do that from that point of view? When I go to the Inventory Posting Setup, I then have a Location Code.

And these are all the different classes, and you saw that I was dealing with retail before. So this one here would be the one that would match up. And again, I got it by Inventory Account, the interim account that I mentioned before, as well as the WIP Account, and some of these ones that are used by manufacturing. And they are stored against the different items, so against your finished goods, actual, or whatever it happens to be.

This is my North site, so it’s just showing me nothing but NORTH. But if I click on All, every single location will have a piece. So it’s been filtered because of how I got into this particular screen. So there it is, there, Suggest Accounts.

And then under More Options, I have the Automate always. Okay. Now, one thing I should mention as we go through this is that as I go back to my Item Card here, one of the things that I can do is once I set this up, I can send it for approval. So I can send this across for approval. I can send this to somebody. So if I’m the engineer and I’m putting this in the system, I can send it off to accounting to make sure that I’ve got all the right categories and things like that set up for the accounting people.

And then they can approve it, and then it becomes an item inside Business Central. So easy to do. You can also use Power Automate to do exactly the same thing. You can create approvals and manage the flows from inside here. Inside here, you got History, you got Entries, you got Item information, all your different Variants, and things like that.

Everything’s on the single screen. Again, these are kind of go-to buttons, and they allow you to open up additional screens as the Purchase Orders and the Vendors. So if I click on list of the vendors who can supply the item, so if I go into that, that’s your vendor item catalog. What’s the vendor number? I can type in ACETRAVEL. And what’s my vendor item number is a 2EAR HEADSET. So it’s a different number than the ACCESS 2EAR, which is a headset.

And then it’s going to be a 30-day lead time, like so. So there it is, there, and the Variant Code, etc., is not valid. So there we are. So you can pick… Oh, sorry. I’ll just leave that one out. I haven’t got it set up at this point.

So there it is, there. And then I can add another vendor if I wish. So I can add it. I can ADVANCE travel, and this one has got… Their number is TWO EAR HEADSET, like so. And there we are, there. So we can then put that, and then automatically…and then it would save it and move it across.

So that allows me to put in my vendors, so that I’ve got my vendors against it. That’s very much like inside GP. What we do is we go to our vendors, and when I go Assigned, on this one, you’ll find ACETRAVEL, and then you would type in your vendor number there where I could put in my 2EAR instead of my ACCESS HEAD. I’ve just got this defaulting across.

The pricing and things like that has been done by the vendor itself. Excuse me. Okay. All right. So that’s kind of what the item card is and things like that. So as I go through these items inside here, they’ve got Statistics and Approvals and Physical Ledger Entries and things like that.

And one of the nicest screens is always this Availability By. This is something that is by Location or by Lot, or by Variant. So you can have different variations of a specific item. So an item may be a 2EAR, but you might decide it is… There’s a blue one and a green one, and that could be a variant. And then you would have how many of the different variants have we got?

What is the unit of measure? If I click on the Unit of Measure, it’ll bring up the units of measure. And right now, it’s in EACH, but you can add additional units of measure if you wish. And additional units of measure could be dozens or grosses, very much like GP has in their unit of measure schedule.

And then how many have I got on hand at any given time? So that’s kind of what we do inside here. So overall, it’s very good from the point of view from people coming from GP. It is all kind of on one big screen. But when you go into here and you look at the grids inside here… And we just…

Let me just get rid of that for a second so we can see everything inside here. As I go through this, if I grab my 2 EAR inside here, I can drill down on these different pieces, and I can look at the different pieces of information as well. Okay. So the next thing is transactions themselves. So inside GP, we basically have…

There are three basic functions inside your transactions that you would be using primarily. There is the Transaction Entry, the Transfer Entry, and the In-Transit Transfer Entry. So we’ll talk about transactions quickly here. So inside here, this is how you do an adjustment in GP. You put it inside here, you put it in NORTH, and I grab my ACCS-2EAR, and I’m going to take…

I’m going to add 10 at $50. There we are. Ready to post. No problem. So at this point, because it’s in a batch, I can hit the Post button, and it will post. If I was to look at my…

If I was to go to Distributions at this point, oh, sorry, on the wrong line, on this particular Distributions, it would show that it’s going to go to 1300-01, and then 300-4510-100. So that’s going to move it from inventory into 00-300. Now, inside Business Central, when we do that, it is a grid-based.

