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19.1. Inventory Overview: Stock, Purchasing, and Fulfillment for MSPs
What the AlgaPSA Inventory module covers — stock across warehouses and vehicles, purchase and sales orders, transfers, counts, RMAs — and how to read the inventory dashboard.
The Inventory module tracks the hardware you buy and resell — spare laptops on the shelf, access points in the van, UPS units staged for a project — separately from Assets, which tracks equipment already deployed and managed at client sites. The two are linked: when you deliver a serialized unit configured to create an asset, it automatically becomes a managed asset for that client.
If your team keeps stock for break-fix swaps, project rollouts, or new-hire setups, Inventory answers three questions at all times: what do we have, where is it, and what is on order?
What the module covers
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Stock | On-hand and available quantities per product, receiving, adjustments |
| Stock Locations | Warehouses, offices, and vehicles (a tech's van as a rolling stockroom) |
| Stock Units | Individual serialized units with serial/MAC, status, and full history |
| Vendors & Purchase Orders | Vendor records, per-vendor price lists, POs, receiving, landed costs |
| Vendor Bills | Lightweight payables tracking against received POs |
| Sales Orders | Client orders from draft to fulfillment, with generated confirmation, packing slip, and pick list documents |
| Transfers | Moving stock between locations, including van load lists |
| Cycle Counts | Blind physical counts with variance review and approval |
| RMA & Loaners | Vendor returns and replacement flows; loaner equipment tracking |
| Ticket & Project materials | Consuming stock on service work, with on-hand visibility and automatic asset creation on install |
| Client equipment | A client's delivered gear, orders, and RMAs, and the quote-to-order path for hardware |
| Margin, Write-offs, Ghost Usage | Profitability and shrinkage reporting |
Everything is recorded in an append-only stock ledger — every receipt, consumption, transfer, adjustment, and return is a permanent movement entry. Corrections are new movements, never edits, so the history always adds up.
The number that matters: Available
Throughout the module, Available = on hand − reserved − held. Stock reserved for confirmed sales orders (or hard-held for them) still sits on your shelf but cannot be promised to anyone else. When you are deciding what you can sell or deploy, look at Available, not on-hand.
The dashboard
Navigate to Inventory to open the dashboard. It leads with money and customers at risk rather than vanity totals: the top of the page answers "what costs us money or a client today?" and the reference numbers sit below. A subtitle sizes up the operation at a glance — branches, vans, technicians, and how much is in play today.
The dashboard opens with money at risk and a ranked worklist, then settles into pipeline and stock-health context.
- Money band: the three figures an owner checks daily. Unbilled but shipped is hardware that left the shelf but is not on an invoice yet. Margin month-to-date shows the running margin and flags any product selling below its current cost. Vendor-owed totals the credits for dead units sitting at a vendor, aged like a receivable so they get chased.
- Needs attention: one worklist, ranked by dollar and customer impact and grouped into bands — costs money or a customer today, worth chasing this week, and keep an eye on. Filter it by Money, Fulfillment, Field, or Ops. Every row carries the single action that clears it: Open staging, Invoice, Reorder, Create PO, Receive, Approve, Ship replacement, and the like. When nothing needs you, it says so.
- This week's deployments: the cutovers going out, each with a readiness bar showing whether the gear is staged (allocated) and provisioned (allocated with a MAC recorded), so a rollout is never discovered short on the morning of.
- Sales-order pipeline: booked value across open orders, as a funnel from quote to booked to fulfilling to invoiced-this-week, with anything blocked on a purchase order called out.
- Receiving today and Ghost usage this week: what is due to land on the dock, and hardware tickets that closed with no parts recorded (see Inventory Reporting).
- Inventory health footer: total stock value with a week-over-week delta, on-hand and serialized unit counts, and the week's activity — units received, deployed, transferred, and RMAs opened.
Low-stock alerts
Set a reorder point on a product (or a per-location override) and AlgaPSA watches it for you:
- A daily morning check sends an in-app alert for each location that has products at or below their reorder point. The alert goes to that location's manager, so the person responsible for a warehouse or van is the one notified.
- An Inventory Stock Low event also fires the moment fulfillment or ticket-material usage drops a product below its threshold — you can attach notification or automation rules to it in Workflows, alongside the PO Received, SO Fulfilled, and RMA Created inventory events.
Where to go next
- Enable tracking on your products and decide which are serialized — see Products and Stock Settings.
- Set up your warehouses and vehicles — see Stock Locations and Vehicles.
- Load your current stock with the opening-balance import, then keep it current through purchase orders — see Purchasing.
- Sell and deliver from stock with Sales Orders and Fulfillment, and keep counts honest with Transfers, Adjustments, and Cycle Counts.
- Draw parts on day-to-day service work in Inventory on Tickets and Projects, and give account managers the full picture in Client Equipment, Assets, and Quotes.