Items and stock

Items

Go to Inventory → Items.

The item register summarises stock value, low-stock totals and recent movement.

Select Add New.

Field	Notes
Name	Specific. “Exercise book A4 96pg”, not “books”.
Category	Groups items for reporting and reordering.
Unit of measure	The unit you actually issue in.
Reorder level	The quantity at which the item appears on the low stock report.
Account	The ledger account purchases post to.
Default selling price	The normal retail price for stock sold to students. Leave blank or zero for stock that is never sold.

Two fields deserve care:

Unit of measure. Buy in bales, issue in reams, and the figures will never agree. Pick the unit you issue in and convert at receipt.

Reorder level. Set it to cover the time it takes to get more, not to zero. If maize takes two weeks to arrive and the school uses 40kg a week, the reorder level is at least 80kg.

Selling price. For a retail item such as a uniform, set the price normally charged to students. The item list compares this price with the current weighted unit cost and shows both markup and margin. The price is a default: it can be changed for a particular student sale without changing the item’s normal price.

Markup and margin are different

Markup is profit divided by cost. Margin is profit divided by selling price. For example, an item costing KES 800 and selling for KES 1,000 has a 25% markup and a 20% margin.

Issuing stock

Inventory → Issue Items moves stock out of the store to a department.

Recent stock movements appear below the issue/return action.

Record the department, the items and quantities, and who collected. Stock reduces immediately, and the issue is attributed to the department for consumption reporting.

Issue at the point the goods leave, not at the end of the week from memory.

Returning stock

Inventory → Return Items puts unused stock back. Record which issue it came from where you can, so consumption figures for that department are corrected rather than inflated.

Adjustments

Inventory → Adjustment corrects the system to match a physical count.

Start a new count from the adjustment screen when no batch is active.

Count at least once a term:

1. Print the stock control sheet.
2. Count physically, writing what is actually there.
3. Enter the counted quantities as an adjustment.
4. Record a reason for every discrepancy. Breakage, spoilage, an unrecorded issue, a counting error. An adjustment with no reason is indistinguishable from a loss.
5. Have the adjustment approved by someone other than the storekeeper.

When an item is allocated to one or more canteen outlets, this Inventory count is the school-wide total: main store plus every outlet. Count each outlet first under Inventory → Canteen → Stock, then include those quantities in the total entered here. ShuleOne will not let a school-wide count fall below the quantities already recorded at canteen outlets. Main-store issues and deductions are likewise limited to the total not allocated to an outlet.

Caution

Large or repeated adjustments in the same item are a signal worth acting on. The purpose of a count is not to make the figures agree — it is to find out why they did not.

Approvals

Issues and adjustments above the threshold in Inventory → Settings go to Inventory → Approval. Set the threshold low enough to be a real control and high enough that the queue is worked rather than rubber-stamped.