Tracking Inventory Stock Items through their Lifespans

ASAP Systems, based in San Jose, California, is the leader in Inventory System and Asset Tracking solutions. In this article, we’ll take a look at Inventory Stock Item tracking and lifespans.

Steps of the Inventory Stock Item Lifespan:

Let’s say that you are a mobile phone seller. You sell iPhones, Samsungs, and other brands of phones. The lifecycle of a particular stock item will be the following:

1) Starting Point / Adding information about an item in the system

Consider that you received an iPhone from the Supplier, and you manually added basic tracking information of the iPhone into the system. You can add this information manually or by importing it through an Excel sheet. If the quantity is large, and the supplier is using the Excel sheet method, the ‘importing Excel file’ option would be the most suitable. Once the item’s information has been added into the system, you can then specify the quantity and make a ‘Receive’ transaction. The ‘Receive’ transaction will transfer this item into your inventory. This is the starting point.

2) Transactions performed on the item

Since the item is now available in the inventory, you can perform several transactions such as ‘Move’. In this transaction, you should specify where the item will be located. For example, let’s consider that you are in a store with several branches. You would like to move this item to another branch, or you would like to move it from the warehouse to a showroom. In this case, you would make a ‘Move’ transaction to reallocate the stock item.

You can also make a ‘Sales Order’ transaction and then an ‘Issue’ transaction in case a customer comes to your store and would like to purchase an iPhone. Within the system, the quantity of this stock item would be deducted from the inventory. In case the customer changes their mind and would like to return the iPhone to the store, you can make a ‘Return’ transaction. Hence, the item quantity is returned to inventory. Additionally, if a certain product is out of stock, the user can create a purchase order. The transaction will then be sent to the supplier for restocking.

3) End of life

The end of an inventory stock’s lifespan is when the item is disposed of or sold. The ‘Dispose’ transaction usually occurs when the product reaches its expiration date, or if the product is broken. In such a situation, the quantity disposed of will be removed from the inventory.

Finally, in the case of both assets and inventory, the item reaches its end of life when it is no longer considered inventory. Check out the other articles on our blog, and request a demo to learn more about our Inventory Management and Asset Tracking system!