Concepts — Stocks¶
This section explains the vocabulary of the module and the way its objects fit together. It does not describe the gestures to make, but what the words mean.
The vocabulary on a single page¶
- Item: what you store. An item carries a name, an internal reference, a barcode, a packaging and a description. Only storable items hold stock; the others cross the module without leaving any quantity behind.
- Family and subfamily: the classification of items. An item belongs to a subfamily, a subfamily to a family. That classification also serves the costing, which each level may decide for what it contains.
- Warehouse: a whole storage site, with its full name and its short name. A warehouse does not hold items directly: it holds locations.
- Location: the precise place where a quantity sits. A location is either internal — a shelf, an aisle, a back room, something that belongs to you — or virtual: supplier, customer, inventory loss, supply, production, transit, return, scrap. Virtual locations stand for the outside; that is where stock comes from and where it goes. An internal location may have a parent, which forms a tree: a parent groups its children and never holds stock itself.
- Operation: the document describing a movement of stock from a source location to a destination location. It goes through successive statuses, described in Lifecycle of an operation.
- Operation type: the model an operation claims. It belongs to a warehouse and sets a category — Supplier for entries, Internal for transfers, Customer for exits —, a numbering sequence, a default source location and a default destination location, and possibly a picking type and a return type. Without a return type, an operation of that type cannot be cancelled.
- Batch: the quantity received at once for an item, with its unit cost price. Exits consume it. See Batches and movements.
- Stock movement: the trace, line by line, of what actually moved: an item, a quantity, a batch, a source, a destination, a cost, a date and an author. Movements are never edited: they are the audit trail of the module.
- Inventory: the count of one or several locations of a warehouse on a given date. Every line sets a theoretical quantity — the one the module believes it holds — against a counted quantity, and the variance is settled by gain or loss adjustment movements. An inventory is full, partial, cycle or one-off; its periodicity is monthly, quarterly, annual, year-end or exceptional.
- Planning: the thresholds of an item in a location — maximum stock, safety stock, minimum stock. They are what triggers the dashboard alerts and what decides the indicators.
The operation categories¶
Three categories, and three ways of circulating:
| Category | Source | Destination | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supplier | Virtual location | Internal location | Entry: a batch is born |
| Internal | Internal location | Internal location | Transfer: batches change place |
| Customer | Internal location | Virtual location | Exit: batches are consumed |
Why a virtual location
An entry always comes from somewhere and an exit always goes somewhere. Virtual locations give that "somewhere" a name, so that every quantity in or out stays attached to an origin and to a destination, instead of being created or destroyed out of thin air.
What follows the reader¶
A user works in one warehouse at a time. The module remembers which one and carries it from screen to screen: see The current warehouse.
See also the platform glossary.
Changelog¶
- 1.0 (August 18, 2026): document created.