Once stock lives in more than one place, “how many do we have” stops having a single answer, and the spreadsheet that used to cope starts costing you sales. This gives every location its own running total, keeps them adding up to the number on the product, and posts the accounting when stock moves in ways that affect what it is worth.
What you can do
- Define as many warehouses as you have locations, with one as the default.
- See on hand, reserved and available per location on any product.
- Transfer stock between warehouses as a two-step send and receive, so goods in transit are not counted as arrived.
- Run stock counts — a whole warehouse or a slice of it — with variances calculated as you enter.
- Have adjustments posted to your accounts automatically when a count finds a difference.
- Keep a complete movement history: what moved, when, why, and which document caused it.
How it works in practice
Set up your locations (Inventory → Warehouses). Most businesses start with one, called something like MAIN, and add more when they open a second site or split trade stock from consignment stock. One is marked default — that is where stock movements land when a document does not say otherwise.
Watch stock look after itself. Selling posts stock out, purchasing posts it in, and the running totals follow. You do not tell the system about routine movement; it comes from the documents you were raising anyway.
Move stock between sites in two steps (Inventory → Transfers). Build the transfer with its lines, then Send — stock leaves the source immediately — and Receive when it arrives. In between, it is in transit and belongs to neither location, which is the honest answer and the one that stops you promising goods twice. A transfer is an internal move: nothing touches your profit and loss, because nothing has been bought or sold.
Count without closing (Inventory → Stock counts). Opening a count freezes what the system believes is there, so people can keep working while you count. Enter the real quantities and the variance shows next to each line as you go. Post the count and each difference is applied to stock and written to your accounts as an inventory adjustment — so shrinkage shows up in your numbers instead of quietly disappearing.
Trace anything. Every product has its movement history: what changed the quantity, when, and which document or count was responsible.
Good to know
- This needs the Inventory app switched on (Settings → Apps). Without it, stock behaves as a single bucket — which is the right setup for a business with one storeroom and no reason to complicate it.
- A transfer never touches your profit and loss. Moving your own goods between your own sites is not a transaction, and treating it as one is a classic way to overstate turnover.
- Adjustment postings need ledger accounts and a cost price on the product. Where those are missing, the stock still moves and the accounting entry is skipped rather than guessed — worth checking before your first count rather than after it.
- Per-line warehouse selection on documents is not available yet. Documents draw from the default warehouse; if you need to ship a single order from two sites, that is a transfer first.