Inventory reports
You’ll need: Inventory reports, Lot reports — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
Two report modules cover stock, and they answer different questions.
Inventory reports: what is where
An inventory report is filtered by business location and inventory category. It answers what you hold, where.
Use it by location when you want to know what a branch is sitting on, and by category when you want to see a slice of the range across everywhere.
Lot reports: which batch, and how long
Lot reports carry a report type and filter by inventory item, lot reference, expiry before, business location and origin.
Covered in the lots lesson, and worth repeating because they are the two most valuable habits in this course: expiry before run weekly, and origin when a recall lands.
What the reports will not do for you
They will not tell you that stock has stopped moving. A slow item and a fast item both simply appear as a quantity, and the slow one costs you money quietly — space, capital, and eventually expiry.
The way to see it is to compare the same report over time, or read an item’s transaction list and notice how thin it is. Nothing will prompt you.
Reconcile before you trust a number
Before making a decision on a figure — a purchase, a promise, a write-off — spend a minute on where it came from. Open the item’s transactions and read them.
Nearly every stock figure that turns out to be wrong is wrong for one of four reasons:
- a movement recorded at the wrong location
- a transfer dispatched and never received
- a known loss booked as a discrepancy instead of a wastage, so the cause is gone
- a document that was expected to move stock and did not, because the product had no inventory item behind it
All four are visible in the transaction list, and none of them are visible in the balance alone.
You have finished
That is Inventory & Stock. You now know that only a transaction moves stock and every document merely causes one, how the four quantities differ and which one to act on, what each transaction type means, how lots and expiry work, how production converts materials into goods, how transfers keep goods visible on the road, and the difference between a count and a known loss.
Next in the catalogue is Purchasing & Suppliers, which is where most of the stock in this course came from in the first place.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.