An item ledger entry is the record Business Central creates for each posted quantity movement of an item: receipts, shipments, transfers and adjustments.
An item ledger entry, often shortened to ILE, is the quantity side of inventory in Business Central. One entry is created every time a document or a journal that moves an item is posted, and it carries the item number, the posting date, the location, the quantity and the entry type, for example Purchase, Sale, Transfer, Positive Adjmt. or Negative Adjmt. Item ledger entries are not edited by hand: they are the audit trail of what actually moved.
Search for Item Ledger Entries with Alt+Q to open the full list. You can also open the entries for a single item from the item card, using the actions that show the entries of that item. From a posted purchase receipt or a posted sales shipment, the action that finds the entries created by the document takes you to the same records with the right filter already applied.
Item 1928-S, an office chair, is received on 03.03.2026 against purchase order 106023 from vendor Fabrikam at location BLUE, 20 pieces at CHF 120. Posting the receipt creates one item ledger entry with Entry Type Purchase, Quantity 20, Remaining Quantity 20 and Location Code BLUE. When 5 pieces are shipped to a customer on 12.03.2026, a second entry appears with Entry Type Sale and Quantity -5, and the remaining quantity on the purchase entry drops to 15.
Two problems come back constantly. First, people read the cost shown next to an entry as final right after posting, when it is only complete once expected costs have been replaced by invoiced costs and the cost adjustment has run. Second, entries are ordered by posting date, not by the date somebody did the posting, so a back-dated document lands in an earlier period and quietly changes an inventory value that was already reported. Deleting is not an option either: a wrong movement is corrected with an opposite posting, never by removing the entry.
Most inventory questions are really questions about item ledger entries, but the list is wide and the filters are long. Zentriq Agent runs read-only queries over this data inside Business Central, so a user can ask which movements exist for an item at a location over a period without building a view first. Anything that would write back, such as a correcting item journal, is proposed for a person to approve before it is posted.
Negative quantities are outbound movements: sales shipments, consumption, negative adjustments and the outbound side of a transfer. Inbound movements such as receipts and positive adjustments are positive.
No. Posted entries are permanent. You correct a mistake with a compensating posting, for example an item journal line with the opposite quantity, or with the undo action on the posted shipment or receipt when it is still available.
Zentriq's AI tools automate many of the manual processes around item ledger entry in Business Central. Learn about the Zentriq Agent or try Zentriq PunchOut to see how AI simplifies procurement in BC.