Dynamics 365 Business Central – Using a Negative Quantity on a Sales Order to Return Items

Gavin Whittaker

I ran into a situation recently where a user had shipped some goods from a Sales Order, which had subsequently been returned prior to the Sales Order being Invoiced. This led me to discover an interesting way to return the goods, and then invoice the Sales Order all at the same time.

After some testing I realised they could add a negative line for the same item, and ship and invoice this all at the same time.

The exact situation and steps I took are described below.

Below is a Sales Order that has a quantity of 10 that have been shipped:

Prior to invoicing this the client has returned 2 therefore I’ve reopened the Sales Order and added an additional line item for -2 for the same item.

I can now Ship and Invoice all the lines which will return 2 into my inventory and also only invoice a total of 8.

If I now check my Item Ledger Entries I can see both entries for this item. There’s a negative 10, as we originally shipped 10, and a positive 2 for the items returned.

I tested this with and without different location settings such as “Require Warehouse Receive” and “Require Warehouse Shipment” and it seems to work fine. I didn’t test it with full WMS switched on and I suspect it may hit problems there.

Thanks for reading!

3 thoughts on “Dynamics 365 Business Central – Using a Negative Quantity on a Sales Order to Return Items”

  1. Vaibhav's avatar Vaibhav 24th Mar 2020 / 1:47 pm

    I think, i may be wrong, this will create a mismatch when you run standard inventory valuation report.
    I think undo shipment function will best fit in such scenarios.

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    • Gavin Whittaker's avatar Gavin Whittaker 24th Mar 2020 / 2:14 pm

      Hi, Thanks very much for the feedback. I’m be sure to check this out. Thanks again.

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  2. Joel D's avatar Joel D 17th Oct 2024 / 9:34 pm

    I just used this in a BC company where 6 of the item were special-ordered (linked to a PO), and then the customer decided they would only buy 3, after we had already received all 6 from the vendor, but before we had shipped them to the customer. In this case BC would not let us reduce the quantity on the sales line (because of the linked PO).

    So we posted warehouse shipment/pick for all 6 (and physically only shipped 3), and then added the row for negative quantity. Then to “ship” the negative quantity we posted a warehouse receipt (and put-away) for the line with -3: you can do Prepare → Get Source Documents on a new warehouse receipt and it will let you select the sales order with the negative-quantity line. Then the sales invoice included both lines, resulting in a net charge for 3 chairs.

    There should be no issue with inventory valuation, because as far as BC is concerned the items left and then were received into the warehouse in the same way as everything else.

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