In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Inventory and Warehouse Management), how do I… Add Bins to a Location

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 the previous article of this series, I showed how bins can be made mandatory for a location. In this post, I am going to show how bins can be manually added to a location.

It is worth noting that if you are enabling bins for a location on a new company, or a new location in an existing company, you can make bins mandatory before creating the bins, but if you are enabling bins for a location which is being transacted in, then you may want to add the bins to the location before making them mandatory.

To add bins to a location, open the Location Card, by using Tell me what you want to do and searching for Locations and select the location from the list.

Click the Bins button on the action bar to open the Location » Bins page:

All you need to do to add a bin is to type in a Code; a Description can also be entered, but is not required:

There is another way of adding bins, which I will cover in a future article, which requires that all bins created in the system share the same structure. In other words, if we create a bin in a format, like above, of a-nn-nnnn then all sites need to use that format; this means you should think about current and potential future locations and pick a bin code format which is both scalable and easy to use.

The format used in the Cronus sample company is:

• Single letter designating the location (which allows users to know at a glance which site a BIN belongs; O for Orange, S for Silver and so on).
• Two numbers for the row.
• Four numbers for the bin.

In most cases, the bin format code in Business Central will mirror that actually being used within the warehouses and you can always create the bins manually with different format codes should this be a better approach to make the system in Business Central match the real world locations.