Key ideas
Items, stock states, the stock ledger, and how O2M keeps your channels in step.
Overview
The key ideas are the terms every Inventory screen uses: items, warehouses, stock states, the stock ledger and channel locations. Knowing them makes every number in O2M easy to read.
Why use it
- Understand what Available, Held, QC hold and the other states mean.
- Read on hand, incoming and in transit correctly.
- Understand how a change reaches every channel.
Items
An item is one thing you can count on a shelf: a product without variants, or one variant of a product (for example, a T-shirt in size M, colour blue). Stock always belongs to an item, and a product with variants shows the total of its variants. Items come from your Master Products; as soon as a product exists, it can hold stock.
Warehouses
A warehouse is any place that holds your stock: your own warehouse, a shop, or a third-party warehouse. Every company starts with one Default warehouse; with Warehouse Management you can add more. Amazon FBA stock, when connected, appears as its own read-only warehouse.
Stock states
Every unit you physically hold is in exactly one state. Adding the states together gives on hand, the number of units in the building. Two more numbers are tracked beside on hand: units incoming from suppliers and units in transit between your own warehouses.
On hand (physically in the warehouse)
can be sold
committed
being checked
not sellable
expired, recalled, not found
kept aside by hand
Tracked, not on hand
Incoming
ordered from a supplier
In transit
on the way between warehouses
- Available: free to sell. Your channels are fed from this number.
- Held for orders: promised to an order that has not left the warehouse yet.
- QC hold: received or returned, waiting for a check. Not sellable until passed.
- Damaged: not sellable. It can be refurbished, returned to the supplier or scrapped.
- Quarantine: taken off sale: expired, part of a held lot, or not found when picking.
- Reserved: kept aside by hand, for example for an event or a B2B customer.
Important Stock on hand never goes below zero. When an order arrives for more units than are available, O2M accepts the order and records the missing units as a backorder, which fills itself as soon as stock arrives.
The stock ledger
Every change to stock, by a person, an order, a channel or a scheduled task, is written as one line in the stock ledger: what changed, how many units, from which state to which, in which warehouse, why, by whom and when. Every number on every Stock screen can be traced back to the lines that produced it.
How O2M keeps channels in step
Whenever the available stock of an item changes, O2M works out what each channel location should show and sends it. If someone changes stock directly on a channel, O2M picks up the change, records it and passes it on to your other channels. A change made on either side is kept.
Something changes
an order, a receipt, an edit
Stock ledger
one recorded line
Available stock
recalculated
Channel feed
your rules applied
Channels updated
each location