Item tracking with lots and serial numbers in BC

Item tracking is how Business Central follows individual units (serial numbers) or batches (lot numbers) of an item through receiving, storage, and shipping. If your company sells anything with a warranty, expiry date, or recall risk, this is the feature that lets you answer "which customers got units from that batch" without searching paper records.

Where it lives

Item tracking appears wherever a tracked item is used on a document line — purchase receipts, sales shipments, transfers, assembly orders — via the Item Tracking Lines action (often a small icon in the line, or accessible from the line's menu). Historical lookups happen through Item Tracing, searchable directly by item or lot/serial number.

Steps: assigning tracking on receipt

1. Post a purchase receipt for a tracked item as normal — quantity, price, everything else works the same as any other line.
2. Open Item Tracking Lines on that line before posting. Business Central flags that the item requires tracking information.
3. Enter or scan the lot or serial number(s). For a lot, one number can cover the whole quantity on the line; for serial numbers, each unit needs its own entry, so a quantity of 10 means 10 distinct numbers.
4. Confirm quantities match — the tracking lines total must equal the line quantity before you can post.
5. Post the receipt. The lot or serial is now on hand and traceable from this point forward.

Steps: selecting tracking on shipment

1. Add the item to a sales order or shipment as usual.
2. Open Item Tracking Lines on the line. Business Central shows available lots or serials currently on hand, often defaulting to a first-in-first-out or first-expired-first-out suggestion depending on setup.
3. Select which lot/serial to ship, adjusting quantity per lot if the order needs to draw from more than one.
4. Post the shipment or invoice. The system now knows exactly which units left and to which customer.

Looking up history

Open Item Tracing, search by the item and lot/serial number, and review the resulting trace — every receipt, transfer, and shipment that lot touched, in both directions. This is the report to run first in any recall or quality investigation.

What you need

Using item tracking on a document requires no special permission beyond posting rights for that document type — the tracking prompt appears automatically for any item configured for it. Setting up which items require lot or serial tracking, and any automatic numbering, is normally an inventory or IT administrator task. Check current licensing for warehouse or advanced inventory features if your company plans to add barcode scanning on top of manual entry — that typically needs a specific module or add-on.

Limits and gotchas

• You can't skip tracking on a required item. If the item card says it needs lot or serial tracking, the line won't post without it — there's no "just this once" override in the standard flow.
• Expiry dates, if used, block shipping expired stock depending on configuration — don't assume you can always override an expiry warning without checking company policy first.
• Mixing tracking types isn't standard. An item is normally lot-tracked or serial-tracked, not both, so don't expect to enter both a lot and a serial for the same line.
• Corrections after posting need a proper reversal, not a manual data fix — undoing a wrongly-assigned lot on a posted shipment usually means a correcting transaction, handled by whoever manages inventory adjustments in your company.

Getting tracking numbers right the first time

The most common frustration with item tracking isn't the feature itself, it's inconsistent data entry — a lot number typed with a stray space, a leading zero dropped, a barcode scanned into the wrong field. Any of these breaks the trace even though the physical item is perfectly fine, because Item Tracing matches on exact values. If your company receives items with vendor-assigned lot numbers on a label, scanning rather than retyping is worth the extra minute it takes to confirm your scanner is configured correctly, since a scanning error is far less common than a manual typing error once the setup is right. It's also worth checking, the first time you work with a newly tracked item, whether your organisation expects expiration dates entered alongside the lot number — some industries require it, others don't track it at all, and the item card setup decides which applies.

Tracked items are usually also on documents that need dimensions filled in correctly, and the receiving side of tracking connects directly to how to create a purchase order in Business Central.