What actually moves stock

You’ll need: Inventory items, Inventory transactions — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

The single most useful thing to know about inventory in FeePrime: stock only ever moves through an inventory transaction. Nothing else moves it. Not an order, not an invoice, not a sales order.

Documents do not move stock — they cause a transaction to be created

This surprises people, and it is what makes the system explicable.

   shipment approved / packed  --> creates a transaction --> stock moves
   standalone invoice          --> creates a transaction --> stock moves
   standalone bill             --> creates a transaction --> stock moves
   stock transfer dispatched   --> creates a transaction --> stock moves
   you record one by hand      --> the transaction IS the move

Every movement, whoever caused it, ends up as a row you can find, read and audit. When a figure is wrong, there is exactly one place to look: the transactions for that item at that location. There is no hidden second mechanism.

Why “standalone”

An invoice linked to a sales order does not create its own movement. The sales order’s shipment already moved the goods, and moving them again would count the sale twice.

A standalone invoice — one with no sales order behind it — is different. Nothing else has moved that stock, so the invoice does. Same on the buying side: a bill linked to a purchase order is skipped because the delivery already brought the goods in; a standalone bill brings them in itself.

The rule underneath: each movement happens exactly once, at whichever document is the first to know it really happened.

Some transactions you create, some you never do

A few types are generated for you and are not offered in the form: a shipment movement, and the two halves of an internal transfer (dispatch and receive). They come from the documents that caused them, so there is nothing to remember and no way to create a duplicate by hand.

The ones you do create yourself: receiving from a supplier, production runs, stock takes, wastage, opening balances, and customer returns.

Product lines move stock too

A line on a document does not have to be an inventory item to move stock. A product carries its linked inventory item’s code, so selling a product moves the stock behind it.

That is why the product-to-inventory-item link from the Products course mattered. Without it, a product sells perfectly and your stock never changes.

The mental model to keep

Inventory is not a number somebody maintains. It is the sum of every movement in and out of a place. If a figure looks wrong, the question is never “who typed the wrong number” — it is “which movement is missing, duplicated, or at the wrong location”.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, look at an item’s transactions and add up the ins and outs by hand. Matching the balance yourself once turns the number from something you trust into something you understand.