Inventory

Products on SmartPart are configured and made to order, so there is no stock of products. What runs out is what they are made of: board, legs, cheese, boxes. The stock register keeps those, and orders draw on them by themselves.

This page walks through it with one example throughout: a workshop that makes tables from oak board and table legs.

Who can do what

The register is under Menu → Orders → Stock.

Adding an item

A stock item is something you keep and use up. Click New item on the Stock page and fill it in:

Reading an item

The four figures at the top of an item's page:

Below them is Movements: every change, numbered, with the balance it left, what it did to reserved, the reference or note, the order that caused it if any, and who made it.

Day-to-day stock work

Three buttons on the item's page cover everything done by hand.

The Details card at the bottom holds the item's settings. History shows who changed which setting, and when. Archive retires an item you no longer use: it keeps its history, but takes no movements until it is made active again.

Connecting a product to stock

A product draws on stock through its parts formula, in the Stock card of the product editor. The formula says what one unit takes, as configured, and returns a list of SKUs and quantities. For a table with width and depth controls in millimetres:

var area = gui.width * gui.depth / 1000000;   // mm² to m²
return [
  { sku: 'OAK-25', qty: area },
  { sku: 'LEG', qty: 4 },
];

A product that uses no stock has no parts formula.

Next to it, When stock is short decides what a customer is told when the register cannot cover their configuration:

What an order does to stock

Nothing here is done by hand: stock follows the order's fulfilment state.

Each of these appears in the item's movements as Reserved, Used or Released, linked to the order. The order's own page has a Stock panel: what it reserved, where that stands, and a Not reserved list of anything that could not be - a SKU the register does not have, an archived item, a formula that failed.

What customers see

• On the product page, under the price, for the configuration on screen: In stock, Materials on order: allow about N extra days, or - for a product that does not sell short - Out of stock in this configuration, with Add to cart withdrawn.
• At checkout, when the cart is priced: a line that cannot be sold short is refused before any payment is asked for, and named. Lines that will take longer are listed under Some items will take longer.

A customer never sees a SKU, a quantity or a supplier.

Staying on top of it

• Needs attention, the second tab on the Stock page, lists every item that is Out (nothing available) or Low (at or below its reorder point).
• The reorder email, each morning at 07:00, sends the orders mailbox the items that have newly run low, grouped by supplier, with the usual order quantity and the supplier's code. Each item is listed once, and again only after it has been back above its reorder point. Ordering is still a person's decision. It runs only where scheduled tasks are switched on (SCHEDULED_TASKS_ENABLED=true) and an orders mailbox is set.

Putting mistakes right