Your inventory is either working for you or quietly costing you. In this joint webinar with Cavallo, we covered the GP inventory features most teams overlook and showed how SalesPad Inventory Manager brings mobile, real-time efficiency to your warehouse floor.
This is the second session in our four-part webinar series with Cavallo, focused on helping Dynamics GP customers work smarter across every part of their business. If you missed our first session on turning GP data into profit with ProfitMax Platform, you can read the recap on the Njevity blog. Each session builds on the last, but they stand alone just as well.
In this session, Paige Horne walked through practical inventory tips inside native GP — the kind of functionality that has always been there but often goes unused. Then Michael DeFazio, Solutions Engineer at Cavallo, demonstrated how SalesPad Inventory Manager extends GP’s capabilities with a full mobile experience built for the warehouse.
The GP Inventory Features You Might Be Ignoring
Most GP users set up their inventory once and don’t revisit the foundation. That’s a missed opportunity. Several native features in GP give you significantly more reporting power, organizational control, and operational accuracy — without any additional software.
Item Descriptions: Short and Generic
Your item card has three description fields: item description, short description, and generic description. Most teams fill in the top one and leave the rest blank. But short description and generic description are reportable fields, meaning you can run profitability and inventory reports sliced by either one.
Think of it this way: an item might be a “Mariners Trucker Hat.” Short description: Ball Cap. Generic description: Hats. Now you can report on all hats, all ball caps, or compare profitability between product categories — without building custom queries.
Item Types: More Than Inventory
Beyond standard inventory, GP supports discontinued, kits, miscellaneous charges, services, and flat fees as item types. A few worth calling out:
- Discontinued marks items you’re no longer purchasing but still need to sell through existing stock. It does not remove items from reporting, and whether sales are prevented depends on the Allow Sale of Discontinued Items setting in the Sales Order Processing Setup Options window. There’s also an option to remove discontinued items as part of the Inventory Year-End Close.
- Kits let you bundle multiple items. Useful when a product always ships with its components. Note that kit quantities are not tracked; only the quantities of the individual components are.
- Services tracks revenue without tracking quantity or cost of goods sold. Ideal for consulting, labor, or time-based charges.
Sites and GL Account Linking
If you operate from multiple locations, sites in GP can be linked to specific GL account segments (Navigation: Inventory > Setup > Inventory Control > Segment ID For Sites). That means inventory sold from your Dallas warehouse automatically posts to the Dallas cost center — no manual override required.
Navigation lists inside the site assignment window also let you mass-assign or unassign items from a site based on criteria like short description or generic description. This is a major timesaver when you need to clean up which items are available at which locations.
Purchase Receipts Inquiry
This is one of the most underused inquiry windows in GP (Navigation: Inventory > Inquiry > Receipts). It shows every inventory movement — in and out — with cost layers, source documents, and quantity detail. If you’re on FIFO, you can see exactly which cost layer is next in line. It’s particularly useful for reconciling discrepancies or validating what happened to a specific lot.
Reconciling the Right Way — In the Right Order
When inventory quantities get out of sync, most people jump straight to reconciling inventory. The better approach follows the order in which the modules interact: reconcile sales orders first, then purchasing, then inventory. Running the reconcile out of sequence leaves issues unresolved.
- Run reconciles with users out of the system to avoid interference from live transactions.
- You may need to run the reconcile sequence more than once to resolve all discrepancies.
- Consider a quarterly schedule, working through a range of items each quarter rather than all at once.
- The Professional Service Tools Library (PSTL) includes a faster inventory reconcile utility if you need to resolve issues quickly.
Stock Count Schedules
GP allows multiple concurrent stock count schedules, and they can overlap. That means you can set up separate schedules for A, B, and C items from your ABC analysis and count them at different frequencies — A items quarterly, B items twice a year, C items annually.
When a count starts, GP freezes the expected quantity at that moment. You can print count sheets, enter counts directly in the stock count entry window, or export to Excel, count, and reimport.
Where GP Ends and SalesPad Inventory Manager Begins
Native GP inventory is solid, but it was designed for desktop use. The moment your warehouse team needs to move through the floor, receive a shipment at the dock, or conduct a stock count across multiple aisles, the desktop becomes a bottleneck.
That’s the gap SalesPad Inventory Manager fills. It integrates fully with GP and brings a mobile-first experience to every inventory workflow, without replacing what GP already does well.
- Full integration with GP — including lock awareness on open orders
- Available on Android and iOS for phones, tablets, and rugged barcode scanners
- User-configurable screens based on role and responsibility
- Works for fulfillment, receiving, site transfers, inventory adjustments, lookups, and stock counts
Stock Counts from the Floor
SalesPad Inventory Manager reads GP’s existing stock count schedules and lets warehouse staff execute counts directly from a handheld device. They can start a count, walk the floor, scan or manually enter quantities, make adjustments on the spot, and submit when complete. No desk required.
Batch Picking
Rather than printing individual pick tickets for each sales order, batch picking groups multiple orders under a single batch ID. A picker pulls up the batch on their mobile device and works through all the orders in one pass — no switching between documents, no stacks of paper. If you’re processing tens or hundreds of orders daily, this alone can meaningfully reduce fulfillment time.
Picking Assignments
Managers can assign specific sales orders or groups of orders to individual pickers by user ID, and pair those assignments with warehouse zones. Each picker logs into the app and sees exactly what they’re responsible for that day — no guesswork, no competing for pick tickets.
Directed Picking
For time-sensitive orders, directed picking automatically prioritizes fulfillment based on configurable parameters: requested ship date, a rush flag, a customer ID, bin location, or specific lot or serial numbers. Rush orders float to the top of the picker’s queue automatically, without anyone manually sorting the list.
Zone Picking
For larger warehouses organized by aisle or zone, zone picking aligns pickers with specific areas. Orders that fall within a zone go to the right person without any daily coordination overhead.
Efficiency Compounds
What stood out most in this webinar was how the features build on each other. Clean item setup leads to better reporting. Better reporting supports smarter stock count scheduling. Smarter counts keep quantities accurate. Accurate quantities make fulfillment reliable. Reliable fulfillment is what gets orders out the door faster.
SalesPad Inventory Manager doesn’t replace GP, it removes the friction points that slow your team down between what GP knows and what your warehouse actually needs to do.
If you’re running GP and your warehouse team is still printing pick tickets, reconciling by hand, or doing stock counts with a clipboard and a spreadsheet, this session is worth watching in full.
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