Moving stock between locations

You’ll need: Stock transfer orders, Business locations, Inventory transactions — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Stock sitting in the wrong place is stock you cannot sell. Moving it is routine — and it is where figures most often go quietly wrong.

The two-phase transfer

A stock transfer order has two events: dispatched and received. Each emits its own inventory movement.

   dispatched   source on-hand  --   in-transit  ++
   received     in-transit      --   destination on-hand ++

Source plus in-transit plus destination is conserved for the whole journey. Nothing is invented, nothing vanishes, and at any moment you can say where the goods are.

Record receipt when it arrives, not when it left

The discipline that makes this worth doing: mark received when the goods actually arrive, and mark what actually arrived.

A transfer marked received at the moment of dispatch is a lie that reads as tidiness. It tells the destination they have stock they cannot find, and it removes the only mechanism that would have shown a consignment going missing.

If twenty went out and eighteen arrived, record eighteen. The two that did not are now a visible discrepancy with a place and a date, which is exactly what you want. Silently receiving twenty makes the loss disappear into a future stock take with no cause attached.

When the quick move is fine

The plain internal transfer type moves stock in one step, with no in-transit phase. That is honest when there is no meaningful journey — carrying a case from the stockroom to the shop floor.

Use the transfer order whenever there is a vehicle and a road. The test is simple: could the goods be somewhere other than either location for a while? If yes, you need the two phases.

Mobile locations count

A location does not have to be a building. A truck or a field agent can be a location holding stock, which means a delivery round is a series of proper movements rather than a gap in your records between depot and customer.

Transfers are not sales

Moving stock between your own locations changes where value sits, not how much you have. If a transfer appears to change your total stock, something is wrong — most often a receipt recorded without its dispatch, or a dispatch that was never received.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, raise a transfer order and dispatch it without receiving it. Look at all three figures. Then receive a smaller quantity than was sent, and see the discrepancy sitting where you can act on it.