Locations and bins

Every stock figure in your account is a number at a place, so the places have to exist first. A location is a building that holds stock: a warehouse, a shop, a supplier's premises, a 3PL. A bin is a shelf or a bay inside one. A small shop with one storeroom needs a single location and no bins. A business with two warehouses and a retail backroom needs the list set up properly once, and it pays back every day in cleaner reports and less time spent tracing stock between sites.

New locations

Open Locations from the main menu and click Add location. Give it a code, short and consistent across your team, something like LDN-MAIN or MAN-1; a name a person would use, such as Manchester Distribution Centre; a type; the country, which feeds shipping and tax; and the full street address. Save, and the location is in the list straight away. From there you can make it the default, add bins inside it, transfer stock into it from another location, and filter the stock view by it.

Location types

A warehouse is a building you run, and most locations are warehouses. Retail is a shop floor or backroom where stock is usually sold over the counter rather than shipped, and retail locations are typically left out of your online available-to-sell figure by default. Supplier-managed is stock you own that lives at a supplier's premises, the drop-ship arrangement. Third-party logistics is stock at a warehouse an external partner operates. The type matters because reports can separate stock in your own buildings from stock at a supplier, which your working-capital figure cares about, and because warehouse and 3PL locations are usually included in shipping logic while supplier-managed stock often is not. If two types seem to fit, choose warehouse.

The default location

When an order arrives and the store does not say which warehouse should fulfil it, the units are reserved at your default location. Without a default the order would sit unassigned, and some incoming orders may fail to reserve stock at all, so always pick one. Open Locations, click the location, switch on Set as default in the drawer and save. There is only ever one default, and setting a new one unsets the old. Any site can be the default; pick the one most unrouted orders should fall back to.

One default location gives every unrouted order somewhere to reserve from.

Bins

Bins are the subdivisions inside a location: aisle A shelf 3, bay 12, cold-room fridge 1. They earn their keep in large warehouses where a picker needs to know exactly where to walk, in cold storage where some shelves are refrigerated and others are not, and in sites with zones for bulky, fragile or high-value goods. To add bins, open Locations, click the location's row to open its bins drawer, and add them one at a time with a short code such as A-12, COLD-1 or OVERFLOW. Moving stock between bins is done from the product's drawer on the stock view, covered in Adjustments, transfers and bins.

Multi-site order routing

A customer orders online. If the store says which warehouse should ship it, the units are reserved there. If it does not, they are reserved at the default. The order is ready to pick at that site, the stock is decremented there when it ships, and the other sites are untouched.