Business Central How-To: Product Variants
Item variants are a great way to keep your list of products under control. For example, you have a large number of items that are almost identical and vary only in color. You can define each variant as a separate item. But you can also choose to set up one item and specify the various colours as variants of the item.
It’s easy enough to define variants for an item.
- Open the Items list page , open the relevant item.
- On the Item card, choose the Related action, then choose Item, and then choose the Variants action.
- On the Item Variants page, list the variants.
Then, when you create a sales document and add the item, you can specify the variant of the item in the Variant Code field. The same applies to purchasing documents.
When you open the Item Availability by Variant page from a document line, then you can insert a variant in the document line by selecting the line with the variant that you want to insert and then choosing the OK button. If you’ve only used the page to view availability and don’t want to insert a variant, then close the page without choosing the OK button.
The page shows one line for each period. Each line shows the item’s availability figures in the following key fields:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Gross Requirement | Specifies the sum of the total demand for the item. The gross requirement consists of independent demand and dependent demand. Independent demand includes sales orders, service orders, transfer orders, and production forecasts. Dependent demand includes production order components for planned, firm planned, and released production orders. It also includes requisition and planning worksheets lines. |
| Scheduled Receipt | Specifies the sum of items from replenishment orders. The calculation includes firm planned and released production orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders. |
| Planned Order Receipt | Specifies the sum of items from planned production orders. |
| Projected Available Balance | Specifies the calculated available inventory. |
| Planned Order Releases | Specifies the sum of items from replenishment order proposals. The calculation includes planned production orders. it also includes planning or requisition worksheets lines that are calculated according to the starting date in the planning worksheet and production order or the order date in the requisition worksheet. This sum isn’t included in the projected available inventory. However, it indicates which quantities should be converted from planned to scheduled receipts. |
Starting in 2022 release wave 2, admins can require that users specify the variant in documents and journals for items that have variants. To activate the capability, on the Inventory Setup page, and select the Variant Mandatory if Exists field. You can override this global setting for specific items.
There are different ways to categorise items within Business Central, but each of them serve a slightly different purpose and it’s important to understand in which scenario which option would work best.
Categories and attributes are two different ways of grouping inventory items. Item variant is a way to indicate that a specific item is available in different colours or sizes, for example. Depending on how you set up your inventory, you can use categories to group chairs versus desks, and then use attributes to group green items versus blue items, for example. You can then supplement this setup by adding variants to each type of chair and desk. By adding variants, you can run reports such as Item Availability by Variant to identify differences between the blue chairs versus the green chairs, for example.
If you’d like to discuss more about Business Central’s many efficiencies and how to use them, or about making the move across to BC, reach out today to Brookland Solutions for a no obligation discussion. Get in touch!
March 3, 2025
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