Getting started
Groups: the organizing unit
How FieldScan organizes stock — groups plus a free-text place name per scan — and the honest answer to "what about more than one location?"
What a group is
A group is a named bucket of scans, and it is the organizing unit everything else in FieldScan builds on. A group can mean whatever your work needs it to mean:
- a client — a bookkeeper keeps each client’s stock in its own group
- a job — this week’s recount, kept apart from last month’s
- an area — the storefront versus the back room
- a channel — items destined for one marketplace
Exports can be scoped to a group, the API can filter by group, and on Team plans the whole workspace shares the same groups, so “put it in the Meyer group” means the same thing to everyone.
One record per barcode
Within your account, a barcode has one record. Scanning it again raises the scan count on that record rather than creating a duplicate — that is what keeps a count honest when two people work the same shelf. A record belongs to at most one group at a time; moving it is an edit, not a copy.
| Barcode | Name | Category | Status | Location | Added by | Scans |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5901234123457 | Blue nitrile gloves, L | Consumables | Reviewed | Aisle 4, Bay 2 | R. Okafor | 3 |
| 4006381333931 | Thermal roll 80mm | Packaging | In Progress | Aisle 1, Bay 7 | M. Reiter | 12 |
| 8712345678906 | Safety goggles, clear | PPE | New | Cage B | R. Okafor | 1 |
| 0012345600012 | Cable tie 200mm (bag) | Hardware | Reviewed | Aisle 9, Bay 3 | J. Vance | 27 |
| 3057640100178 | Degreaser 5L | Chemicals | Archived | Store room | M. Reiter | 2 |
The place name, per scan
Separately from groups, every scan carries GPS coordinates and a free-text place name — “Aisle 4, Bay 2”, “Van shelf B”, “Mezzanine”. It is a string you can search and export, written at the moment of capture.
Stock in more than one place, honestly
Because a barcode has one record per account, the same SKU sitting in two places does not become two rows. What you actually have:
- The scan count accumulates across places — a total, not a per-place tally.
- The place name and coordinates tell you where each item was last recorded.
- Groups separate stock cleanly when the items themselves differ — different clients, different jobs, different channels.
When you need separate totals of the same SKU per place, do a pass per place and export between passes. The counting stock in more than one place playbook walks that workflow end to end, including where it stops being the right tool.