WindoorERP Documentation 19.0

Understand warehouses, locations, and stock

5 min read Updated 2026-08-31 WindoorERP 19.0
This article is step 1 of 6 in 2- Setup Your Warehouse

What this does

Explains the two words everything in Inventory is built on. A warehouse is a physical site with an address. A location is a place inside it — a rack of profiles, a glass stillage, the loading bay.

Get these two straight and the rest of the application stops being mysterious: every transfer, every count and every valuation figure is a movement between locations.

Before you start

  • Nothing to change anything here. Reading the Locations list needs only Inventory access.
  • Storage Locations must be switched on in Inventory ▸ Configuration ▸ Settings for the Locations menu to appear at all.

Steps

The list of storage, transit and virtual locations

  1. 01
    Open Inventory ▸ Configuration ▸ Locations. By default it shows internal locations only.
  2. 02
    Open any location and look at its Location Type. That one field decides whether the goods there count as your stock.
  3. 03
    Read the hierarchy in the name: WH/Stock/Zone A/Rack 3 is rack 3, inside zone A, inside the stock of warehouse WH.
  4. 04
    Clear the Internal filter to see the rest — the virtual locations the system moves goods to when they leave your hands.

Every location type, and what it means

Only one of these holds stock you own. The others exist so that every movement has somewhere to come from and somewhere to go.

InternalYour stock. Racks, zones, bays. Only quantities in internal locations are on hand, valued, and available to sell.
VendorWhere goods conceptually come from when you receive them. A receipt is a move from Vendor into Internal.
CustomerWhere goods go when you deliver. A delivery is a move from Internal into Customer.
Inventory LossThe counterparty for stock adjustments. A count difference is posted as a move to or from here, which is why an adjustment has a date, an author and a value.
ProductionThe counterparty for manufacturing: components move into Production, finished goods move out of it.
TransitGoods that have left one warehouse and not yet arrived at another. They are still yours while in transit.
VirtualA grouping only — a heading in the tree that never holds quantities itself. WH/Stock's parent is one of these.

Nothing is ever created or destroyed: every move has a source and a destination. That is why stock cannot simply be edited, and why the reason for a change is always recoverable.

Reading the hierarchy

Locations form a tree, and the name shows the whole path. WH/Stock is the stock of warehouse WH; WH/Stock/Zone A is a zone inside it; WH/Stock/Zone A/Rack 3 is a rack inside that.

A quantity sits at exactly one location — the deepest one. Asking for the stock of WH/Stock adds up everything beneath it, which is how a total and its breakdown stay consistent.

Depth costs discipline. Every level is a place someone must put things and later find them; two well-kept zones beat twenty racks nobody updates.

What a warehouse owns

Creating a warehouse creates more than a name. It gets its own stock location, its own operation types, and — depending on how goods come in and go out — input, quality control, packing and output locations.

That is why the number of receipt and delivery steps is a warehouse setting rather than a preference: changing it creates and retires the locations and operation types underneath.

Troubleshooting

There is no Locations menuStorage Locations is off in Inventory settings.
A location shows no stockIts type is not Internal, or the quantity sits on a child location and you are looking at a leaf rather than the parent.
Stock appears in a place nobody put itRead the moves. Virtual locations are counterparties, not shelves — goods "in" Vendor or Customer are not physically anywhere.
Totals do not match the racksAdd up children as well as the parent, and check whether any quantity is reserved rather than missing.
Two warehouses show the same location namesExpected. The short code in front — WH/ — is what distinguishes them.
A location cannot be deletedIt has stock or history. Archive it instead; deleting would break the moves that reference it.

Common mistakes

  • Treating Vendor and Customer as places goods sit. They are the other end of a move, nothing more.
  • Building a rack-level hierarchy nobody maintains, then not trusting any of it.
  • Expecting to edit a quantity directly. Stock changes through moves, which is what makes it auditable.
  • Reading a parent location's total and assuming it excludes the children.
  • Creating a second warehouse for a different room in the same building. Use locations for that; a warehouse is a site with an address.

In this section

Configure essential inventory and warehouse settings The Inventory settings page is a list of switches that decide which features… Set up a warehouse Creates a warehouse: a physical site with an address, its own stock, and its… Create storage locations A location is a place inside a warehouse that stock can sit in — a profile… Configure an operation type An operation type is the template behind every transfer. It sets where goods… Adjust stock after a count Corrects what the system believes is on hand so that it matches what is… Schedule cycle counts by location Replaces one enormous yearly count with small, regular ones: the hardware store… Scrap damaged stock Takes goods that can be neither repaired nor returned — a cracked glass unit, a… Allocate incoming stock to orders When one delivery from a supplier is wanted by three customers, the reception…

Continue learning

Set up a warehouse Creates a warehouse: a physical site with an address, its own stock, and its… Create storage locations A location is a place inside a warehouse that stock can sit in — a profile…

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