Some of our customers, especially distributors and retailers, often buy and sell one-off items. These are items they have not bought or sold before and may never again. One-off items are often sold through special orders.

This is often a head-scratcher for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central users. BC does not offer a Miscellaneous Article functionality and organizations typically want to avoid creating multiple items, even if they are non-stock, for one-off transactions.

Since it is possible to use miscellaneous vendors or customers for one-off purchases and sales, people often have the reflex of creating a miscellaneous article to use for these one-off transactions. This, however clever it may look at first, can create havoc in your system.

Let’s discuss some of the impacts of using a miscellaneous item in Business Central. The first problem arises from costing concerns. Unless you apply lot or serial number traceability combined with specific costing for each item, which can be a painful solution due to the multiplication of unique identifiers, your inventory valuation for this miscellaneous item will quickly derail.

Consider this scenario:

You purchase a $500 electrical device. Receive it.

You then purchase a $5 gizmo and receive it before the expensive electrical device gets invoiced and shipped.

At this moment, your accrued inventory value of $505 on the books is good. Your item cost, however, is off. If using Average costing, for example, your cost is now $252.50.

Now, if you were to ship and invoice the gizmo, it would be at $252.50. Your Cost of Good Sold value would obviously be wrong and your electrical device remaining in inventory would be undervalued.

This would happen whether the purchased items are invoiced or not at the moment you invoice your sale. This scenario can happen regularly in high volume environments.

We recommend using multiple miscellaneous items, reusing them over time, so that a purchase and sale cycle is completed, and the inventory is nil, before the item is utilized again.

If you want to continue using a single miscellaneous item, then we suggest isolating them from your chart of accounts by configuring posting groups that do not hit regular accounts, such as text accounts like MISCCOGS or MISCINV if your CofA is all numerical. Which it typically would be.

This approach will allow you to track quantities in inventory, purchase and sales documents. Keep in mind, however, that the cost of your item card would pretty much always be incorrect and that none of your transactions would hit the books. You would have to create manual entries every month for stock, accrued inventory, cost of goods sold, etc.

Hope this helps.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us should you have concerns or questions.