inventory-item-variants.md

title	description	author	ms.author	ms.reviewer	ms.topic	ms.search.keywords	ms.search.form	ms.date	ms.service
Manage product variants	Learn how you can record products that are almost identical but vary in color, size, or material as item variants.	brentholtorf	bholtorf	bholtorf	conceptual	item, variant, finished good, component, raw material, assembly item, item substitution	30, 5717, 31, 32, 346, 9091, 5718, 5716, 5720, 1384, 1383, 35, 5404, 1378, 5719	06/13/2024	dynamics-365-business-central

Manage product variants

Item variants are a great way to keep your list of products under control. For example, you have a large number of items that are almost identical and vary only in color. You can define each variant as a separate item. But you can also choose to set up one item and specify the various colors as variants of the item.

Tip

For a practical introduction to using variants in production, see Walkthrough: Variants for the Contoso Coffee demo data.

Add variants to an item

It's easy enough to define variants for an item.

To add variants

1. Open the Items List page, open the relevant item.
2. On the Item card, choose the Related action, then choose Item, and then choose the Variants action.
3. On the Item Variants page, list the variants.

Then, when you create a sales document and add the item, you can specify the variant of the item in the Variant Code field. The same applies to purchasing documents.

Item availability by variant

[!INCLUDE inventory_variant-availability]

Require use of variants

Starting in 2022 release wave 2, admins can require that users specify the variant in documents and journals for items that have variants. To activate the capability, on the Inventory Setup page, and select the Variant Mandatory if Exists field. You can override this global setting for specific items.

On item cards, the Variant Mandatory if Exists field has the following options:

Field value	Description
Default (No)	The setting from Inventory Setup applies to this item.
No	Users aren't required to specify a variant for this item.
Yes	If the item has one or more variants, users must specify the relevant variant. If they don't, they're blocked from posting the transaction.

Note

These settings don't affect items that don't have variants.

If the capability is switched on, you can't post an entry if the variant isn't specified.

Categories, attributes, and variants

[!INCLUDEinventory_variant]

See also

Register New Items
Set Up General Inventory Information
Walkthrough: Variants