With one location, a stock figure is simple: 400 units means 400 units on the shelf. With two, 400 units could be 300 in the warehouse and 100 in the shop, or 400 in the warehouse and a shop that ran out this morning. The total is true and useless.
Managing stock across several locations comes down to one rule: every quantity belongs to a place. Everything else follows from that.
What counts as a location
A location is anywhere stock sits long enough to be counted: a main warehouse, a second unit, a retail shop, a workshop, a service van, a consignment stock at a customer, a third-party warehouse. The test is whether you need to know what is there without going to look.
Two things are not locations. A shelf inside a warehouse is a position within a location, worth tracking in its own right, but the stock on it still belongs to the warehouse. And a supplier’s warehouse is not your location until the goods are received: stock on order is a purchase order, not inventory.
Quantity per location, always
Record every movement against a location: goods received into the warehouse, units sold from the shop, parts used in the workshop. The product’s total is then the sum of its locations, and the per-location figures are the ones you act on.
This has a consequence that feels strict and is worth keeping: a location can never go below zero. If the shop records a sale of a product it shows none of, the error is not in the sale. Either a transfer from the warehouse was never recorded, or the sale happened at the warehouse. A system that lets the shop go to minus 3 hides both.
Transfers
Stock that moves between your own locations is a transfer: one movement, two sides. Minus 50 at the source, plus 50 at the destination, on the same date, with the same reference. The total does not change and the value does not change. Only the split between locations does.
Three habits keep transfers honest:
- Record the transfer when the goods leave, not when someone remembers. A van loaded on Monday and recorded on Friday means a week when the warehouse and the van both think they hold the goods, or neither does.
- Transfer the exact quantity sent. If the shop receives 48 of the 50 sent, that is a count difference at the shop, to be investigated, not a transfer of 48.
- Never count a transfer as usage. Moving goods to the shop is not selling them. Reorder calculations, turnover and cost of goods sold should ignore transfers, or every move will look like demand.
Where do orders go
Every purchase order needs a ship-to location, chosen when the order is raised, so that the delivery lands in the right place without anyone deciding at the dock. Most businesses receive everything at one site and transfer out from there, which keeps receiving in one place with the people who know how to do it. A few, with suppliers close to each shop, ship direct. Either works. What does not work is an order with no destination.
Counting, site by site
A stock count covers one location. Counting two sites on the same day with the same team is the common way to lose the plot: a product counted in the warehouse while a transfer to the shop is in the van is counted twice or not at all. Count each site on its own, with transfers in or out of that site paused until the count is approved.
Reorder points with more than one location
The reorder point for a product is usually set on the total, because the supplier delivers to one place. The transfer to the other sites is an internal decision. When one site holds most of the stock and another keeps running out, the problem is transfer frequency, not the reorder point. Look at usage by location before you raise the order quantity.
How StockBold handles locations
In StockBold every quantity is held against a location, and the product page shows its stock by location. One location is the default, pre-selected in movement forms; every purchase order names the location it ships to. Any movement that would take a location below zero is refused, even if it is backdated.
A transfer writes two rows in the movement history, a negative at the source and a positive at the destination, with the same comment on both. Transfers never change the total or the value of your stock, and they are left out of usage, turnover and cost of goods sold.
A purchase order carries its ship-to location, and received goods land there. Stock counts are created per location, and can be narrowed to one supplier, category or department. A location you stop using can be archived with its history intact. Inside a location, products you choose can be tracked by shelf.
Read more about inventory management in StockBold, or the help guides on how locations work and transfers between locations.