So what we have is a item journal. Item Journals. There we are. So inside here, we have a positive adjustment. We have different types inside here. Instead of just an adjustment and a variance, we can do a purchase and a sale.

If I do a sale, I can actually sell the product from here directly to a customer. So if a customer has picked it up already, you want to get an entry done, and you know that it went to the customer. You can actually add a customer by using the sale, or you could purchase it. And if it would be an increase, sale obviously would be a decrease. I’m going to do the positive adjustment to match up to what I did before.

Document Number is there. That’s no problem. I’m going to go ACCS, and then I’m going to grab the 2EAR, the dual ear, same as I did before, and then I’m going to put it into the NORTH site. I’m not going to give it a bin because I don’t have any bins set up. I’m going to do the 10.

I’m going to put in $50 so that it comes out at $550. There we are, there. Now, one of the things you’ll notice over here is the Division Code and my Department Code. My Department Code defaulted to 02. One of the things I did forget to mention, and I will go back and quickly show it, let me go Show Details, is that inside here we have Dimensions, and inside the Dimensions in Business Central, we have dimensions instead of a segmented chart of accounts.

In GP’s case, we set it to 300. So we have it set to the DIVISION. So let me just do a lookup here for DIVISION, and we had it set to 300. There it is, there. And so now it’s going to set the DIVISION to 300. I also have the DEPARTMENT of 200, which is a Division Value of North.

So this would be… Now, I can then filter this and say it’s only allowed to have this, or it can have multiple possibilities. So I’m going to leave this one. I’m going to leave this one off for the time being, but the… So I go like this, and I go up, and now everything is saved. Cut off that screen.

And now, when I go back to my list here, and I go back to my card, the Division Code is right there. But if I was to go like this and change this to RETURNS, and I’ll change it back to NORTH, you’ll see that the 300 is automatically populated inside here. So that will then drive it to 13…with the equivalent of what used to be 300-1300-02, and this is now going to that.

From here, if I go up to my posting, and I preview the posting, I can always preview posting inside Business Central, and it gives me my ledger entries and things like that, but most importantly, it gives me my journal entry, which is what I want to take a look at. And you’ll notice here that it’s going to 02, 300, and it’s going directly into your… Your debit is going into inventory control, and the 1312, that’s the interim or the other account that we have there for adjustments.

So that’s where that goes from that point of view. So that’s how we do a standard item journal. The other thing that we can do is an item transfer. And inside GP, item transfer… Transfer. That was there a second ago.

Transfer. My apologies. For some reason, it’s not showing up today.

All right. So inside GP, you can do the same thing inside Business Central, but inside GP, what we have is, whoops, let me just pop this up here, we have the Transfer and the In-Transit Transfer. The difference between those is that in-transit transfers are ones that you move from a site onto a truck, wait five days, and transfer it into the next warehouse.

So, for instance, I have a warehouse in Vancouver and I have one in Chicago. When I load in Vancouver, I transfer it out to the truck, the truck then takes three days to get to Chicago, and then when I unload it, I put it back in. So that’s what the In-Transit Transfer is in GP.

And then the Transfer Entry is the direct transfer itself. And it is under Transfer. So inside here, what we do is this is a transfer order. So we’ve got transferring from NORTH to SOUTH.

If I put an in-transit transfer site inside here, it becomes an in-transit. So they have one screen, whereas GP has two. And then from here, we’ve got the five items being moved from NORTH to SOUTH. And then what’s the date of the shipment and things like that. Coming from what? If I go Show More, it gives me an address, so I can put that on documentation, so I can actually do a printout, so I’ve got pieces of information.

