Warehouse management is critical to any business that sells physical goods.  This is no easy task and mistakes are inevitable - and usually quite costly.  Sometimes, situations can arise where someone may even try to ship more units than what what actually available. When this happens, you may want the system to prevent you from issuing the shipment and let you know that there is not enough stock to proceed with your transaction. We have created a rule to make sure that you cannot ship goods from a location if there is not enough inventory.

This type of automation can be arranged with the setup of a system rule. Please contact us at support@paragon-erp.com for help setting up rules.

Step 1: Install and activate the rule

All rules are activated and maintained from the rules card in the settings screen.

The rule to prevent shipments from being issued if there is insufficient stock must be installed on the before_issue_ship trigger.

Step 2: Seeing the rule in action

Once your rule has been installed, shipments will only be issued if there is sufficient stock in the location the shipment is pulling from. Therefore, it is important to know how much stock of an item you have in each location.

An example is shown below. The product drone t-shirt xs blue has 1000 units in the third party warehouse location. 

Check your inventory

To check your inventory, you must first have locations and add stock.

Once your locations and inventory are set up, navigate to the inventory module by hitting the inventory button in the side panel.

Then in the search bar, enter the name of the item you would like to check inventory for.

Verify the location address

The address of the third party warehouse can be found in the locations module. In order to ship from this location, the ship from address must match the address of the warehouse in the locations module. To navigate to this screen, hit the more button and then the locations module.

Select your location, and the address will appear on the screen.

Create a shipment

Now it's time to create a shipment. You can create a shipment from a packing list, order, invoice, or you can create it manually.

To continue our example, we will try and ship out 1005 units of the product drone t-shirt xs blue from the third party warehouse location. This is more than the level of inventory at this location, so the shipment should not be issued.

First, make sure that the ship from address is the same address as the warehouse you would like to ship out from. To change the address, hit the edit button on the shipment screen.

Then hit the arrow underneath ship from. A selection of locations will appear. If your location is not in the drop down list, make sure to go back and set up your addresses.

To test the rule, we will set the quantity of the product in the shipment to 1005 units. This is 5 more units than what is available at this location.

Try to issue the shipment

Hit the action button and issue the shipment.

The shipment will not be issued and its status will remain the same. A blocker notification will appear to explain that there is insufficient stock at the current warehouse to fulfill the shipment. To remove the blocker, you will have to add more inventory to this location, or select a location that has sufficient stock.

What's next?

Now that you can no longer ship from a location with insufficient stock, you might want to know more about how to adjust and move inventory from location to location. To learn more about this, feel free to look at our Jonar documentation:

How inventory moves across locations

Adjusting stock by importing inventory