Stock Tracing Concepts

Stock Tracing Component Only

This facility is used for Stock Control extended property maintenance. It allows you to add new properties or delete properties, or edit the characteristics of the standard pre-defined properties.

To access this operation start INSTALLATION Workshop and from the menu select Stock Tracing|Specification Maintenance.

What are extended stock properties?

These are additional stock item characteristics grouped under a single stock item product code. In "standard" Stock Control, products are differentiated from one another by assigning them different product codes. Extended stock properties are used when you still need to be able to differentiate between products, but when doing this by product code would be inappropriate or inconvenient.

Examples include:

serial numbers
batch numbers
lot numbers
warranty expiry dates
colours
sizes
styles
supplier cost price history
special purpose

Under some circumstances it may be useful to keep track of stock sold by serial numbers. It would obviously be time consuming and difficult to create a new product code each time a serial number needed to be issued. Products that also come in large numbers of variations, i.e., colour and size and/or style can be difficult or impossible to code by unique product code. To use one example, if product ABC came in 5 colours, 4 styles and 3 sizes then the number of product codes needed to cover every possible combination would be:

5 x 4 x 3 = 60

If there were only 10 such products in your range then the number of product codes required would still be:

10 x 60 = 600

The elimination of a size or addition of a style would also involve a great deal of maintenance work. (Adding or deleting sets of product codes would be required. As well, deleting product codes would also cause the sales history relating to that product to be "lost". Or at least the ability of CAPITAL's reporting system to product a historical analysis of the sales of those products would be unavailable.) Extended stock properties allow you to define and track these types of variations without creating masses of product codes.

In some instances CAPITAL can also work with extended stock properties and maintain and manage them automatically for you. This is useful in such areas as warranty expiry date tracking, or when you need to know the suppliers a product was purchased from, and/or the last set of cost prices paid.

Changing a product code each time a stock item's supplier changed, would be confusing (at best) for staff to deal with.

CAPITAL's extended stock property system solves all these problems and more.

Adding Or Changing Extended Properties

Extended stock properties are part of what is referred to as CAPITAL's stock trace system. This is because powerful facilities are provided by CAPITAL to enable you to trace the movements of stock that have been assigned these properties.

If you delete or dramatically alter the characteristics of a property you have already used, you may be unable to use CAPITAL's "stock trace" system to locate information on products assigned to that property or "tracing" may not work.

Only delete a property if you have no interest in any historical information related to products assigned that property in terms of sales, back orders, assemblies, servicing, purchasing, etc. Since you can define over 200 properties in addition to those that have already been pre-defined for you, there should be no urgent need for you to remove properties that may no longer be in current use.

The pre-defined properties (the first set of properties that come supplied with CAPITAL as standard) cannot be deleted.

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