How to know what is in stock and where it lies: bin locations, receiving and picking, stocktaking without stopping work, and orders that reserve goods instead of promising what is already gone.
Reserved stock is on the shelf but already promised to confirmed orders; available stock is what is left to sell. The usual formula is available = on hand − reserved − blocked, where blocked covers damaged or quarantined goods. Reserve when an order is confirmed, in the warehouse it will ship from, release reservations when orders are cancelled, and promise customers only the available quantity, never the on-hand figure.
ABC analysis sorts inventory items by their share of annual consumption value, usually units used or sold times unit cost. Class A is the small group that makes up roughly 70–80% of the value, B the next 15–25%, and C the long tail of many items with the remaining few percent. Each class then gets its own rules for counting, reordering and review.
What bin-location storage is, how to name zones, racks and bins, and how to keep stock by location, batch and unit in OrgLines.
A goods received note, or GRN, is the document a buyer's warehouse creates when a delivery arrives, recording what was actually received: which items, in what quantity and condition, from which supplier and against which purchase order. It is the moment goods enter your stock, and together with the purchase order and the supplier's invoice it is used to check what you should pay for.
Cycle counting is a way of checking inventory by counting a small, planned selection of items on a rolling schedule, for example every day or every week, instead of counting the whole warehouse once a year. Valuable and fast-moving items are counted more often, slow and cheap ones less often, and every difference is corrected and investigated while the cause is still fresh.
Economic order quantity (EOQ) is the order size that keeps the combined yearly cost of ordering and holding stock as low as possible. It is calculated as the square root of 2 × annual demand × cost per order ÷ holding cost per unit per year. Ordering more than EOQ ties up money on the shelf, ordering less means paying for too many orders.
A SKU, or stock keeping unit, is your own internal code for one specific variant of a product that you stock and sell, for example one colour and size of a shirt, so that stock, orders and sales can be counted per variant. Good SKUs are short, unique, built from a few fixed segments in a fixed order, and never reused.
OrgLines warehouse management: several warehouses with zones, shelves and bins, batches and serial units, reservations, shipments, purchase orders, weights and Business Central integration.
OrgLines ERP covers products, warehouses, batches, sales and purchase orders, reservations, shipments, invoices with your own PDF layouts, POS and Microsoft Business Central integration.
Create a free workspace in a minute and invite the AI assistant to your team.
Start free