Inventory & locations
Where stock lives, how on-hand is tracked, and how it moves.
Stock in Carbon lives at a location and, within it, in a storage unit. What's actually on hand is derived from a ledger of movements — not a single editable number — so every quantity has a trail behind it.
Locations and storage units
A location is a site or warehouse. Within one, stock sits in storage units — bins and shelves that can nest (aisle › shelf › bin) and be typed (cold, hazardous, returns). A storage unit attached to a work center is a lineside bin, used to stage material at the point of use; everything else is a warehouse bin.
On hand is a ledger
The item ledger is the source of truth. On-hand is the sum of its signed movements — receipts and outputs add, sales and consumption subtract, transfers move between places. A cached per-location quantity exists for quick reads, but the ledger is what's authoritative.
| Entry type | Effect |
|---|---|
| Purchase / Output | Goods received or produced into stock. |
| Sale / Consumption | Goods shipped or issued to a job. |
| Positive / Negative Adjustment | Manual corrections. |
| Transfer | Movement between locations or storage units. |
Read on-hand from the ledger, not the cached quantity table — the ledger is the truth, and it's status-aware (it can separate what's on hold or rejected from what's truly available).
On hand can go negative. Shipping, issuing to a job, and picking all post their movements without first checking availability — Carbon would rather let the work proceed and reconcile later than block the floor. Only manual negative adjustments are guarded against overdraw.
Movements
Two kinds of transfer move stock. A warehouse transfer moves it between locations, and is carried out as a shipment out of one and a receipt into the other. A stock transfer moves it within a single location, between storage units. A manual adjustment writes straight to the ledger as a positive or negative entry — or a Set Quantity that books the difference to a target.
Value
Inventory value is on-hand quantity times the item's unit cost, summed per item and location.