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Playbook

Counting stock held in more than one place

Groups, place names, and a pass-per-place workflow — plus a plain statement of what FieldScan does not model, so you can decide if it fits.

← All playbooksOne pass per placePhone scanner + Web dashboard + CSV exportUpdated Jul 28, 2026

A worked example, not a customer testimonial.

First, what FieldScan does not do

There is no multi-location support in FieldScan — no location entities, no per-warehouse stock levels, no transfer documents. If you run three warehouses on an ERP, this playbook is not going to replace it, and we would rather say so in the first paragraph than have you find out in week three.

What FieldScan has instead is smaller and often enough: groups, a place name plus GPS on every scan, and a barcode-per-account record whose scan count accumulates. This playbook is how far those actually go.

The setup: storefront, back room, van

A shop with stock in three places. The honest questions are “what do we have, in total?” and “where was this thing last seen?” — not warehouse-grade stock allocation.

A shopkeeper checking stock against open cartons in the back room of a small store.

The setup

Three places, one account

Place names carry the where, groups carry what must never mix, and a barcode still has one record.

Use place names for the where. As you scan, type the place once per area — “Storefront”, “Back room”, “Van” — and every scan carries it, searchable and exportable. GPS rides along automatically, which sorts the van from the shop even when nobody typed anything.

Use groups for stock that is genuinely different. Consignment items, a client’s goods, seasonal overflow — things that must never mix in a report get their own group.

The pass-per-place workflow

A barcode has one record per account, so the same SKU in two places does not become two rows — its count accumulates and its place name shows where it was last scanned. When you need separate per-place tallies of the same SKU:

  1. Count the storefront. Export the file, named storefront-2026-07-28.csv.
  2. Count the back room. Export again — back-room-2026-07-28.csv.
  3. The difference in each SKU’s scan count between the two files is the back-room tally.

One pass per place, one export between passes. It is a deliberate discipline rather than a database feature, and for one shop with three places it takes minutes.

What this playbook leaned on

Groups for what the organizing unit really is, GPS tagging for the place fields, and export fields and formats for the per-pass files.