Inventory overview

Quick reference

• Every piece lives as a row in the inventory table, scoped to your tenant and pinned to one location.
• The list view lives at /inventory; each piece has a detail page at /inventory/<id>.
• SKU is the model identifier (you set it, or Nexpura auto-generates it). Stock number is the per-piece identifier — S1, S2, and so on for owned stock; C1, C2 for consignment.
• Quantity changes flow through the stock_movements ledger, never through a direct edit of the row. Every adjustment, sale, transfer, and shipment receipt writes a movement row.
• Archived items are soft-deleted (deleted_at stamped) — they vanish from the list view but the historical row is preserved, and the detail URL renders a read-only interstitial.

The shape of the data model

1. An item is a row, not a hierarchy

Nexpura's inventory model is intentionally flat. A gold-band ring, a loose diamond, a packet of jump rings, a packaged box of stock cards — each is one row in the inventory table. There's no parent-child product hierarchy; if you sell a ring in three lengths or four sizes, each length is its own row with its own SKU and its own quantity.

That decision keeps the data model honest about what your stock actually is — a list of distinct pieces (or distinct packs of pieces) sitting in a location, each with a real-world cost and a real-world price. The cost of the flat model is that you maintain rows by hand for each length or size variant; the benefit is that quantity counts, valuations, and sale paths all read cleanly off a single row.

2. Item types

Each item is one of five types: Finished Piece (a ring, a necklace — the piece you sell), Loose Stone (a gem you may set into a custom commission), Finding (clasps, jump rings, ear hooks — the small parts you build with), Raw Material (a length of gold wire, a sheet of silver), and Packaging (boxes, bags, cards). The type drives which fields show up on the form — packaging doesn't need a stone type, raw materials don't need ring sizes — and which views the item appears in.

For most stores the bulk of the catalog is Finished Piece. The other types matter when you start doing workshop commissions or want to track consumables separately.

3. SKU vs stock number

Two identifiers, two jobs. SKU is the model code — what makes this piece recognisable in your own catalogue. You set it yourself (e.g. RING-18CT-SOL-0.50CT), or if you leave it blank Nexpura generates one via the next_sku database function. Two pieces of the same model share the same SKU.

Stock number is the per-piece identifier — S1, S2, S3 for owned stock, C1, C2 for consignment. The stock number is what goes on the price tag and what your insurance schedule references. It's allocated monotonically per tenant.

Stock numbers are assigned automatically when you create stock via the receive shipment flow (the invoice scanner). If you create an item directly from /inventory/new the form doesn't auto-allocate one — that's by design, since you may already have a stock number written on the existing piece you're cataloguing. Set it in the field if you have one, leave it blank if you don't.

4. Quantity, low-stock threshold, and the movement ledger

Each item has a current quantity and a low-stock threshold (default 1). When quantity drops to or below the threshold, the item shows in the “Low stock” KPI on the dashboard and the inventory list gets a coloured pill.

Quantity is never edited directly. Every change — a sale, an adjustment, a transfer-in, a stocktake — writes a row to stock_movements, and a database trigger updates the inventory row's quantity to match. The benefit: a complete audit trail of every change, with who did it, when, and why. The cost: nothing.

See Adjusting stock and viewing history for the operator-facing flow.

5. The consignment flag

Pieces taken in on consignment from a vendor or a colleague aren't really yours until they sell, so the financial treatment differs. The is_consignment flag on the item marks it as consignment stock, switches the stock-number prefix to C, and surfaces extra fields on the form: consignor name and contact, start and end dates of the consignment window, and the commission percentage you owe back on a sale.

Consignment-from-vendor is documented at /docs/memo-and-consignment/receiving-on-memo. For the item-level mechanics, the flag and fields live on the standard /inventory/new form.

6. Locations and multi-store stock

Every item belongs to exactly one location at any moment. If you have multiple stores, the same model SKU can have a separate inventory row at each location — the boutique row has quantity 3, the workshop row has quantity 1. A transfer between locations decrements the source row and creates (or bumps) a destination row for that SKU. See Transferring inventory between locations.

If you only have one location, none of this matters in practice — every item just lives at your one store.

7. Gem-certificate and grading fields

For pieces with a stone, the form carries fields for Certificate number, Grading lab (GIA, IGI, AGS, in-house, etc.), Grade, and a Report URL where you can paste a link to the lab's online verification page. None of these are required, but if your store sells certified diamonds or coloured stones at price points where the certificate is load-bearing, filling them in is what makes the piece's provenance traceable from the tag through to the sale.

8. Archive vs delete

There's no hard delete from the inventory UI. The Archive button on the detail page does a soft delete — it stamps deleted_at on the row, hides the item from the list view, the POS, and reports, but keeps the row in the database so historical sales and audit logs still resolve.

Visiting an archived item's detail URL shows a read-only interstitial with the archive date and a back link. There's no self-serve restore today — if you archived a piece by mistake, contact us and we'll clear the deleted_at stamp.

Common questions

Troubleshooting