Multiple stocks/warehouses?

[A1ex037]

Hello everyone,
I am trying to figure out how to split stock into 2 different warehouses. Our stock has been created (due to the constant change in order price) on a FIFO basis from here. We're moving one part of a warehouse to a different city (in a time, both cities will hold identical assortment of products). I am thinking of a way to assign quantity immediately on the order form, by splitting quantity column into two to represent quantity for each product at appropriate warehouse. If anyone has some better idea, it would be great.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

This all depends on exactly how you represent stock quantities anyway, but the solution will have to include a Warehouse ID of some kind in the table that enumerates your stock levels, however you approach it.

The way we normally recommend stock tracking is to have transactions for each stock item. Then you add up transactions for stock add, stock draw, corrections, etc. Your situation would include n internal transfer from one warehouse to another, so you would have a pair of transactions with intracompany transfer as the transaction type. Search this forum for Inventory articles. We've got close to a gazillion of them.

 

[jdraw]

I agree with Doc. Also, I noticed the referenced link in your post. I recall responding to posters who have referenced that post in the past.
You may find related FIFO post helpful. Or this one
Here is an older, related thread dealing with FIFO
As Doc says, there are several post on FIFO in various forums, youtube etc.

 

[CJ_London]

with FIFO and multiple locations, you need to know what the company policy is for valuation. It may be that they are only interested in total stock value regardless of location, or it may be they need to know the value of stock at each location. The same applies to cost of sales.

I suspect it will be the latter in which case you would need two fields - price and quantity for each warehouse - so says to me you need two rows to split the transaction. And in reality, wouldn't stock be delivered to one location or the other - might be one purchase invoice but would be two lines.

So I also agree with Doc

 

[A1ex037]

Thank you for your responses. Last few days I have been playing with the original idea, that didn't turned out well (too much overhead with changing parameters on each order). I will try @The_Doc_Man suggestion. I appreciate the note on the stock tracking. Also, @CJ_London excellent comment on having track on stock value separately. Our main stock should hold around 90% of all stocks, while the small one should hold remaining. To answer the delivery: all orders are coming to main location, smaller fraction is moved aside and then transferred to another location.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Different kinds of products require different valuation methods. Serialized items like laptops are kept in inventory as quantity 1. You don't ever sell 10 laptops. You sell 1 laptop ten times because each item has a serial number. However, nails are sold by the pound. You would NEVER value nails using purchase price because unless you put serial numbers on your nails, you couldn't know how much a nail was valued at whereas you would value laptops at their original purchase price for inventory valuation purposes. Each time you buy nails and add them to your inventory, you take the current cost and average it with the existing inventory to come up with an existing valuation. So, the price of a pound of nails varies slightly each time you buy more. Whereas the price of a laptop is static because it is valued at its actual cost rather than an average.

Inventory can be very complex and we need to know YOUR rules in order to suggest how to handle it. Standard accounting practices allow for certain types of variation in assigning a value to inventory.

So, we start with you telling us what type of products we are dealing with. Are we dealing with things that have a shelf-life? So old inventory must be sold first as we would with laptops and milk. The difference here is that we probably won't dump the old laptops, we'll just discount them when new models come out but if milk isn't sold by its sell by date, it is either donated to charities (it still has a few days of safe use even if it can't be sold) or dumped in the trash.