Some users of InventoryControl need to track inventory that is being taken from the main warehouse to a job site, where it is either used or returned to the warehouse after completion of the job. We receive this question most commonly from satellite television installers, but the same usage can apply to other industries.

Rather than setting up each job as a new location, the easier way to do this is to set up a Location to represent the truck that the inventory is being loaded onto. Depending on the size of your operation, you may want a separate Site for the truck fleet, or you could just create the trucks within the main Site if you are only using 1.

At the beginning of the job, enter Move transactions for all of the inventory being loaded onto the truck to move it from the warehouse to the truck. As the inventory is used, be it hardware that is installed at the job site, or just consumable resources, you will enter Remove transactions to remove the inventory from the truck location. If you have the customer set up in your database, you can enter that customer as part of the remove transaction for further tracking.

Once the job is complete, if the truck is emptied at the end of the job, you will enter new Move transactions to move all of the remaining inventory back to the warehouse. Or if the truck is replenished to a certain base stock level, you can do those Move transaction to refill the truck from the warehouse.

The reports and the transaction list can then be filtered by location and/or date, so you can see what was removed from the truck for use on that specific job.