Help · Updated 22 October 2026
Receiving a delivery
Open the item, enter the quantity and choose Receive. On-hand changes at once and the movement records the actor, the device and the time. On a purchase order, a short delivery leaves the order partial so you can receive the rest later.
Receiving is where the ledger is usually lost. A box arrives, someone puts it on the shelf, and the count that follows disagrees with the system for a week. The fix is not discipline, it is making the recording step take about as long as opening the box. In Mobile Inventory that step is a quantity and one button.
Receive an item
- Open the item you are putting away. Scanning its barcode is the quickest way to find it.
- Enter the quantity that arrived, in the unit the item is stocked in.
- Choose Receive.
On-hand changes at once. The movement that records it carries the actor, the device and the time, so the delivery is traceable later without anybody writing it in a notebook. If the delivery is wrong, you do not edit the past: you record a correction with a reason, which leaves both events visible.
What the movement records
Every change to stock is a movement, and every movement answers the same three questions: who did it, on what device, and when. That is what makes the activity trail readable when two people share a shop and a number does not look right. The trail is not a summary that can drift from the stock; it is the history the stock is built from.
A delivery is short: record what actually arrived
Suppliers send what they have. Counting the invoice instead of the boxes is how a shop ends up with stock it never had. On a purchase order, receive the quantity that is physically in front of you.
If you receive less than the order, the order does not close. It stays partial, and the remainder can be received later when the rest of the delivery turns up. That is the normal case, not an exception: one order, two deliveries, two movements, one order that finally closes.
- Open the order under Orders.
- Enter the quantity that arrived against each line.
- Receive. The order stays open for the balance, which can be received later.
If the shortfall is permanent — the supplier has discontinued the line, or the rest is not coming — the order stays partial. That is the honest record: less arrived than was ordered.
More arrived than you ordered
Over-receiving is reported, not blocked. A supplier sends an extra case, or the pack size changed and the invoice does not match the order. The product records what actually arrived and tells you it was more than expected. It does not refuse the delivery, because refusing to record real stock is worse than the discrepancy: the shelf would hold something the ledger denies.
Read the report as a prompt. An over-receipt is usually a packing change, a duplicated order or a supplier substituting a larger unit — all things worth knowing before the next order goes out.
Adjustments, with a reason
Not every change to stock is a delivery or a sale. Something breaks, a customer returns an item, a count is corrected. These are adjustments, and each one is recorded with a reason:sale, waste, correction orreturn.
| Reason | Use it when | What it can carry |
|---|---|---|
| Sale | Stock leaves the shop | A price, and for consignment items a consignor share |
| Waste | Stock is damaged, expired or unsellable | The reason |
| Correction | The recorded number was wrong | The reason |
| Return | Stock comes back into the shop | The reason |
The reason is not decoration. It is the difference between a report that says "stock went down by nine" and one that says nine were wasted, which is a number you can act on. A sale can carry a price, and for consignment stock a consignor share, so the money side of the movement is not reconstructed later from memory.
Transfers between locations (Pro)
Moving stock from the stockroom to the shelf, or between two shops on the Pro plan, is one paired movement: it leaves the source and arrives at the destination as a single record. That pairing is deliberate. A transfer that only subtracted would look like waste; one that only added would look like a delivery.
A transfer refuses to move more than the source location actually has. You cannot send twelve units from a location holding eight, because the result would be negative stock in one place and stock from nowhere in the other.
Transfers need a connection. Unlike receiving and counting, they are not queued offline, because a paired movement has to be checked against the source before either side is written.
Offline behaviour
Receiving works with no signal in the phone app. Record the quantity as usual and the change waits in the outbox; the home screen shows how many changes are waiting to sync. When the connection returns, queued changes are sent once. Each carries its own id, so a retry after a timeout does not record the same delivery twice.
A rejection is surfaced, not swallowed. If a queued change is permanently refused — a permission problem, for example — you are told, rather than being left with a delivery that looks recorded and is not.
What it does not do yet
- Transfers do not work offline. They need a connection to check and pair the two sides.
- Over-receiving cannot be blocked. It is reported after the fact by design, so the ledger matches the shelf.
- There is no approval step. Recording a movement writes it; there is no second person to sign it off.
- Purchase orders need Pro. On Starter you can still receive against an item and record adjustments, but not against an order with partial delivery.