Inventory and stores

How stock is organised

The words below are used precisely, and they are not interchangeable. There is no "branch" and no "business unit" in IndustryMax — division is the only grouping below a company.

Tenant

One customer of IndustryMax. The account.

Company

One legal person inside that customer: one registered firm, one GSTIN, one PAN, one state, one set of books. A group owning two firms is one tenant and two companies.

Division

A grouping inside a company. Every division belongs to exactly one company.

Location (store / warehouse)

Where stock physically sits. Locations form a tree — site, building, rack — and stock can be held at any level of it, picked one level at a time.

The item master

• One item master for everything, with an item type saying whether the item is bought, sold, or both.
• Two units per item where a trade uses two — bought in bags, issued in kilograms — with the conversion held on the item and both figures shown.
• Variants, where a variant is an identity rather than a separate code: an item that has variants demands one everywhere it is used, and an item that has none never shows the field.
• HSN or SAC code and the GST rate, read from the item onto every document that needs them rather than typed each time.
• Group and sub-group, category and sub-category — a two-level taxonomy where the item stores the leaf.
• Brand, make, shelf life and expiry behaviour.
• Reorder levels, set per company at two thresholds: one that warns, and a lower one that raises a pending indent by itself.
• Movement classification — fast, slow or dead — from actual consumption.

Movements

Every one of those writes a row in the stock ledger naming the document that caused it, so any balance can be walked back to the documents that produced it. Opening balances are declared once, on their own document, with the rate — they post on approval and are never editable afterwards.

Transfers and approvals

A stock transfer can be set to require approval. Where it is, stock moves on approval and not before — nothing is reserved while a transfer is pending, and the transfer slip prints only once the stock has actually been released. That ordering matters: a slip printed before release is a slip somebody drives away with.

Physical stock take

• Count sheets for a location or a set of items.
• The variance against the book figure, item by item.
• Cycle counting, so the whole store does not have to stop.
• The count posts as an adjustment with the stock take behind it as the reason, so the correction is explainable months later.

Valuation

Stock movements carry quantity. Value is held separately, in cost layers, which is what makes more than one valuation method possible at all.

• Ten cost methods: moving weighted average (the default), FIFO, FIFO perpetual, LIFO perpetual, LIFO annual, batch-wise, last purchase cost, standard cost, monthly average, and at-zero for consignment or free-issue stock.
• The method is chosen per item, not forced on the whole company.
• Changing a method is a revaluation, and the difference it would make is shown before anything is written.
• A method change is dated and the old one is closed rather than overwritten, so a quotation costed in March is still explainable in September.
• Market-price methods — average price, last sale price, standard price — are listed but deliberately not selectable as a carrying value, because valuing stock at what it sells for overstates it by the whole margin.

Stock labels

Received material can be labelled with a printed QR code. Scanning it opens that stock in the workspace — which still requires a login; the label is a shortcut, not a credential.

Reports

• Item stock and ledger, per item and per location.
• Stock summary and item history — recent receipts, orders, indents and gate entries for one item.
• Stock ageing and stock valuation, under the chosen method.
• Adjustment register, including reversals and their reasons.
• A transfer-leak report, for stock that left one location and never arrived at the other.
• Reorder position across every purchasable item.

Questions

Related

• ProcurementIndustryMax runs the whole buying chain for Indian factories — indent, approval, RFQ, supplier quotations, comparison, reverse auction, purchase order, goods receipt, supplier bill and payment — in one system, with every approval recorded.
• ProductionBills of material, production orders, work centres, routings and job cards in IndustryMax — with material issued against the order, output received into stock, and WIP, yield, scrap and variance reported from the same records.
• Procure to PayHow procure-to-pay works in IndustryMax: indent, approval, RFQ, quotation comparison or reverse auction, purchase order, gate entry, store receiving, GRN, supplier bill and payment — and exactly which step moves stock and which creates money owed.
• Multi-company & LocationsHow IndustryMax models a group: one account, several legal companies each with their own GSTIN and books, divisions under them, a tree of stock locations, and financial years — with one login that switches between the companies a user may see.