Business Central 29 Direct Transfers Add Route-Level Posting and Warehouse Pick Support

The roadmap gives a month, not a day. It also warns that all release information can change. Third-party coverage of Business Central 29.0 places the feature in the release's supply chain work. Tine Staelens' "thinkaboutit.be" preview summary says direct transfer orders now work from source locations that require inventory picks or warehouse shipments.

Direct transfers in one paragraph​

Business Central has two ways to move stock between locations with a transfer order:

• Conventional transfer: Goods go through an in-transit location. You ship at one end, wait, and receive at the other. Stock sits "on the truck" in the meantime.
• Direct transfer: No in-transit location. Shipment and receipt happen at the same moment.

Direct transfers suit sites across the car park from each other, or moves where nobody needs to track goods on the road. Until now, though, the convenience often didn't fit well with warehouses running picks and shipments.

Summary: Direct transfers skip the in-transit stage. This update is about making them work properly when the source warehouse has rules about how stock leaves the building.

What actually changed: posting method per route​

Before this update, one setting on the Inventory Setup page decided how Business Central posted every direct transfer in the company. The roadmap entry describes a two-level model:

1. Company default: Set Default Direct Transfer Posting on the Inventory Setup page.
2. Route override: On the Transfer Routes page, set Direct Transfer Posting for any route that should behave differently.
3. Order-level adjustment: You can change Direct Transfer Posting on an open Transfer Order when needed.

The rule is simple. If the transfer route has a setting, the order uses it. If not, the order falls back to the Inventory Setup default.

This matters for companies with mixed needs. One route might need separate posted shipment and receipt documents for audit or costing. Another route might just need the stock moved with one clean document. Before, you picked one behaviour for the whole company. Now you choose per route.

Summary: The setting has moved from company-wide only to company default plus route override, with order-level changes allowed while the order is open.

The two posting methods compared​

The roadmap describes two methods:

• Shipment and Receipt: Posts a transfer shipment and a transfer receipt together. Qty. to Ship must equal Qty. to Receive. Partial posting works when you post from a warehouse shipment.
• Direct Transfer: Posts one Posted Direct Transfer document. It posts the full quantity on the transfer line and creates no separate shipment and receipt documents.

Microsoft Learn's page on transferring inventory between locations (last updated April 7, 2026) adds context the roadmap leaves out. It compares the modes as they worked under the old company-wide setting. Microsoft's rollout notes don't confirm that every row still applies, but it shows why the two methods aren't interchangeable:

In practice, Direct Transfer is the lean option. It creates two ledger entries and one document, with nothing extra. If your finance team assigns item charges, such as freight, to transfer receipts, Shipment and Receipt is the method that keeps that possible. Getting this choice wrong on a route isn't a disaster. You may just find out at month-end that the document you need doesn't exist.

Summary: Choose Direct Transfer for simplicity and Shipment and Receipt when you need receipt-side documents and item charges. Per-route settings let you make that call per lane instead of once for the whole company.