So there it is, there. Inbound hop, and then I’ve got some electronic information which may be used, especially if you use 3PLs. This is quite helpful to have some extra numbers and things like that attached to it. As I go through the posting routine inside here, if I preview the posting, I can take a look at this, and then we’ll be pulling it, and we go like so.

And then there’s my G/L Entry. It’s got a number of ins and outs, coming out, going in, coming out, going in. So it’s doing a roundabout way of doing it, but it does actually do the in-transit transfer, so that it’s all done.

So there it is, there. Okay. So that’s the transfer screen. And so we’ve got both transfer and in-transit transfer on the same place. You can then set up an in-transit code if you wish as such. When I go into my site inside here, if I go into Show Details for SOUTH, inside here, you can use it as an in-transit inside here.

So if I was to clear this out at this point, that’s fine, and we go Save. So then, if I was to go to my location cards, I could check my locations. Locations. And if I go to my INTRANSIT site inside here or my…like so, INTRANSIT, we would set up INTRANSIT, and we would mark it as an in-transit site.

And then area code. Where is it? Again, does the…? Is it going to another warehouse that you may have issues with, or is the examples of the time you set them up like this? I’m not going to say that. This is just basically a truck. So there it is, there.

I’m going to leave everything else the way it is, and we go Save. And now, when I go back to here, I now have an in-transit site. Come on. Take off that there, and then I have to fill in my in-transit code, and now my INTRANSIT site is here.

So we’ll feed it through the INTRANSIT site. So that way, I’ve got the ability to say whether it’s a direct transfer, in other words, NORTH to SOUTH. It could be that you’ve got two warehouses side by side, and there is no truck. It could be that you’ve got different… You could have a bonded part of your warehouse and then an unbonded part of your warehouse, and you need to do a transfer from the bonded into the unbonded as you clear customs through it, and you pay your tariffs and your duties on that, and any taxes.

And that way, you can then do that with a direct transfer rather than having to go through the in-transit one. So that’s what you’ve got inside here. Again, you’ve got increase and decreases, how many shift, how many received, and things like that. So that’s what the in-transit transfer does. All right.

Okay. Reporting-wise, there are a number of reports. And let me just go… I hit the wrong button there.

I apologize. So when I click on All Reports, I get a list of all the reports. There’s my Inventory & Pricing report. So I’ve got this. I got reports inside here. Nonstock, Order Details, Substitutions, Assembles, and Sales History, and things like that.

So we’ve got a number of different places inside here. Underneath here, warehouse management side, we’ve got our Inventory Report, Items, By Location. Some of these are Power BI, as you can see inside here. So they are all available as well. They’re all pre-built. Planning & Operation, Goods Handling. So Planning & Operations, Picking List, time expiration, and things like that.

So you have a large number of different reports from that point of view. So that gives you your stock status reports and all those types of things that are required in order to do these payables. And then down here, we’ve got Inventory. More reports down here, inventory transactions, as well as your valuation and your cost specs and things, Physical Inventory List, and things like that.

And your Inventory- G/L Reconciliation. So this will reconcile your inventory to your general ledger, Date Filters, and things like that. So it gives you all the information you need in order to balance your inventory, and then your inventory is from inside here. Things about this is that you can always edit these items in Excel. So if I click on the Edit in Excel, let’s go Open, this will allow me to edit my items.

So I can make global changes or large-scale changes with lots of different items. I’ve got all my items coming out. I don’t have that many of them. Should fire up Excel in a second. There it goes. It will take a second for it to hook itself up to Business Central, and then it will refresh the page and give me all the information.

Of course, it’s going to do that to me today. I must have something open, so let me just open up Excel. Here we are. Now, let’s try this again.

Wants to come in in protected mode. Couldn’t open in protected mode. So it will bring up your different pieces and then move from there. It did work this morning.

