In the real or physical world, you cannot have negative inventory and to ensure your inventory costing remains accurate, negative inventory can be blocked when using basic inventory functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Please note that if you are using Warehousing or Locations with Bins, Business Central will not allow you to have negative inventory regardless of these settings.
To prevent Negative inventory
You can set a default value in Inventory Setup which sets the default value on each new item card created. Within Inventory Setup you can put a checkmark in the Prevent Negative Inventory.
To do this, search for and then select the Inventory Setup page and set Prevent Negative Inventory to “True” as shown in the image below.
When you select the check mark in Prevent Negative Inventory all new Inventory Items created will have Prevent Negative Inventory set to Default (Yes). If the check mark is not selected, the value will be set to Default (No).
The user can confirm the Value in the Item Card as shown in the image below.
Allowing an individual item to post as negative inventory
If you want to allow an individual item to post transactions that can create negative inventory, then you can edit the individual Item Card Prevent Negative Inventory and select No on this field for that item. That is No, you do not want to prevent negative inventory.
If, however you do want to block negative inventory and you have set all items to Prevent Negative Inventory, Business Central will not allow the user to post a transaction that will result in a Negative Inventory quantity.
Depending on your company & individual settings in Business Central, you may receive a warning that there is insufficient stock prior to posting the transaction.
If you ignore the warning and proceed to posting, you will receive the following error message and you will not be able to post the transaction until there is inventory on hand to prevent negative inventory.
