Inventory: Catalog, Purchasing & Stock

Set these up in this order — each later step references the ones before it:

1. Warehouses — create at least one location. Products, stock levels, purchase orders, sales orders, and transfers all reference a warehouse.
2. Suppliers and Customers — simple master-data lists. Set these up before creating purchase orders (suppliers) or sales orders (customers).
3. Products — create one by one, or bulk-import via Products → Import. The CSV needs a header row with sku and name at minimum; optional columns include brand, category, supplier, unit, hsn_code, tax_rate, cost_price, selling_price, reorder_point, reorder_quantity, barcode, description. The supplier column is matched by name against suppliers you've already created — set those up first if you're importing with supplier links. Note: this imports product masters, not opening stock balances — bring in your starting stock quantities via a purchase-order receipt or a manual stock movement (see below).

There's no separate "settings" screen for units of measure or numbering — purchase order numbers auto-generate, units default to "pcs", and default tax rates come from your business's Finance (GST) profile.

• Products — catalog grid with category/supplier filters. Cost fields are only visible to users with cost-viewing permission; editing likewise requires an edit permission. Create, update, toggle active/inactive, and generate barcodes here.
• Purchase Orders — create a PO, approve it, and receive stock against it line by line (partial receipts are fine — receive what's arrived, and come back for the rest later). Tax amounts on each line calculate automatically from your business's tax profile and the supplier's location/registration — you never enter them by hand. Receiving a line is the moment stock actually increases.
  • Suppliers stage this feed and the Discovery→CRM handoff described in the CRM guide will draw on the same supplier/customer records.
• Sales Orders — create, confirm, ship, or cancel. Shipping a sales order is the outbound counterpart to receiving a PO: it's what reduces on-hand stock.
• Inventory (Stock) — a live per-warehouse stock table, with a manual stock-movement action for corrections or physical counts outside the normal PO/SO flow.
• Stock Transfers — move stock between two warehouses with a full create → approve → ship → receive workflow, so you get an in-transit audit trail (stock leaves warehouse A on ship, lands in warehouse B on receive) rather than teleporting instantly.
• Sales Returns — create a return against a shipped/delivered sales order, then approve it. Approval — not creation — is the moment stock is actually restocked (or written off as damaged) and a credit note is issued against the original invoice.
• Alerts — low-stock notifications, also surfaced in the shared topbar bell across the whole platform.
• Audit Log — a history of changes for accountability.
• Dashboard — a summary view, filterable by warehouse.

Inventory no longer has its own Team page — access is configured for the whole business at Admin → Team, alongside every other module. Three of the eight built-in roles are inventory-specific: Inventory Manager, Procurement Manager, and Warehouse Operator — check that page to see exactly which of the workflows above each one can perform (e.g. who can approve a PO vs. just receive stock against one).

• Service (FSM): field jobs reserve parts from Inventory when scheduled, consume them on job completion, and release the reservation if a job is cancelled. This is entirely optional — jobs work fine without Inventory licensed, they just skip material tracking.
• CRM: an opportunity can turn into a real sales order (a "fulfillment request") without leaving the CRM screen; CRM can also poll that order's status and suggest in-stock substitutes when something's unavailable. A customer's Inventory order history shows up on their CRM "Customer 360" profile.
• Cost data is never exposed to the platform's AI assistant, regardless of the asking user's own permissions.