I must have some… I have a setting in my security that stops me from doing it, but it will allow you to make changes to it and then publish those back into Great Plains. So if I open this up in a card, let’s see if it’ll open. Yeah, it couldn’t open in protected mode. I don’t know why. I’m not registered for some reason.

All right. Let me grab a registered version of Excel. And this is the same company, just I’m registered on this particular machine.

So if I go like this, and I go Open it in Excel. So there it is in Excel.

And this is the same as a smart list. This has just dumped everything out that’s on that screen. So I’ve got all that information available to me.

If I minimize this, if I now go up to my Edit in Excel, it should open. There it is, there, protected view. I go Enable Editing.

And there it is, there. So now I can publish this back into Business Central. Okay. All right. Whoops.

Questions. Do we have any questions, Katie?

– We do. And just a reminder, if anybody has any questions, please enter them into the question area in the control panel. First one here, Don, is about item pictures and whether or not they are available for all users in a version of GP. Apparently, they only show up for the users or are only visible to the users who uploaded them.

Is that the same in Business Central?

– No. Because it’s a cloud-based system, all storage is done. It’s available to everyone, assuming they have security rights to see it, which I’m going to make the assumption. It can be changed inside GP as well because you can actually put those pictures. Depends where you store the pictures. But that is something that you can definitely see inside Business Central all the time.

– Great. Next one here is, what happens in Business Central when you enter a transfer and add the transit item? Is it automatically received once that time passes, or does an employee still need to receive it?

– For the in-transit, you can either do it both at once, but ordinarily, what would happen is the in-transit is so that it’s… You want to move your inventory. So if I do an… So on May 31st or on May 30th, I transfer product from Vancouver to Toronto. So I take it out of my inventory in Vancouver, and I put it in the in-transit site.

I want it in the in-transit site because the truck is somewhere in between Calgary and Winnipeg when I’m doing my stock count in both Vancouver and in Toronto. So as a result, when I do my stock count in Toronto, I don’t want that product to be part of my stock count. And in Vancouver, I don’t want it to be part of my stock count.

But I still need it as part of my inventory at month-end because I still own it. It just happens to be on a truck. So ordinarily, you would do that as two separate transactions, and you can do it in two separate transactions. I believe you probably could, just like you can inside GP. You can do an in-transit kind of all together at once, but that defeats the purpose of using the in-transit site.

The in-transit site is so that it is not in any of the usable inventory sites until such time as it’s been received into the new one, okay?

– Right. And I believe that answered the follow-up question to that, which was, what does inventory look like when you have material in transit, especially if you have multiple locations? But correct me if I’m wrong. I think [crosstalk].

– So, what would happen is it shows as a site. So it shows you what you’ve got. So when you saw that list inside Business Central of the item availability by site, your in-transit site will show up there, and it shows you how many you’ve got in the in-transit site. So, you can say, “Oh, I’ve got 15 in transit.” Now, depending on how many routes you have and how many warehouses you have, you know, if you’ve got 5 warehouses and you put everything into in-transit and I’m shipping to 5 different warehouses, I don’t know of the 50 items that I shipped out, how many are going to site 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

I don’t have… I can get… I’d have to get a report written for that, or you would have to have different in-transit sites, in-transit to Calgary, in-transit to Toronto, in-transit to Vancouver. So then you would hit the right in-transit site, so you know where the destination is, so that the person can look back and go, “Oh, I got to add up my Toronto site plus all of the items that are heading to Toronto, or actually, how many I have available,” okay?

– So I think that answered all of our questions for today. I did go ahead and add the link to our events page into the chat if you’d like to check out previous webinars. We are taking a webinar pause over the summer, and then we’ll be starting up again for the fall in September.

I also added the link where you can set your email preferences to opt into our email so you can stay in the know about those upcoming events, as well as see our latest blog articles. And then just a reminder…

– Thank you very much.

– …this will be shared with you early next week. Thank you, Don, for the information today. Thank you, everybody, for joining us.

– Thanks, all, for attending.