Products / SmartFloor Production
One document for one batch of production work.
Consumption, output, scrap and rework live on a single production batch, posted as often as the plant demands. Every post is an immutable checkpoint against Business Central’s own ledgers, and the live balance is re-read from the ledger afterwards.
Pre-release
SmartFloor Production is built to a complete specification and is approaching first release. It is not published to Microsoft AppSource and it is not installed at a customer site. Its automated tests run against a real Business Central container. There is no figure, no benefit percentage and no customer reference anywhere on this page, because none exists yet.
The problem
Production reporting arrives after the production.
Standard Business Central will happily record a whole batch in one sitting. The trouble is that the batch does not happen in one sitting.
One order, many visits
A batch of work is not one event. The line consumes, produces, scraps and reworks across a shift, and the paperwork is expected to arrive once, at the end, complete and correct.
So the floor keeps its own copy
Between posts the real state of the batch lives on a whiteboard or a clipboard, because the system only knows what was entered the last time somebody sat down at it.
And the ledger finds out late
Consumption posted hours after the material moved makes work in progress a guess for the rest of the shift, and the variance shows up at close rather than at the machine.
How it works
A batch you can post from, repeatedly, without losing the thread.
- 01
One document for the batch
Consumption, output, scrap and rework sit on a single production batch with its own lines and routing, instead of being spread across separate journals that have to be reconciled to each other afterwards.
- 02
Post as often as the plant demands
The document is continuously postable. An operator posts what has happened so far, keeps working, and posts again — the document stays open and the ledger stays current.
- 03
Every post is an immutable checkpoint
Each post writes a checkpoint against Business Central’s native ledgers. A checkpoint is a record of what was posted and when, and it is never rewritten — corrections are new movements, not edits to history.
- 04
The balance is re-read, not remembered
After every post the live balance is read back out of the ledger rather than carried forward in the document. The number on screen is what Business Central actually holds, not what the page believed it should hold.
The rule it is built on
The ledger stays the only record of truth.
SmartFloor Production does not keep a private tally of the batch and reconcile it later. It posts through Business Central’s own routines, records what came back, and then re-reads the balance from the ledger.
That is a deliberate constraint rather than an implementation detail. A shop-floor tool that maintains its own running figures becomes a second source of truth, and the day the two disagree is the day nobody trusts either.
What it does not do
- It does not schedule. Sequencing work across resources is SmartFlow APS.
- It does not write inventory or capacity entries directly.
- It does not replace the production order — it posts against it.
- It does not hold a balance of its own between posts.
Checkable, today, by your own reviewer
Three things you do not have to take on trust.
A pre-release product cannot offer you a reference. It can offer you statements precise enough that your own technical lead can disprove them, and these are the three that decide whether an extension posting to inventory and the general ledger is safe to evaluate at all.
It never writes a ledger entry
Posting goes through codeunit "Item Jnl.-Post Line" and Business Central’s native item-tracking path — the same code the platform runs when you post an item journal by hand. The extension never inserts, modifies or deletes an Item Ledger Entry. No shadow inventory, no parallel cost model, no side ledger.
It adds no field to any Microsoft table
There is not one table extension in the product. No column to orphan and no schema to migrate on the day you uninstall it. Three page extensions add navigation actions only, and they leave with the app; SmartFloor’s own records live in SmartFloor’s own tables.
It has no dependencies and calls nothing
The dependency list is empty in v1 and stays empty. No content delivery network, no fetched web font, no runtime network call from the server or the browser, no dynamic code evaluation, and no secret held anywhere.
Each is a statement about the source rather than about the benefit, which is the point: it is the kind of claim a reviewer settles in an afternoon.
Questions
Before you ask us
Does it post to the ledger itself?
No. Posting goes through Business Central’s own posting routines, and the checkpoint records the result. That is deliberate: an extension that writes inventory or capacity entries directly becomes the second source of truth, and reconciling two of those is a worse problem than the one it set out to solve.
What happens to a mistake?
It is corrected the way Business Central corrects anything — with a further movement that is itself posted and checkpointed. Nothing already posted is edited, so the history of the batch stays readable after the fact.
Does the floor need Business Central training?
The batch is presented as a single visual document rather than as journal lines, which is the point of the format. It is still Business Central underneath, and it still respects the permissions and the posting rules the tenant already has.
How does this differ from SmartFlow APS?
SmartFlow APS decides the sequence — what should run, on which resource, in what order. SmartFloor Production records what actually happened when it ran. One plans, the other posts, and a plant usually feels the second problem first.
Next step
Bring one batch and we will walk it through.
Thirty minutes with an engineer. We will show you the document on a real production order and tell you plainly whether standard Business Central already covers what you need.
sales@dynamicspro.ca · Serving North America · 416-843-6575