Inventory

Items, warehouses, stock movements, and purchasing.

Items

An Item is either stock-tracked (its quantity matters, and every sale/receipt moves it) or not (a service line with a sale price but no quantity to track). Each stock-tracked item picks a costing method:

• FIFO — consumes the oldest remaining stock (by receipt) first, at whatever cost it was received at, even if you've received the same item at different costs since.
• Weighted average — keeps one running average cost per item/warehouse, recalculated on every receipt.

Both are handled the same way everywhere else in the app — the costing method only changes what the system does internally when stock moves, not how you use the screens.

Warehouses

Stock is tracked per Warehouse. Mark one as the default — it's used automatically when an invoice line needs stock issued and no other warehouse is specified.

Purchase orders

A Purchase Order goes to a vendor Party (the same Party record used everywhere — see CRM), with one or more lines each for a specific item and quantity. Status: Draft → Ordered → Partially Received/Received (or Cancelled).

Receiving supports partial fulfillment — record however much of each line actually arrived; the PO's status updates automatically based on what's still outstanding. Each receipt creates a stock movement and, for FIFO items, a new valuation layer at that receipt's cost.

How stock moves automatically

You never create a stock movement directly — it always happens as a side effect of something else:

• Receiving a purchase order increases stock at the cost you received it for.
• Sending an invoice with a stock-tracked line decreases stock and records the cost of goods sold for that line (see Sales-to-Cash) — using FIFO or weighted-average cost, whichever the item is set to.

If an invoice would need more stock than you have on hand, sending it fails outright rather than going through with a negative or partial fulfillment — nothing is issued, and the invoice stays in Draft so you can fix it (receive more stock, or remove the line) and try again.

Where this leads

Every stock movement — in from a purchase order, out from an invoice — eventually needs a dollar figure on the general ledger. See Accounting for how that COGS figure gets posted.