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Card class: Card
Estimated cost of holding aged inventory. Joined with commerce sell-through to flag dead stock with cash impact.

At a glance

Annualised cost of holding inventory: capital + warehousing + obsolescence. Total Inventory Value × Carrying Rate %. Default carrying rate 22% (industry mid-market median).
What it countsSUM(Total Inventory Value) × Carrying Rate. Carrying rate breakdown: cost of capital (10%) + warehousing (5%) + insurance (1%) + obsolescence (4%) + shrinkage (2%) = 22% default.
CurrencyReporting Currency.
Time window30D (rolling annualised)
Rolesowner, finance

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Microsoft Dynamics 365 data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

UK apparel brand on BC, snapshot 14 Apr 26.
ComponentValue
Total Inventory Value£2,622,000
Annual Carrying Rate22%
Annual Carrying Cost (this card)£576,840
Monthly impact£48,070
Reducing dead stock (£284K) by 50% saves £31K/year in carrying cost.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

CardWhy pair
Total Inventory ValueThe denominator.
Dead Stock ValueHighest carrying cost.
Inventory TurnoverVelocity reduces carrying.

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Business Central: BC does not natively compute carrying cost. The Inventory Valuation report gives the numerator; the carrying rate is workspace-configured. Why may differ:
ReasonDirectionWhy
Carrying rateEitherDefault 22%; merchant-specific
Multi-Company aggregationCard sums
Cross-connector reconciliation: No commerce-side counterpart.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Carrying rate components? Cost of capital (10%) + warehousing (5%) + insurance (1%) + obsolescence (4%) + shrinkage (2%) = 22% default. Tunable. Industry benchmarks? Apparel: 20-30%. Electronics: 15-25%. Industrial: 10-20%. What changes the rate? Higher interest rates raise cost of capital. Higher warehouse rents raise warehousing. Configure annually.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Inventory Carrying Cost is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.