Inventory

Backbone MRP tracks how much of each part your company has on hand, at each of your company locations. These quantities are not typed in and maintained by hand — they follow your shipping, so the numbers stay current on their own.

What Inventory Costs

Everything on this page is included for every company. On-hand quantities per part and location, stock moving as you lock shipments, the full movement history, the On Hand columns and both inventory reports — none of it needs a paid feature.

One thing is paid for: Inventory Counts, correcting your stock against a physical count. Every company can start five counts without the feature, and those five work in full. Beyond that, starting another count needs the feature turned on, under Company Settings → Subscription Settings → Change Features & Licenses. It can be bought on its own — it does not require Order Entry or any other feature.

Nothing is ever discarded. If Inventory Counts is turned off later, your stock levels, your movement history and every count you have already entered are kept exactly as they are. You simply cannot start a new count until it is on again.

How Stock Moves

Stock comes out of inventory when you lock a shipment. Building a shipment and adding lines to it changes nothing; a shipment you are still working on is a plan, and only locking it makes it a fact. That is the single moment inventory changes, and every movement is recorded with the shipment number that caused it.

Unlocking a shipment does not put the product back. The stock stays out until you lock the shipment again, at which point the quantity is worked out afresh from whatever the shipment then says. This is what makes corrections safe: unlock, fix a quantity, lock again, and only the difference is applied. Locking the same shipment twice never deducts twice.

Note: Inventory tracking begins from the point this feature was added to your system. Shipments that were completed before then did not move stock and will not do so retroactively, so your starting on-hand quantities are whatever your records currently say.

Lines that never move stock

Shipping and freight charges — these lines carry no part, so there is nothing to take out of stock.
Parts marked as non-inventory items — the part itself says its stock is not tracked.
Lines with no company location to draw from — Backbone works this out for you from the line, the order's ship-from location, or your company's default location, and if a company has several locations with none marked as the default and none chosen on the order, the line is left alone rather than guessed at.

Quantities Below Zero

A location's on-hand quantity can go below zero, and Backbone will not stop you from shipping product your records say you do not have. This is deliberate. Your receiving history may simply not be entered yet, and a company should never be blocked from shipping goods that are demonstrably sitting on the dock.

Treat a negative number as a signal to check what has not been recorded, rather than as an error.

Seeing Inventory on a Part

Open any part and choose its Inventory tab. Inside are two further tabs — Locations and Changes — which between them answer what this part's stock is and how it got that way.

Locations

Lists every company location that stocks this part, with the quantity held at each and the unit of measure it is counted in. The part's stocking units — the units its inventory is kept in, which need not be the units you sell it in — are set at the top of the tab. Locations can be removed from the list by right-clicking them.

Changes

The movement history behind those balances: every increase and decrease, when it happened, when it was recorded, and what caused it. The tab opens showing the last ninety days; change the start and end dates and choose Load changes to look further back. Use Groupings to gather the movements by order or by company location.

Change Date vs. Entry Date: the change date is when the movement is considered to have happened — a shipment's ship date, which may be backdated — while the entry date is when the record was actually written. They differ whenever a shipment is locked after the fact.

On Hand on Orders and Shipments

Order and shipment line tables both carry an On Hand column, with its unit of measure beside it, so you can see what you actually have while you are still building the paperwork — without opening each part.

The figure is the part's stock across all of your company locations, not just the location the line will draw from. For a company with a single location the two are the same number. The column is read-only: on-hand follows your shipping and receiving, and is never edited directly.

On a shipment, the column shows the quantity as of when the screen was loaded. Lock the shipment and the screen reloads, so the column then shows the figure after that shipment's product came out.

Inventory Reports

Two reports on the Reports menu cover inventory across the whole company rather than one part at a time. Like every report, their data can be copied and pasted straight into a spreadsheet.

Parts Inventory Report

What the company has on hand right now, one row per part and location, with the part number, name and description alongside. Group by part to see a part's total across your locations, or by location to see everything held at one site.

By default the report lists only locations that are actually holding something. Shipping a part creates a stocking record for it automatically, so over time a company accumulates records for parts nobody deliberately stocks; turn on Include locations holding no stock in the constraints dialog when you want to see those as well. Locations holding a negative quantity are always listed, since those are the ones worth looking at.

Totals across units: when a grouped row's underlying records are counted in different units of measure, the total is left blank rather than adding, say, kilograms to pieces. A blank total means the group's units do not agree.

Inventory Changes Report

The movement history for the whole company over a date range — the report to reach for when a quantity looks wrong and you need to know how it got that way. It shows the part, location, dates, quantity changed, the order and line numbers behind the movement, and the note recording its cause.

A start date is required, and the constraints dialog opens with the last ninety days already filled in. Group the results by part, company location, change date or order. Double-click a row to open the part it moved; right-click to open the shipment or order that caused the movement.

Correcting Stock With a Count

Everything above describes stock moving on its own as you ship. When the number on file and the number on the shelf disagree — and eventually they will — an inventory count is how you settle it. You record what you actually counted, and Backbone adjusts your stock to match.

Counts live under Parts → Inventory Counts. See Inventory Counts for the full walkthrough. Your first five counts work without Inventory Tracking — they sync and adjust stock for real — so you can try the whole workflow before paying for it.

Inventory counts — correcting on-hand quantities against a physical count.
Parts — creating and maintaining the parts whose stock is tracked here.
Reports — running, filtering and exporting reports.
Units of measure — defining the units parts are stocked and sold in.

Backbone MRP

Factory control & optimization platform