Tracking stock

Most cleaning companies discover they are out of something at eight in the morning, in a van, at a client site. The cost is not the £4 bottle of degreaser. It is the hour lost driving to a cash and carry, and the client who watched it happen.

Inventory holds one row per thing you buy and use up: chemicals, consumables, PPE, small hardware and spare parts. Each row carries a quantity, a unit and a minimum threshold. When the quantity drops to or below the threshold, the row turns amber, the screen grows a banner, and an alert email goes out to you.

What the Inventory screen shows

The page is titled Inventory Management with the subtitle "Track supplies, equipment and consumables", and carries a single action, Add Item. Under the title sits a band of four counts, and those four are the whole picture at a glance.

The search box at the right of that band matches the item name only, not the notes and not the unit. Below it, the table is headed Current Stock with a count reading "24 items", and everything else on the page is a filter over that table.

The columns, and the filters over them

Ten rows to a page. There are no row checkboxes and no bulk actions, so there is no way to delete twenty items at once: each one is deleted from its own sheet. Clicking an open row closes it again, which is a small thing you will use more than you expect when you are checking levels down a list.

The stock levels, and what each colour means

One function decides the pill, the gauge colour, the alert and the CSV cell, so those four can never disagree. It reads the quantity against that item's own minimum threshold and returns one of four answers.

The header band folds Critical and Out of Stock together into one figure, Critical / Out, because both mean the same thing to you on a Monday morning: order it today. The table keeps them apart because the difference matters when you are deciding what to do with a job booked for tomorrow.

The threshold is per item, and it is the whole mechanism

There is no global "warn me at 20%" setting. Every item carries its own Min threshold, and you set it when you add the item or from the Edit tab afterwards. The number to use is not "how many do we like to have", it is how many get used between one order and the next arriving.

• A chemical you order monthly and get through at four bottles a month: threshold 4.
• Gloves that come in boxes of 100 and last a fortnight, with a five-day delivery: threshold 1.
• Something the wholesaler always has on the shelf and you can fetch the same day: threshold 1, because you are only warning yourself to pick it up.

When either the low or the critical count is above zero, the alert banners appear above the table, critical first. Each one lists the offending items as clickable chips reading the name and a running quantity such as "0/5 750ml Spray", so you can go straight from the banner to the item.

Alerts also leave the screen. Crossing a threshold sends you an email, deduped so one crossing sends one email. A toast confirms it on screen, naming the item that has gone low and saying the alert has been emailed to you, or counting them when several go at once. Going back above the threshold clears the flag, so the next crossing alerts again rather than going quiet forever.

Adding an item

Add Item opens a drawer titled Add Inventory Item, subtitled "Track a new supply, tool or consumable". It is three short sections and takes about twenty seconds per line of a wholesaler invoice.

How stock actually moves

The Edit tab deliberately does not let you type a new quantity. Stock only ever moves through Adjust Stock, which forces a direction, an amount and a reason. That is what turns the History tab into something you can trust when a case of chemicals goes missing.

The reason list is fixed and short, and it is the list your history will be readable by: Restock / Delivery, Used on Job, Damaged / Written Off, Returned to Stock, Audit Adjustment and Other. Switching the direction resets the reason to the sensible default for that direction, so an addition defaults to a delivery and a removal defaults to use on a job.

The other way stock moves is from the phone. A cleaner working a job can raise a supply request, and those land in a Supply Requests panel above the table with a subtitle counting how many are awaiting fulfilment. Marking one Fulfilled decrements each item on it and writes a movement with the reason "Used on Job" and a note naming the requester.

Stock is one number, not one per site

This is the thing people expect and do not get, so it is worth saying plainly. An inventory item holds a single company-wide quantity. There is no per-location stock, no transfer between sites, and no van as a stock location. An item has a name, a category, a unit, a quantity, a minimum and a notes field, and that is the whole record.

What the product gives you instead is the notes field, whose placeholder literally suggests it: "Supplier info, storage location, reorder details…". If you keep a cupboard at two sites, the practical pattern is two items with the site in the name, each with its own threshold. It is a workaround rather than a feature, and it is honest to call it one.

Getting the list out

Beside the pager sits a ghost Export CSV button. It writes inventory.csv containing the whole filtered and sorted list rather than the page you are looking at, with the headers Item, Category, Current Stock, Min Threshold, Unit, Status. The Status cell carries the display label, so a spreadsheet reads "Low Stock" rather than a code. The toast confirms the count: "Exported 24 items".

Filter to a category first and the export follows the filter, which is the quickest way to hand a chemicals-only order list to whoever does your buying. The export button is only on the page when there is at least one matching row, so an empty filter cannot produce an empty file.