In Transit – You may have a situation where you need to track material that is in transit. A common example of this is where you take ownership of the material FOB a foreign or at least distant port, and it will spend some time in transit to your warehouse. Ordinarily you may simply record an order from a supplier, and then the next step you take is to receive the stock into your warehouse because the time in transit may not warrant the extra accounting step of assigning it to an in transit situation.
However, and this step is especially important if you take ownership of the stock at the beginning of its journey, you will want to account for it in your tracked inventory. This is as simple as making an inventory location inside your company called something like “In Transit”. Then you’ll configure that location so that inventory is counted by is not available.
The process flow is that you:
- Create an Ordered Stock transaction to recognize the material as ordered from the supplier.
- When the supplier delivers the material to your FOB location, or you take possession of it, you create a Received Stock transaction from that supplier and to your own In Transit
- When the stock arrives at your warehouse, create a Movement transaction to transfer the stock from your In Transit location to the desired location in your facility.
To set this up, choose Companies from the Ribbon menu, locate your company and open to its details, then switch to the Inventory Locations tab. Here you can create a new location, naming it something like “QC Hold” or “In Transit”. Make sure that Set Contributes to total inventory is checked, and Contributes to available on-hand inventory is not checked.