ContainerQ User Guide: Overview & Getting Started
This section is the actual manual — what ContainerQ does, in the terms you’ll see on screen, one topic per page. Start here for the shape of the whole thing; the pages after this go deep on each piece.
What ContainerQ is
ContainerQ gives Business Central a real license plate entity — a pallet, tote, carton, or container you build, pack, move, and nest, one unit at a time, instead of re-declaring its contents at every step.
What makes that identity trustworthy is the part most container apps gloss over. For items Business Central tracks with its own package-specific item tracking, the platform’s own posting engine is what refuses to let a container and its contents come apart — ContainerQ rides that enforcement directly. For everything else, ContainerQ keeps its own record and continuously re-checks it against the real ledger, and shows you the result on the container itself. Either way, the app’s own tables are never trusted as inventory truth on their own — they’re re-derived from the ledger, and every posting is confirmed by an independent second read before it’s reported complete.
Underneath that, item tracking — lot, serial, package — and expiration dates are attached the way Business Central actually requires, not bolted on afterward. Containers get SSCC-18 and GS1-128 labels so an identity built on your dock still means something to a carrier or a trading partner. Containers can nest inside other containers, several levels deep, and every action against them is written to an append-only event log. All of it was built by reading Microsoft’s own Base Application source rather than guessing at how Business Central behaves.
ContainerQ works on its own. It also coexists with BDP WarehouseQ, our separate warehouse-operations extension, for teams running both — see working alongside WarehouseQ for exactly what that does and doesn’t mean today.
How to read this manual
Each page below covers one concept or one set of actions, in the exact language the product uses on screen. If you’d rather skip the explanations and just do something, jump straight to build your first pallet — it walks the whole path from an empty container to a verified post.
As with everything in this Help Center, present-tense claims here describe the version of ContainerQ currently shipping. Where a capability is designed but not yet available — split and merge, for instance — this manual says so plainly rather than describing the roadmap as if it were already true. If you’re evaluating a compliance-critical workflow, verify current behavior in your own environment before depending on it.
Before you start
You don’t need to read this manual in order, but it’s written assuming you already have the concepts from the Learn section: what a license plate actually is, what an SSCC carries, and why any container app’s record can drift from the truth underneath it. If any of those terms feel unfamiliar, the Learn section covers them in plain language before this manual starts using them as product vocabulary.
This manual also assumes you’re the one operating the app day to day — building containers, packing stock, moving pallets, working a scanner or the browser client — rather than the person configuring item tracking or permissions for the first time. Setup itself, including how item tracking has to be configured before ContainerQ can attach it correctly, is its own page: setup reference.
What you’ll meet in this manual
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Binding modes explained | The field on every container that tells you which kind of guarantee you’re looking at — Package bind or Positional bind — and why the difference matters. The most important page in this manual. |
| Pack, Move, Split, Merge and Nest | The core actions that build and change a container, and which ones are available today versus planned. |
| Quality holds | How to quarantine a container — and everything nested inside it — while a quality issue is resolved. |
| Labels and barcodes | How ContainerQ prints a container’s identity as a scannable, standards-based barcode, and what that label does and doesn’t guarantee. |
| Working alongside WarehouseQ | How ContainerQ relates to BDP WarehouseQ today — no more, and no less. |
| Setup reference | Permissions, your GS1 Company Prefix, and container-type defaults. |
A word on scope
ContainerQ is early-stage software, and this manual is written to reflect that honestly. Some of what a full license-plating product could eventually do — splitting a container’s contents onto another container, merging two containers into one, receiving stock directly onto a new container, or shipping straight from one — is designed but not yet reachable in the shipped product. What’s real today is building, packing, moving, and nesting containers, with binding-mode-aware posting and a continuously re-checked ledger record throughout. The FAQ’s honest-boundary answer states the current line plainly, and it’s worth reading before you plan a workflow around a capability this manual doesn’t confirm is live.