Warehouse Locations will allow you to segment inventory between multiple places (warehouse locations) so that you can track the amount of inventory you have at one warehouse location vs another. The main purpose of warehouse locations will be to be used in conjunction with sites. With this, we can assign sites their own inventory and those sites can have menus for pantry members that display inventory accurate to the inventory at that site.

Warehouse locations determine where inventory is currently stored in the system and the system will create a default warehouse location for every new pantry. The system will require there always be at least one active warehouse location at any given time.

To see existing/add new warehouse locations, you will need to open Pantry Warehouse from the dashboard side menu.

Once there, select Maintenance and a new list of options will appear. The option to select here is ‘Warehouse Location’.

On the Warehouse Location page, you will see a grid containing all existing warehouse locations.

In the last column is the edit button. Clicking either the edit button or the “Add Location” button will bring up a dialog allowing you to add/edit a warehouse location.

The fields on the “Add/Edit Warehouse Location” dialog are:

1. Warehouse Location Name - The name of the warehouse location.

2. Is Active- Determines whether the warehouse location is currently in use.

3. Short Name - A short name or code for the warehouse location.

4. Use For Food Bank - If your pantry is an organization that is set up as a Food Bank by Unicentric to allow other pantries to order from you, you can set this if you’d like those other pantries to be able to order inventory from this warehouse location.

From either “Pantry Warehouse” or “Warehouse”, you have the option to transfer inventory between warehouse locations. To do this, navigate to the transfer page by clicking the “Transfer” side-menu option after opening either “Warehouse” or “Pantry Warehouse”.

On the Transfer screen, you will see a grid containing all transfers in progress. Checking the ‘Include Completed’ checkbox will allow you to include transfers that have been included in the grid view as well. In the grid, you’ll see several columns related to the transfer.

Source Warehouse - The starting warehouse location where the inventory is being taken to.

Transfer No - This corresponds to the “Transfer #” on the “Add/Edit Transfer” dialog.

Pull Date - This corresponds to the date the inventory to be transferred was pulled (removed) from the source warehouse.

Destination Warehouse - The warehouse where inventory is being transferred to.

Expected receive date - The date the items are expected to arrive at the destination warehouse.

Status - Can be either Opened/Initiated/Completed where Opened means details of the transfer have been entered but the transfer has not been started (initiated), Initiated, meaning food has started to move between the different warehouse locations and Completed meaning the food pulled from the source warehouse has been successfully transferred to the destination warehouse.

When you click the “Add Transfer” button or choose to edit an existing transfer, you will see a pop up that looks like the following:

Almost all the fields above mirror the fields displayed in the grid listing all transfers on the main transfer page. The only fields that are not represented in the transfer grid are the “Transition Warehouse” which is explained in a later section of the article. Here, I will explain the data that appears in the inventory grid on the pop-up.

Once you select a ‘Source Warehouse’ for the order, you will see all the inventory available at that location that can be transferred to another warehouse location. In the grid you will see:

Category  The category associated with the inventory item.

Item  The name of the inventory item being transferred.

UOM  The unit of measure associated with the food item. Note in the image above you can see “Borden's 2% Milk” can be seen twice with two different units of measure. You should make sure you are selecting the correct unit of measure to be transferred.

Available  The amount of the inventory item currently available at the source warehouse.

Best By  If a “Best By” date has been entered for the inventory item, it will display in this column.

Transfer Quantity  The amount of the food item you intend to transfer to the destination warehouse.

Once you have selected the quantity associated with the items you wish to transfer, you can use the “Initiate Transfer” button to begin the transfer. Once initiated, you won’t be able to change the inventory items/transfer quantity. To change the items/quantity the transfer will need to be deleted (which will return the inventory items to the original source warehouse) and recreated.

If inventory used in a transfer isn’t going directly to the destination warehouse but instead to a different warehouse (say a warehouse labeled ‘Truck’, ‘Staging’ or ‘Shipping’) before reaching the destination warehouse, you can set that intermediary warehouse using the ‘Transition Warehouse’ drop down.

Once you initiate the transfer, the system will recognize that the inventory has been moved from the source to the transition warehouse.

If the inventory is going to be moved to multiple transition warehouses, you can represent this from this screen as well. After the inventory has reached the initial transition warehouse, you can change the “Transition Warehouse” value from the old warehouse previously being used to the new holding warehouse.

Changes to …

To show that the inventory we pulled from the source warehouse is now at the ‘Shipping Truck’ warehouse. Clicking the “Change Location” button

at the bottom of the pop-up will move the inventory from the old “Shipping Preparation” warehouse to the new “Shipping Truck” warehouse in the system. You can keep changing the transition warehouse until the inventory has reached the destination warehouse.

To complete a transfer, simply click the “Mark Complete” button.

This will indicate that the inventory items pulled from the source warehouse have been successfully received and able to be used at the destination warehouse.