Inventory: products, locations and stock

Inventory is for organizations that sell goods. It keeps what's on hand of each product at each location, what approved orders have claimed, and what's left to promise. Stock only changes by a movement (received, counted, adjusted, moved, shipped), and every movement is kept.

Set it up

1. 1

   Turn on inventory

   Click Turn on inventory. Orders approved from now on wait to ship; ones approved before count as shipped already, so nothing old turns up.

   SettingsInventory & shipping
2. 2

   Add your products

   New product for each thing you sell, with the SKU your customers and price lists use: order lines find their product by SKU. On QuickBooks, Stock, then Bring over from QuickBooks brings your items across, with their quantities as opening stock and their sales prices onto the default price list if you like. A product can also be added while entering a vendor's bill: on the line, Stock item lists your products and ends with New product, which asks the same details as here and takes its cost from the bill.

   Inventory
3. 3

   Add your locations

   On the Locations tab, New location for each place stock is counted separately. One is the default: new orders ship from it.

4. 4

   Put in what you have

   Receive stock for what's on the shelf, or enter it as Opening stock when you create the product.

On hand, committed, available

• On hand: what's physically there. It goes down when a shipment ships, not when it's picked.
• Committed: what approved orders still have to ship.
• Available: on hand less committed. It's what a new order can count on.

A product is Low when what's available falls to its reorder point, and Out when nothing is available. To reorder lists what to buy, and how many. Open a product to see it by location, the open orders waiting for it, and every movement with what was on hand after it.

Styles, colours and sizes

For clothing and anything else sold in sizes and colours, switch on Sizes and colours under Settings → Inventory & shipping (it's asked when you turn inventory on). Off, a product is just a SKU and a name, as most businesses that buy and sell want. A garment is a style in colours and sizes, each a SKU of its own. On a product, give its Style (G5000), Colour (BLK) and Size (L): the SKU is composed from them (G5000-BLK-L) until you type one. Products made before this are read from their SKU the same way.

• Sizes… on Receive stock, on a bill and on an order takes a whole run at once: a row per colour, a column per size. Sizes and colours that aren't products yet are made on the spot.
• The Inventory list filters by style and shows each product's colour and size; a product's page lists the other variants of its style with what's available.
• On a price list, Price a style prices every colour and size of a style at once, with the sizes that cost more adjusted.

Reports has a Stock & shipping group for the same figures over time: stock on hand and its value, what to reorder, movements, shipments and orders still to ship.