There are several settings in Inventory Setup and General Ledger setup that need to be reviewed when multiple users are required to post shipments and other inventory transactions simultaneously:

The “Automatic Cost Posting” and “Automatic Cost Adjustment” settings cause the system to perform a number of background posting and record locking tasks when an inventory transaction is posted, which can cause locking errors very quickly when multiple users are posting simultaneously.

If you’re posting transactions through Warehouse Insight from the handhelds or relying on data that may be locked, it’s possible that these locking errors could manifesting as “bad data” or locking errors on the scanners. Warehouse Insight is not causing these errors, it is simply reporting the base Business Central error.

If your environment relies on multiple people posting inventory transactions simultaneously, the recommended settings are to turn off “Automatic Cost Posting” and set “Automatic Cost Adjustment” to “Never”. You can change those at any time without issue.

When turning off “Automatic Cost Posting”, also turn off “Use Legacy G/L Table Locking” in the “General Ledger Setup” – when that setting is enabled it will also create more table locks and potential performance issues than necessary (it’s called “legacy” for a reason – the non-legacy approach is significantly faster).

Once those settings have been changed, you will need to perform the cost adjustment and posting periodically. You can schedule the cost adjustment to run nightly (or weekly or monthly) using the “Adjust Cost – Item Entries” batch job. You can post the inventory costs to the G/L periodically using the “Post Inventory Cost to G/L” report. Unfortunately, you can’t easily schedule the posting report without doing a modification so this may be a manual step, often only done at month end.

Order Tracking

When Order Tracking is enabled, Business Central creates and modifies records in the Reservation Entry table whenever supply or demand records change (e.g., Sales Lines and Purchase Lines). The Reservation Entry table is also used for managing Lot and Serial numbers, so in mid- to high-volume environments the additional activity due to Order Tracking could cause locking when attempting to manage Lot or Serial numbers.

Turning off Order Tracking is highly recommended unless very specifically required. This is done on the Item Card per item under the Planning tab. Set “Order Tracking Policy” to “None”. This can be done in bulk through RapidStart or the “Edit in Excel” function.

Changing these settings can have a significant impact on overall system performance, including Warehouse Insight performance on the handhelds.