Entering Warehouses

A Warehouse is a physical location in which inventory items are stored.  A warehouse can be store rooms or buildings where your items are stocked and organized, or a vehicle that contains items for use by technicians out in the field.  

Creating a warehouse in ESC for every store room/building and for every vehicle will help you to track the ins and outs of your inventory.  Keeping track of your quantities with warehouses can help to reduce losses.

Creating and Editing Warehouses

To create a new warehouse, go to Inventory → Enter Warehouses.

Click the Add New button and assign this warehouse a 4-digit Warehouse number and enter a Description, such as "Mike's Van" or "Truck 25".  We do not recommend setting the Warehouse number to match a technician's number or the specific number of a vehicle, because this would mean discontinuing and recreating the warehouse when the technician leaves the company or that vehicle is decommissioned.  This creates unnecessary work.

If at any time, you need to change the Description of a warehouse, you can do so by returning to Inventory → Enter Warehouses and double-clicking on the warehouse that you wish to edit.  This may be necessary if the warehouse is named "Mike's Van" and Mike is being replaced with Joe (thus "Joe's Van").

Setting the Default Warehouse

If you need to change the default warehouse that all of your items are received to and billed from, you can do so by going to Company → System Setup → Inventory.

Deactivating a Warehouse

From time to time, it may be necessary to discontinue the use of a warehouse.  Perhaps a storage unit or vehicle is no longer in use and will not be replaced.  However, once a warehouse has been used, it cannot be deleted, but it can be deactivated so that it no longer shows up in your lists to be used.  

In order to deactivate a warehouse, you'll first need to empty that warehouse.  There are two ways to do this: adjust the quantities of the warehouse to zero or transfer the items in that warehouse to another warehouse.  If you choose to simply adjust the quantities to zero, then those quantities will not reappear elsewhere, they will simply be adjusted out.  If you choose to transfer the items, then this will maintain accurate quantities in the warehouse that the items were physically transferred to when they were removed from that warehouse.

To adjust your quantities to zero:

1. Go to Inventory → Adjust Inventory.
2. The date of the adjustment should be today's Date, so that no transactions prior to today can affect the quantities of the warehouse.
3. Select the Credit Account for this transaction; the Debit Account is automatically set to you Inventory Asset account.  If you don't want this adjustment to affect your financials at all, set the Credit Account to your Inventory Asset account to create a 'wash' (meaning that the balance of the Inventory Asset account will not change).
4. Click on the Activities menu and select Fill List of Warehouse Parts.
5. Select the Warehouse that you wish to clear out and then click the Zero Quantities box.  Click OK.
6. All items that had quantities in this warehouse will be filled into the Adjustment screen with a Quantity of zero.  Click Save.
   Note: This process will not clear out any serialized items.  Those must be transferred to another warehouse using the Warehouse Transfer screen under the Inventory menu.

To transfer your quantities to another warehouse:

1. Go to Inventory → Reports → Physical Worksheet.  
2. In the Filter screen for this report, fill in the Warehouse number with the 4-digit number of the warehouse that needs to be cleared.  Then click Preview or Print.  
3. Now head to Inventory → Warehouse Transfer.
4. Use today's Date for the transfer.
5. In the From Warehouse field, select the warehouse that needs to be cleared.
6. In the To Warehouse field, select the warehouse that will be receiving the items.
7. Key in or scan each item and its quantity to be transferred.
8. Once all items have been entered, click the Save button.

Deactivate the Warehouse:

1. Once the warehouse has been cleared of all items, go to Inventory → Enter Warehouses.
2. Double-click on the warehouse to be removed.
3. Uncheck the Active box.
4. Click OK and then close the Enter Warehouses screen.