How to post a sales invoice in Business Central

A sales invoice in Business Central is the document that bills a customer and, when posted, creates the accounting entry and (for stocked items) reduces inventory in one action. It's one of the two most common documents in the Sales module, alongside the sales order, and for a lot of small and mid-size businesses it's the single most frequently used screen in the whole system.

Where it lives

From the Business Central role centre, search (Alt+Q, or the magnifying-glass icon) for Sales Invoices and open the list. A new invoice is created from there, or from a customer card's New Document action, which pre-fills the customer.

Steps

1. Open a new sales invoice. Search for "Sales Invoices," select New, and choose the customer. Business Central fills in the customer's default currency, payment terms, and address from the customer card.
2. Check the header fields. Posting date defaults to today; change it if you're invoicing for a prior period. Confirm the Payment Terms Code and Shipment Method are right for this customer — both come from the customer card but can be overridden per document.
3. Add invoice lines. Each line needs a type (Item, G/L Account, Resource, or Fixed Asset) and a number. Type or paste in an item number, or use the item picker, and enter quantity. Unit price pulls from the item's sales price setup; you can override it on the line if this customer or order has a special price.
4. Review quantity and price together. The Line Amount and Amount Including VAT fields at the bottom of the page update live — check them before posting, especially if you changed a unit price or discount manually.
5. Attach anything the customer needs to see. Use the paperclip/attachment icon to add a PO reference or supporting document; it travels with the posted invoice record for later reference.
6. Post it. Use the Post action, or Post and Send / Post and Print if the customer needs the document immediately. Business Central asks you to confirm before posting.
7. Find it afterward. Posted invoices move to Posted Sales Invoices, searchable by customer, number, or date, and remain there for the life of the company data.

What you need

Posting requires a role that includes sales-invoice posting permissions — most Business Central seats include this by default for a sales or finance role, but check with your administrator if the Post button is missing or disabled. Licensing for who can access Business Central at all sits with your subscription plan; check current licensing with your partner or admin rather than assuming every named user has the same permissions.

Limits and gotchas

• Posted means locked. There is no "unpost" for a routine correction — plan for a credit memo or the Cancel/Correct action rather than trying to edit a posted invoice.
• Wrong posting date, wrong period. If your fiscal periods are closed for a date range, Business Central refuses to post into it — check the posting date first if you get a blocking error.
• Price and discount surprises. Unit prices and line discounts come from pricing setup tied to the customer, customer price group, or item. If a line looks wrong, it's almost always the pricing setup rather than a data-entry mistake — ask whoever maintains sales prices before overriding it manually every time.
• Reserved stock. If the item is reserved against another order, posting can be blocked or can pull from a quantity you didn't expect. Item tracking with lot and serial numbers in Business Central covers how reservation and tracking interact on shipped lines.
• Dimensions on the line. Many companies require a department, project, or cost-centre dimension on every sales line for reporting. If posting is blocked with a dimension error, see Using dimensions on a sales document in Business Central.

A quick sanity check before you post

Before hitting Post, it's worth a thirty-second pass over the whole document rather than just the last line you typed: does the Bill-to and Sell-to address match what the customer actually asked for (they're not always the same company for a branch or subsidiary), does the currency match what was quoted, and does the total including VAT look like the right order of magnitude for this customer. Most posting mistakes are caught at this stage, not after the document is locked. A new user's most common early error is leaving the posting date on today's date when the invoice actually belongs to a prior period close — check it explicitly rather than trusting the default every time, particularly in the first few days of a new month.

Once the invoice is posted, the next routine task is usually recording the customer's payment against it — see How to apply a customer payment in Business Central for that step.