When your first real warehouse lives inside Business Central

From “stockroom plus spreadsheets” to a real warehouse model

For many mid-market businesses, a Business Central project is not just a new system. It is the moment when a simple stockroom, managed by a few trusted people and spreadsheets, becomes a real warehouse in the eyes of the system.

That jump can feel bigger than expected. Suddenly there are locations, bins, posting setups, zones, put-away strategies, and warehouse documents. The temptation is either to turn everything off and treat Business Central as “just accounting”, or to switch on every advanced feature at once and hope it all works.

In practice, the projects that succeed tend to do something different: they start with a simple but correct warehouse model, and let the physical operation and the data grow into it.

The risk of copying the demo company

Business Central’s demo company is extremely useful for exploration. But it is a poor template for your real warehouse.

The demo data is designed to show features, not to match your:

physical layout and constraints,
customer promise on lead times,
staff skills and available headcount,
actual mix of SKUs, seasons, and suppliers.

When teams copy the demo structure too literally, they often end up with:

Locations and bins that do not reflect the reality of how goods are stored and moved.
Posting setups that produce correct-looking numbers, but are hard to reconcile.
Warehouse documents and tasks that feel like extra paperwork instead of support.

The goal is not to reproduce the demo. It is to design the smallest warehouse model that faithfully represents how your business actually works — and how you want it to work as you grow.

Start with a “minimum viable” warehouse design

A useful first step is to treat your initial Business Central warehouse design as a minimum viable warehouse: not perfect, but deliberate and small.

In our experience, four elements matter more than any barcode scanner or automation:

A clear Location structure – where do you genuinely need different Locations from a planning, cost, and reporting perspective (e.g. main DC vs. showroom vs. consignment)?
Meaningful bins – receiving, shipping, adjustment, and pick/put-away bins that line up with how people physically move stock, not how the system happens to suggest it.
Inventory Posting Setup that finance can live with – so that when a receipt is posted, everyone understands which accounts move and why.
Warehouse roles and responsibilities – who is allowed to do what in the system, in line with real job roles on the floor.

Getting these basics right does not require a huge project, but it does require a conversation between operations, finance, and the implementation team.

Directed put-away & pick: powerful, but not a religion

Directed put-away and pick (DP&P) is one of Business Central’s most powerful warehouse capabilities. It can help you use space better, guide staff, and prepare for higher volumes.

But there is a cost:

More setup work: bin types, zones, rankings, and put-away templates.
More discipline: staff must follow system documents, not only verbal instructions.
More change management: the way people think about “where things go” will shift.

For some businesses, turning on DP&P from day one is the right move. For others, it is better to:

Start with location- and bin-based tracking without full DP&P.
Use simple, stable patterns for receiving and shipping.
Introduce directed flows once the team is comfortable with the basics.

The key is to make a conscious choice, based on throughput, complexity, and readiness, rather than treating DP&P as a checkbox that “must” be ticked because the software supports it.

Let data tell you how the warehouse is really behaving

One of Business Central’s quiet strengths is that, once your warehouse model is in place, it gives you a rich trail of movements, documents, and exceptions. That trail is hugely valuable if you treat it as data, not just history.

With a simple data model and some basic analysis, you can start to see:

Which bins and zones are constantly under pressure.
Where put-away and pick routes are causing unnecessary travel.
Where errors and adjustments cluster, by item, supplier, or shift.

This is where our software and data skills come together: we use Business Central as the backbone, and then apply analysis to tell you not just what happened, but where small, specific changes in layout or process would buy back time and accuracy.

A different way to think about your first BC warehouse

The most successful Business Central warehouse projects we see have a few things in common:

They start smaller than the software allows, but more deliberate than “just turn it on”.
They use a sandbox to explore options before committing them to the live warehouse.
They treat the initial design as version 1, not as something that must be perfect forever.

If you are about to put your first real warehouse into Business Central, the most important decision is not which barcode labels to buy. It is how clearly you describe the way you want goods to move through your business, and how well your system model reflects that.

Once that model is in place, technology can amplify it. Without it, even the best tools will struggle to turn a stockroom and a set of spreadsheets into a warehouse that truly supports growth.