Stock availability

The register is location-aware: it knows which Business Central location each store sells from, shows stock signals against that location, and can look across every location when an item is out of stock here. Availability is advisory by design - it informs the cashier, it never blocks a sale.

Where availability appears

Register tiles show Out and low-stock badges against this store's location, so a cashier sees the state of the shelf before scanning.
"Available nearby" toast - adding an item that is out of stock at your store raises a non-blocking toast naming the location holding the most stock. The line is still added; the sale proceeds normally.
Price Check shows a per-location availability table for the scanned item, with your own store's location pinned to the top - see Price check.

NOTE

Selling out-of-stock never blocks a sale. Badges and toasts are advisory; the authoritative inventory movement happens when the document posts in Business Central.

The Store Location Code

Each POS Store carries a Location Code - the BC inventory location that store sells from. It is the anchor for everything on this page:

Adding a mapped item stamps the store's Location Code onto the POS sale line, and that location is what ultimately posts to the BC sales line.
Pricing and estimated SKU cost use the same location context.
Variants, the selling unit of measure, and scale-captured lines all use the same location authority; returns copy the frozen source location from the original sale.
In Price Check, the store's own location is pinned first in the availability table.

A store with a blank Location Code can still list locations in Price Check, but it has no authoritative selling location - configure a valid named location before selling mapped items. See Multi-store operations for the store card fields.

How availability is computed

Availability is the live available-to-sell quantity for the exact item, variant, location, and selling unit of measure:

posted Business Central inventory,
minus inventory reservations,
minus unreserved outstanding BC Sales Order demand,
minus positive Released POS sales not yet represented by a BC order.

Demand reserved against inbound supply does not consume current on-hand twice. Open carts are not counted as demand. When end of day creates an exact linked BC order for a POS sale, that order replaces the POS demand, so the quantity is only ever counted once.

Actual inventory changes when the Sales Invoice or Credit Memo posts. In create-order mode, creating the BC Sales Order alone does not move inventory - shipping and posting the order does. See Consolidated posting.

Setup

Map your POS items to BC items so stock is tracked per item - see POS items and catalog.
Give every POS Store a valid Location Code so each store's stock is tracked against its own BC location.
Open the register and confirm tiles show stock badges, and Price Check shows the per-location table with your store pinned first.

TIP

In a single-store company, still set the Location Code. It keeps posting, cost, and availability on one named location instead of the blank location, and makes a later second store a configuration change rather than a data migration.

Turning availability lookups off

Stock visibility is a register-profile capability (Stock Availability). When it is disabled for a role, the availability controls are absent from the register and direct server lookups are rejected - useful for roles that should ring sales without browsing inventory across locations. See the Role profiles playbook. Price Check as a whole can also be disabled per terminal (for example on a customer-facing till) via the terminal's Disable Price Check field.