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

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At a glance

Annualised cost of holding inventory: capital + warehousing + obsolescence. Total Inventory Value × Carrying Rate %. Default carrying rate 22% (industry mid-market median).

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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.

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Worked example

UK apparel brand on BC, snapshot 14 Apr 26. Reducing dead stock (£284K) by 50% saves £31K/year in carrying cost.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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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: Cross-connector reconciliation: No commerce-side counterpart.

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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.

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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.