Example: Material You Own That’s Unavailable (Managing Inventory)

You will most likely have some situations where you have material that you own, that you need to track, but it is not currently available for use. Examples of this are where you have moved material to a quarantine area for inspection or because it is defective, or you have material that is in transit to or from your facility.

QC Hold – An internal location where material is temporarily stored while waiting to be assessed. If the material is judged to be OK then it’s later moved back into stock. If not OK then it’s moved to another location for repair or re-work, or returned to the supplier, or scrapped. Material is moved into and out of QC Hold with the Movement transaction.

Here’s an example of the result of a Movement transaction to move one piece of stock into QC Hold:

 

And here’s a corresponding Movement of the same stock from QC Hold back into an available storage location:

Stock moved out of QC Hold

 

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 own the stock during 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:

  1. Create an Ordered Stock transaction to recognize the material as ordered from the supplier.
  2. 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
  3. 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.

The In Transit location can also be used when material is being moved from your facility to some other location. Just make the appropriate transactions similar to the flow shown above.

Here’s an example of the result of a Receive Stock transaction to accept stock from a supplier and put it into your In Transit location:

Receive stock from a supplier into your In Transit location

 

And here’s the corresponding follow-up Movement transaction to move the same stock from your In Transit location on one of the regular storage locations in your facility:

Move stock from In Transit to regular storage area

 

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 Contributes to total inventory is checked, and Contributes to available on-hand inventory is not checked.