Hello everyone,
I’m facing an issue in Business Central related to unit of measure conversion precision.
I have an item (a metal sheet) that is purchased in kilograms (KG), but its base unit of measure is pieces (PZ). To produce 1 PZ of this item, 480 KG of material are required.
In the “Item Units of Measure” table, I defined the conversion as:
1 PZ = 480 KG, which implies that 1 KG = 1 / 480 = 0.00208.
However, Business Central rounds this value to 5 decimal places, so the system stores 0.00208.
The problem is that when I multiply:
480 × 0.00208 = 0.9984,
which is not equal to 1, and this causes discrepancies in inventory and costing.
Unfortunately, the customer does not want to reverse the units of measure (i.e., set KG as the base and PZ as the alternate), which would solve the issue more easily.
Has anyone encountered this limitation before? Is there a workaround to increase the precision or handle this conversion more accurately without changing the base unit?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Hi,
I have some bad news - hopefully someone else knows a better solution.
As a general rule of thumb, I tell customers that they want/need to use the SMALLEST unit of measure that they purchase/use/sell in as the BASE and then larger units of measure are the alternates.
I’ve had a lot of customers struggle with this, and really there aren’t any work arounds.
Create a new item with the Base Unit as Kg, the alternate as PZ, and the PZ = 480 Kg and it’ll work great.
I don’t know if this is addressed in new versions, but you would want to be able to do inventory entries in PZ so when you do a cycle count you don’t need to know the KG.
Also you might want to have someone program a fact-box so that you can tell how many sheets you have in stock.
NOTE/THOUGHT
I think it’s best practice for sheets you use Sq. M or Sq. CM rather than Kg - although it’s not super important.
Also I would not call it PZ in case you buy sheets of different sizes in the future. I don’t know standard metric sheet sizes but if it is like North America I would expect sheets to be 1.5m x 3m as a standard size - so maybe SH-1.5-3.0 or SH-15x30 as a Unit of Measure would be better in case you ever buy them in 1.5m x 4.5m sizes in the future etc.
Hope this helps
Thanks Robert for your reply. I was a bit concerned, as it seems there isn’t a standard solution that fully meets the customer’s expectations (considering PZ – we’re Italian – or PCS as base units of measure). Still, I really appreciate your time and support. Have a great day!
You can set a Rounding Precision within the Item Unit of Measure table so that it converts .9984 to 1. You would want to run through several scenarios to ensure your Rounding Precision properly handles all of your potential builds. For example, don’t use Rounding Precision = 1 if you are going to produce half sheets, or it will round them all up to 1.
As previously mentioned, best practice is Base Unit of Measure = Smallest Unit, but with Rounding Precision you can get much closer to reality.
Hi Soldatino,
I learned that the Piece in Italian has a Z in it! Love learning new things.
My point to not use a “non dimensional” unit of measure - eg: PCS or PZ - for something that has dimensions remains unchanged.
If your customer buys sheets of material, use the smaller unit of measure as the base (kg in our case) and include the dimensions in the UofM so they can in the future buy other sizes.