The Discrepancy That Shows Up on Friday Afternoon
The FB stock figure says 47 units. You add up what's physically in the Showroom, the Display area, the main Stock bay, the XRF Room, Third Floor, Fourth Floor, Kilpauk, and Waltax Road depot, subtract the machines flagged as Problem units and the ones marked Reserved — and you get 43. Four units unaccounted for. The audit is Monday.
That gap between what the finance system believes you hold and what you can actually locate across your locations is a multi-location stock operation's most expensive recurring problem. It doesn't come from theft or damage in most cases. It comes from moves that didn't get recorded: a unit pulled from the XRF Room for a demonstration and never reinstated in the book, a machine set aside as Reserved but still showing in the Showroom count because someone forgot to decrement the field.
The Main Stock Structure template solves this with a deceptively simple architecture: every location gets its own integer field, a calculated Total sums them all, and a Difference field runs FB Stock − Total in real time. When the Difference reads zero, you're clean. When it doesn't, you know exactly which direction the variance runs.
The Anatomy of a Multi-Location Record
The FB stock field is a double, not an integer. That matters when you're dealing with bundled SKUs or fractional unit accounting — some equipment categories are tracked in partial units against the finance system. The location fields (Showroom, Display, Stock, XRF Room, Third Floor, Fourth Floor, Kilpauk, Problem machine, Reserved, Waltax Road) are all integers because physical units at a depot don't come in fractions.
The separation of Problem machine as a named integer field rather than a status tag on individual location fields is the structural decision that keeps operations honest. If you absorbed defective units into the main Stock count with a tag, they'd inflate your available inventory figure. Kept separate, the Problem machine count sits visible in every record, contributing to the Total but never masking as sellable stock. A manager scanning a product's record instantly sees that 3 of the 12 units in the system are problematic — without needing a filter.
The Reserved field operates the same way. Units earmarked for a customer or a future transaction are counted in Total but clearly isolated, preventing double-allocation. The Difference formula surfaces when those reservations create a gap against FB stock that wasn't anticipated.
What the Barcode Field Changes at the Depot Level
Waltax Road is a road depot, not a warehouse with fixed terminals. The Barcode field — a native Memento barcode type — means a staff member at the depot can scan a unit's barcode with a phone camera, pull up its record instantly, and update the Waltax Road count without retyping an item code. The Item code field is stored as a double, which accommodates the full numeric range of most EAN/UPC code structures, but barcode scanning bypasses that entry entirely for speed.
The Product Group field provides the aggregation layer that turns individual SKU records into category-level inventory summaries via Memento's filter and sort functions. When you need to know total XRF Room stock across all machines in Product Group "Industrial Analyzers", that's a two-tap filter operation.
The Difference calculated field is the daily operational signal. Negative means the physical count exceeds what finance holds — usually a recording lag from a recent receipt. Positive means finance believes stock exists that you can't locate. Both states are actionable, and both are visible immediately on the record without opening a spreadsheet.