Keeping track of what you own

The seven figures on an item

Total is how many you own. Under it sit four pools that account for the ones not available: damaged, in maintenance, retired and missing. They never overlap and they never add up to more than the total.

The other two are worked out rather than stored. Committed is how many are promised to bookings that are out or going out today. Available is what is left. Neither is a column anybody can edit, which is what stops them drifting from the bookings that produced them.

Adding an item

An item needs a name, a category, a unit and an opening quantity. A new account arrives with a starter set of categories and four storage zones already set up, so you can add your first item straight away.

If the category you want is missing you can add it from the item form rather than leaving for another screen — noticing a category is missing happens while you are filling the form in, and walking away loses everything typed.

Where an item lives

Placement is two parts. The zone is which end of the building you walk to; the position is the aisle and shelf. A row reads Zone A · Aisle 3, Shelf B.

Zones are areas, not shelves. Four or five of them is right for a warehouse; one per shelf turns the zone filter into a list of single items, which helps nobody.

When something breaks, is repaired, or turns up

Move units between the pools from the item’s own page. Six chairs come back scratched: move six from good into damaged. They go off for re-webbing: move them into maintenance. Two never come back at all: missing. One is beyond saving: retired.

Every one of those writes a line in the item’s history with who did it and when. There is no way to change a quantity quietly — the record is written as part of the change itself, in the same breath, so there is no version of events it can be missing.

The floor observes, the office decides

Moving units between pools, editing placement and submitting a stock count all need one permission. Changing the total — how much the company owns — needs a different one, and that split is deliberate: somebody counting on the floor should be able to say what they found without being able to change what the company is supposed to have.

See stock counts for how the two halves meet, and the permissions reference for the full list.

An item’s history

The history on an item page shows two things merged together: every adjustment to its quantities, and every booking it has been on. A hire changes nothing about the item — the chairs that went to a wedding and came back clean are the same chairs — so without the second half the page would say “no changes yet” about an item that had been out four times.