Inventory: stock, warehouses and purchase orders
Inventory keeps the stock of your products by warehouse. Activating an order reserves its stock, and fulfilling it takes the stock out, so you never promise what you don't have. Purchase orders bring stock in, low-stock alerts tell you when to buy, and the reports show what your stock is worth and what isn't moving.
Turn on Inventory
Inventory is an add-on feature. If you don’t see Inventory in the app switcher, ask CRMSix support to turn it on for your organization. You can raise a ticket from Help in the app.
The Inventory app has the tabs Stock, Purchase orders, Movements, Warehouses, Reports, Products, Orders, Accounts and Tasks. Each product also gets a Stock card, and each order a card showing its reserved and issued stock.
- Manage inventory.People with this permission set up warehouses, receive, adjust, transfer and quarantine stock, set reorder points, and raise and receive purchase orders. Admins have it, and so does the standard Manager profile.
- Everyone else.Anyone who can see products sees their stock. Anyone who works orders reserves and issues stock by activating and fulfilling them.
Set up
- Go to Warehouses and choose New warehouse. Add each warehouse, store or depot that holds stock. The first is the default: orders reserve from it first, and stock arrives there unless you choose another.
- Under Low-stock alerts on the same page, choose who gets a task when a product runs low.
- Choose Receive stock (on the home page or the Stock tab) to enter your opening stock: the warehouse, each product, its quantity and its cost. A product starts being tracked the first time it’s received.
- On each product’s Stock card, choose Inventory settings to set its unit (pcs, box, kg…), the reorder point and the reorder quantity.
A service, or a product you don’t keep in stock, stays untracked: its orders don’t reserve or issue anything.
Stock: available, reserved, quarantined, damaged
| Quantity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Good | Stock in the warehouse that can be sold. |
| Reserved | Good stock held for activated orders. |
| Available | Good stock that isn’t reserved: what you can still promise. |
| Quarantine | On hold, for example waiting for quality checks. It can’t be sold until it’s released. |
| Damaged | Can’t be sold. Write it off with an adjustment, or move it back if it’s repaired. |
| Incoming | Still to arrive on purchase orders. |
The Stock tab lists every tracked product, for all warehouses or one, with its value. Filter it to Low stock, Out of stock or Quarantined or damaged. Open a product to see each warehouse, set its bin (shelf or location), and act on it.
Receiving, adjusting, transferring
- Receive stock brings stock in without a purchase order: opening stock, customer returns, stock found. Receive into good stock or straight into quarantine.
- Adjust corrects a warehouse’s stock after a count (set it to the counted quantity), or adds or removes some, with a reason: stock count, damaged, expired, lost or stolen, found, sample, internal use and others.
- Status moves stock between good, quarantine and damaged, for example to put a batch on hold or release it after testing.
- Transfer moves stock from one warehouse to another.
Stock can never go below zero, and stock reserved for orders can’t be adjusted, transferred or quarantined away: release the order first. Every change is a movement: the Movements tab lists them all with who made them, the quantity, the balance after it, the value and the order or purchase order it belongs to. Filter by product, warehouse, type and date.
Orders
Inventory follows each order’s status:
| When the order… | Stock |
|---|---|
| is activated | Each tracked product is reserved from the default warehouse first, then others. If there isn’t enough, what there is gets reserved and the order shows what’s short. |
| is fulfilled | The reserved stock is issued, and any shortfall is issued from available stock. If there still isn’t enough, the order can’t be fulfilled until stock arrives. |
| goes back to Draft or is cancelled | Its reservations are released. |
| goes from Fulfilled back to Activated | What was issued comes back into stock, and is reserved again. |
The Stock card on an order shows each line: reserved and where, what’s short, or what was issued.
Purchase orders
- Go to Purchase orders and choose New purchase order. Choose the supplier (an account, or just a name), the warehouse it’s delivered to, the currency, and each product with its quantity and cost.
- Choose Mark ordered when it’s sent to the supplier. Its quantities show as incoming on the products.
- When goods arrive, choose Receive goods and enter what came, line by line (or Receive everything outstanding), into good stock or quarantine. A purchase order can be received in several deliveries; it’s Partially received until everything has arrived.
A draft can be deleted; after that, cancel it. Cancelling keeps what was already received.
Low-stock alerts
When a product’s available stock (all warehouses) falls to its reorder point, the person chosen under Warehouses → Low-stock alerts gets a task saying how much is left, how much is on order and the usual reorder quantity. There’s one task each time it runs low; another comes only after stock has been back above the reorder point. The Inventory home page lists everything that’s low.
Valuation and reports
Stock is valued at weighted-average cost. Each receipt at a cost (from a purchase order, an opening balance or an adjustment with a cost) updates the product’s average; issues, transfers and write-offs move at the average. Purchase orders in another currency are converted at today’s rate in Settings → Currencies.
- Stock valuation shows the total, by warehouse (split into good, quarantine and damaged) and by product.
- Slow-moving stock lists products in stock that haven’t been issued in the last 30 to 365 days, with their value.
Stock levels, movements, reservations and purchase orders are also in the Query Console for your own reports.
Sandboxes
Warehouses, stock and purchase orders aren’t copied into sandboxes.