mInventory maintains several inventory levels for you. These levels are automatically updated based on things you do with an item (buy, sell, adjust, build). You can’t just edit these levels directly.
Available – This is the amount of available inventory or On Hand inventory for this item. Available inventory is ready for sale. Available inventory is increased by purchases and decreased by sales. It can also be decreased through the creation of assemblies and allocation of inventory to another item. See Allocated below.
Allocated – Allocated inventory is the quantity of an item that has been used in the configuration of another item (an assembly). For those items that are “assemblies” the items that have been assembled are listed in the components table on the bottom half of the inventory screen. It is these items that will have an “allocated” quantity on their item record. Allocated is somewhat like available, in that the amount of the item is still in your inventory. The difference is that it’s allocated to another item. The allocated count is reduced when you sell the “Assembly” and increased when you build new assemblies.
On Order – This is the quantity of an item that is part of an in process purchase order. This is a purchase order that has been created, but not yet received.”On Hold – This is the quantity of an item that is part of an draft sale. This sale has been created in the system, but not yet marked as shipped.
Sold – This is the number of units of this item that have been sold.
mInventory supports the following workflows to update inventory levels.
Purchase Orders – Use this workflow when you purchase inventory items from a vendor. This can be a wholesale/retail model or you could be purchasing raw materials that you transform into products using the Assemblies workflow described below.
Manufacturing – Use this workflow when your company manufactures products and you simply want to record how many of each item you made. In this workflow, you create items for each of your manufactured products and then acknowledge a production run to update item quantities/costs.
Assembly Builds – Use this workflow when an item in your inventory is made up of the combination of other inventory items. The Inventory Items screen has a table at the bottom that allows you to identify the components of an assembly. Companies that purchase products and transform them into other products typically use this workflow.
Manual Adjustments – Adjustments are changes that are made to inventory levels because of some issue with a particular item. These can be due to theft, damage, unexpected receipts or some other reason. These are not frequently used and are not meant as a way to receive stock into inventory.