Locations are places where inventory may be stored, sent to, or sent from. Examples of locations are warehouses, manufacturing centers, or retail stores.
Settle tracks the availability of inventory across locations. You can use locations to track inventory levels, and the flow of inventory items from one place in your shipping network to another.
There are five types of nodes that Settle uses to track and store inventory:
Store: A store refers to a physical retail outlet where products are displayed and sold directly to customers. These nodes serve as the most immediate point of interaction between your products and consumers.
Warehouse: Warehouses, or fulfillment centers, are specifically designed to manage and process online orders. These nodes are responsible for picking, packing, and shipping products to customers who have placed orders through your preferred e-commerce platform.
Distribution Center: Distribution centers act as central hubs for receiving, storing, and distributing inventory to various locations, including stores and fulfillment centers.
Manufacturing Center: Hub where inventory items can come out transformed in some way. Generally, raw materials or work-in-progress materials go in and work-in-progress materials or finished goods come out.
Corporate: Corporate nodes refer to your headquarters or main administrative offices.
You can have multiple locations or a singular location, depending on what most accurately reflects your existing manufacturing and fulfillment procedures.
Locations can be manually-managed or managed through an integration.
đ Read more about our Trackstar integration in Settle here.
Integrated Locations
Integrated locations have their inventory numbers syncâed against a WMS on a daily basis. Otherwise, integrated locations function very similarly to manually managed locations described below.
Manually-managed Locations
Manually-managed locations have all inventory managed through documents entered in Settle. Inventory numbers are updated exclusively via updates to Settle Purchase Orders, Work Orders, Inventory Transfers, and Customer Orders. Whenever brands do a series of inventory counts, we recommend ensuring your baseline numbers in Settle.
Creating a new manually-managed location in Settle
From your locations page, create a new Location by selecting âAdd locationâ in the upper right.
You will need to add the Location name, Category, Code (unique identifier), and complete address of the location. You may also add a point of contact, a contact email, and any notes.
Adding inventory to a manually-managed location
After creating a manually-managed location, youâll be prompted to add baseline inventory numbers. Youâll be able to select an item from your catalog, and break down your inventory by âOn Handâ, âAvailableâ, and âReservedâ. You can default to updated today, but if your information is outdated, you can update numbers from a certain point.
Inventory numbers will be updated by Documents and Orders in Settle.
đ Read more about Inventory in Settle here.
FAQs
What about transfers for photo shoots or giveaways?
Many brands create a âmarketingâ location for influencer giveaways or photo shoots. These items donât count as COGS since theyâre never sold.