In this article
Aggregated Inventory for LS Central is designed to tackle a significant challenge faced by businesses dealing with a high number of transactions. As transaction volumes increase, standard processes in Business Central, adjust and post inventory costs in particular, tend to become time-consuming bottlenecks.
With Aggregated Inventory, the system consolidates inventory transactions from multiple store locations into a single aggregated location. This consolidation decreases the number of Item Ledger Entries, leading to faster execution of critical inventory cost adjustment and posting processes.
Statement Posting is a key area where Aggregated Inventory can significantly improve efficiency. For example, if the same items are sold across multiple stores, statement posting in LS Central would typically create separated Item Ledger Entries per item per store. However, with Aggregated Inventory activated, these sales are aggregated as a single Item Ledger Entry per item in the aggregated location. While this is a simplified example, factors like variants, posting date, and dimensions also play a role in determining whether sales get aggregated. The aggregation rate directly affects performance — a higher aggregation rate leads to faster execution of the adjust and post inventory costs processes.
Inventory movements are recorded using documents and journals. With Aggregated Inventory activated, documents and journals will display both the source store locations and the aggregated location. Upon posting, the system will create relevant Item Ledger Entries and Aggregated Inventory Entries. The Item Ledger Entries show the inventory at the aggregated location while the Aggregated Inventory Entries keep track of the inventory at the store location.
Aggregated Inventory can provide you the information about the inventory availability at the individual store locations. This information is crucial for many retail processes and other LS Central modules, including e-Commerce, Mobile Inventory, Customer Orders, POS Inventory Look-up, as well as Store Inventory.
When Aggregated Inventory is activated, the Item Ledger Entries provide a consolidated view of inventory movements at the aggregated location. Meanwhile, the Aggregated Inventory Entries break down these movements into individual store locations, which are the actual sources of these transactions. It is important to note that Aggregated Inventory specifically deals with store locations and the aggregated location, not warehouse locations nor other virtual locations.
As Aggregated Inventory Entries track all inventory movements at the store level, this data will grow rapidly. While the adjust and post inventory costs processes remain unaffected by this, dealing with larger amounts of data in a table can lead to decreased performance. The data compression and archiving functionality in Aggregated Inventory enables you to have this data compressed and archived on a regular basis. Aggregated Inventory Entries that meet specific criteria are grouped, compressed, and archived in batches. If needed, you have the option to undo these batches. The system can then decompress and restore the entries that were previously archived.
See also