The words of the warehouse, spelled out

A record you can only add to: once a line is written it is never edited or deleted. A mistake is corrected by writing a new movement that offsets it — with its own reason, author and date — instead of making the wrong one disappear. It is the difference between an inventory you can prove and one people simply have to trust.

The type of a movement: receipt, put-away, pick, shipment, transfer out and in, adjustment, quality release, damage, return, change of ownership. It is not free text typed by an operator but a closed list, and the reason code decides how the movement is treated: whether it touches stock cost, for instance, or leaves it alone.

How many units are actually there right now, at one precise point: the combination of warehouse, location, item, lot, serial, owner and stock state. It is not the same as what you can sell — from that figure you still have to subtract whatever is already committed to other orders.

The table that keeps the running balance for every cell, updated in the same transaction as the movement that changed it, so a stock question is answered without walking through millions of lines. It is not a second truth: it can be rebuilt from the ledger at any time, and a nightly reconciliation does exactly that.

A claim on goods for an order, kept apart from physical stock. It starts soft when the order is confirmed — a quantity held at warehouse level — and becomes hard when the order is released to picking, once the location and the lot are known. The order is never written inside a stock line: who owns the goods and who has been promised them stay two different questions.

The movement that brings stock back in line with what was actually counted. There is no field in CargoNode where a quantity gets retyped: an adjustment is proposed, approved by someone who holds that permission, and only then becomes a ledger line carrying who asked, who approved and why.

The scheduled check that recomputes stock from the ledger and compares it with the projection, and recomputes what is committed from the active reservations. If the two readings differ by a single unit it says so at once, instead of letting the gap grow quietly for months.

A dated copy of stock at a given moment. Here they are not taken at regular intervals: the year-end one is frozen once and becomes the statutory inventory, immutable; for any other date stock is rebuilt from the ledger, which carries a date on every line. Storage charged to an owner whose goods you hold is measured the same way — the ledger balance at the end of the period, not stock as it stands today — which is why the same invoice, regenerated months later, comes out at the same figure.

The location within arm’s reach that is picked from every day, kept topped up from bulk. Separating the pick face from bulk is what makes picking fast: the operator works a few nearby positions instead of walking the whole building.

The order in which locations are met while walking the warehouse. Every location carries its position along that round, so the pick list follows the physical route instead of sending the operator back down the same aisle three times.

The condition the goods in the building are in: available, reserved, in quarantine, damaged. It is not a descriptive label but a dimension of stock: goods in quarantine are counted and cannot be promised, and they become available only through a release movement.

A group of units produced or received together, identified by a code and, where it matters, an expiry date. If the item calls for it the lot is captured at receiving, and from then on every movement knows which lot it belongs to — which is how a manufacturer’s recall is answered in minutes rather than days. Lot traceability is an Italian legal requirement, so it is on in every configuration.

The number that identifies a single unit rather than a group. If an item is serial-tracked, every movement demands that number: you always know where that unit is and, once it has left, who it went to.

You buy by the carton, store by the box and sell by the piece. CargoNode holds the conversion factors between an item’s units and always writes the ledger in the base unit, so balances stay comparable; the factor used is frozen onto the document line, because the past should not change the day the packaging does.

The display box that, once opened, becomes N sellable pieces — or the other way round. It is a real movement rather than a correction: boxes go out, single pieces come in, and the cost of the carton is spread across the pieces’ cost layers instead of going missing on the way.

Whoever owns the goods, who is not necessarily whoever runs the warehouse. It is a dimension on every line from day one, even when there is only one owner: switching it on to hold goods for clients needs no data migration, and two owners’ stock on the same rack stays separate.

Receiving goods with no purchase order to book them against, because the pallet turned up anyway. You scan what is there, declare lot and cost, and the goods are in: the paperwork is sorted out afterwards, the stock figure is right immediately.

The step from the receiving bay to the rack, with the location proposed by the rules and a double scan — item and location — confirming where it was set down. Without that confirmation the job stays open: it is the gesture that makes tomorrow’s stock figure trustworthy.

The inspection of incoming goods before they can be sold. It is not a note on a sheet of paper: the goods sit in quarantine — in the building and counted, but impossible to promise — and leave it only through a release movement, or end up among the damaged stock.

When a location holds less than the pick list asks for. The operator declares what was actually found and moves on: the line closes on the real quantity and the system opens the follow-up work itself — a replenishment to that pick face, or an exception to look at further upstream.

Topping up pick faces from bulk stock, driven by a minimum threshold and a maximum level per item and location. A periodic scan finds the pick faces below threshold and creates the top-up jobs before the location runs dry.

The practice of moving goods that are already earmarked for an order straight across the warehouse, from the receiving bay to shipping, without a stop on a rack. It is used where flows are repetitive and volumes are known in advance, because it saves two handlings per unit.

Counting one slice of the warehouse at a time all year round, instead of stopping everything once a year. Sessions are opened by zone or by rack and become work on the handheld; whatever does not add up never corrects the stock figure on its own, it becomes an adjustment for someone to approve.

Moving goods between two warehouses through declared states — draft, ready, in preparation, shipped, arrived, completed — with a “problem” state it can fall into and come back from, because that is what warehouses do. In transit the goods sit in a transit location with a real balance: a shortfall on the road shows up instead of disappearing between the two sites.

The app the operator uses on the floor, built for a network that may not be there: at the far end of the aisle operations queue on the device and go out when coverage returns. Each one carries an identifier generated on the handheld, so coming back into range records nothing twice.

The Italian goods-transport document that travels with whatever leaves the warehouse: what is going out, to whom, under which reason and by which means. It comes out of the shipment and is numbered without gaps per warehouse and per year — a missing number in the series is something you have to explain, not a detail.

The valued count of goods held at the close of the financial year, required of Italian companies by article 2217 of the civil code. Once closed it is frozen: that year’s inventory stays immutable and readable line by line, at the value it had then and not the value it would have today.

What the goods you hold are worth and what the goods you sold cost you, computed in layers: every inbound creates a layer at its own cost and every outbound consumes the oldest layers first. It is about money, not about which unit leaves the shelf — that decision belongs to FEFO.

The Italian ledger of invoices issued and invoices received, with taxable amount and tax split by rate: it is the basis of the periodic VAT settlement. It fills itself from the documents as they are issued or recorded and is never typed by hand. Being a legal obligation, it stays on in every configuration.

One piece of software serving many companies while keeping each one’s data apart. In CargoNode the separation is by database schema: every customer has their own, so there is no query that can show another company’s data because someone forgot a condition.

The property that repeating the same operation does not perform it twice. Every scan carries an identifier created on the handheld: if the network drops and the request is sent again, the server recognises the identifier and returns the same outcome instead of writing a second movement.

A part of the system you switch on when you need it. There are four: sales, accounting, analytics and third-party logistics. The warehouse is not one of them, because it is the product; Italian legal obligations are outside the list too, and always on.

The numbers that size a customer — warehouses, users, monthly orders, connectors, owners — written on their own row rather than inside a pricing tier. Raising one changes nothing in the software and needs no data migration: the second warehouse was allowed for on day one.

The link to an outside system: an online store, a carrier, another management system. The external system’s codes stay inside the connector instead of polluting your item records; events pass through a queue with retries, and a channel that begins to fail is isolated without stopping the others.