Workaround needed: Transfer Inventory Item Quantities Between SKUs

I have two warehouses and have a work-around as follows:

ITEM-GREY-US: Qty: 10
ITEM-GREY-UK: Qty: 2

Sometimes I transfer stock between locations. What would the right way be to go about a stock transfer between two inventory items? Should I do a write-off to a suspense account and then “reverse” it to the other inventory item? What would be the correct way of allocating the 10 units of ITEM-GREY-US to ITEM-GREY-UK so we end up with 0 in the first and 12 in the other?

Curious if anyone has a workaround!

The fundamental thing to understand is that these are two separate inventory items in Manager, not the same item in two locations. So you can’t convert one into the other. You need two separate transactions, the first to get rid of one item, the second to acquire the other item. Your idea of “reversing” the transaction won’t work, because you must deal with two separate inventory items. And Suspense is where Manager puts mistakes, not an account you ever want to use on purpose.

I may be given a slap on the wrist from the accountant, however, a simple sales invoice with 10 of the US item and -10 of the UK item would change the quantities.

You could create a new customer called stock transfer.

Jason.

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That seems like one way to combine the two transactions I mentioned. You don’t actually have to create a customer, though. You could do this via Spend Money or Receive Money as though it was a zero-money cash sale or purchase.

The problem I see with it is that you haven’t subtracted any value from one item nor added any to the other. So the average cost of each item is going to be skewed. What I mean is that those UK items will appear to have been free, when they obviously weren’t.

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Hence the slap on the wrist.

Adding the average cost to the Unit Price should fix that.

No slap. Just looking for an answer until the warehousing module is added.

Creating a customer called Stock Transfer and using a Sales Invoice with both quantities and unit values as described above would be a solution - in effect - one warehouse selling to another warehouse.

An alternative would be to use Production Orders - the input Inventory would be the delivering warehouse and the finished inventory would be the receiving warehouse - then you only need to enter quantity values.

Both of these assume that both warehouses are in the same currency.
Also, Inventory Write Off only works one way - writing off, you can’t use it to do the reverse - writing on

Production order is a very interesting idea. Since there is a line for non-inventory costs you could also add the shipping cost for transferring items between warehouses using this method. Both items would need their average prices entered to correctly valuate the inventory, correct?

Yes

Very nice, I will try this method. Also good to have stock transfers separated from sales invoices and production orders would then be a great way of tracking these movements.

The production order idea is creative. It has the advantage of not requiring any additional account, which would permanently appear in your chart of accounts.

And remember, the ability to handle warehouses is coming.

Do we know approximately when the warehouses are coming to Manager? I.e. is it on the top of the list and up next or just something that will come eventually?

Top of the list:

But that is no guarantee of when. Bugs are still being worked out in PDF creation. And urgent fixes always take priority. This is not a simple change.