What are stock changes?

This article gives a quick introduction to the concept of N_StockChanges.

In the video, "stock changes" are also referred to as "stock movements". This name has been phased out after the creation of the video, as the word "movement" implies "physical movement", which is not always the case. "Change" better captures the nature of positive or negative mutations of inventory.

Click the link here for the recording 51 min 18s (13.01.2022)
Use the video-timestamps to skip to the topic that you are interested in.

Introduction (0:00)

A basic introduction to the content of the presentation.

Why stock movements (0:45)

With stock movements, it is possible to register the amount and flow of stock. This is useful if you do not want to sell more products than you have in stock, to track the exact position of the current stock, which is useful for order picking.
Note: Stock changes also have an impact on finance if the stock value is tracked.

Positive and negative stock movement (3:57)

The current amount of stock in the warehouse is the sum of all stock movements. A positive stock movement is a stock movement which adds products to the stock, a negative stock movement decreases the amount of stock. There are several reasons for positive stock movements: Purchase, Returns, Movement, Manual correction. A negative stock movement exists because of either a sale, a movement or a manual correction.

Tallying (7:00)

It is important to know that every negative stock movement should have a positive counterpart. When 1 bike is sold (-1) there should have been at least 1 bike added earlier to the stock (+1).
Tallying is the concept of countering every negative stock movement with a positive one.

Moving stock (10:35)

When moving stock, a stock change of type ‘movement’ is created. Every negative stock change has a ‘corresponding positive stock change’ as its counterpart.
This way you can justify removing stock from one location, as it is added at another location with the “corresponding positive stock change” and the total amount f stock did not change.

Inventory corrections (NL: voorraadcorrectie) (25:38)

Inventory corrections help users to create multiple stock movements and group them together. Be aware that the screens of inventory corrections are somewhat similar to stock movements. There are several types:

  • Movement (by choosing location A and location B with the amount, the system creates every underlying stock movement automatically).
  • Mutation (This is for adding or removing stock at one location).
  • Revaluation (this can be used when a wrong purchase value is registered. For a specific amount of products, a revaluation corrects the value).
  • Product stock batch change (KB839), this type is not covered by this video.

Reservations (33:20)

Reservations are needed to prevent double selling a product. When a product is sold, a reservation is made. This means the reserved product can not be sold again, despite the fact that it is in stock. A reservation is always linked to a positive stock movement (tally) that has products left. This way, the application knows that the products in that specific stock movement are reserved.

Hi Joachim,

We’re trying to change the stock of several product at once via Inventory counts but we get a weird error message after processing the corrections. Even though we get the error, the correction is processed in the inventory. We think this is just a simple bug showing and nothing much else happens as far as we can see.

Just to be sure we also tried Inventory corrections for a single product and there we got a different error message telling is there’s no available period. And again the correction is processed, without anything else happening which means it works as far as we can see.

I have one last question about the corrections. Even after 2 hours a correction still says it’s tranfering to a ledger, is there something we need to do before a stock change/movement gets put in a ledger?

With the limited information, I can only take guesses. In general, it’s useful to provide a trace file to find out what happens before the error: How to start a trace analysis for a Novulo application to find bugs

Therefore, I cannot help with the first error. It’s a really generic error message.

The second error suggests that you haven’t configured a period for 2025 yet in your financial administration.

Also make sure to update M3009 to the latest CTP for improved error messages.