Eight warehouses. One inventory model that actually reflects reality.

Not all inventory is the same kind of inventory.

Take Apex Industrial Supply, an importer running owned warehouses in two countries, Amazon FBA in both, goods in transit from an overseas supplier, a trade show circuit, and a repair operation for returns.

A single "Inventory" number in most systems blends all of that together - stock that can ship today, stock Amazon controls, stock still on a container ship, stock sitting at a trade show booth, and stock that might be defective. None of those should be treated the same way, and treating them the same way quietly corrupts your numbers.

Eight locations. Two fundamentally different roles.

Every warehouse falls into one of two categories: sellable stock that can ship directly to a customer, or non-sellable stock that must move through an internal transfer before it can be sold. Getting this split right is the foundation everything else in this page builds on.

Orders route by country. Automatically.

Domestic orders route between the Canada and US warehouses based on the customer's country - set once, applied forever. On the customer record, under Sales & Purchase, a default warehouse is configured per customer: Canadian customers default to the Canada warehouse, US customers default to the US warehouse.

The sales order's warehouse field then defaults automatically from that customer setting - no one has to remember to pick the right warehouse order by order. For a large customer base, this default can be set in the same pass as fiscal position assignment, so the rollout happens once.

Goods that have left the supplier but haven't arrived yet - split by destination.

Rather than one shared location for goods en route from an overseas supplier, each destination gets its own dedicated In-Transit warehouse: In-Transit - Canada and In-Transit - US. The destination is known the moment the purchase order is placed, so there's no ambiguity to track later, and reporting on in-transit value by destination is a direct query instead of a manual split.

Show inventory, tracked separately, ties directly to channel COGS.

Stock allocated to a trade show gets its own warehouse - and because sales from the show pull from a dedicated location, channel-level cost of goods sold for cash sales becomes a real number pulled straight from warehouse valuation, not an estimate.

Returns get quarantined before they touch sellable stock.

Customer returns route directly into the Repair Centre - never back into a domestic warehouse - so potentially defective units never mix into sellable inventory before they've been inspected.

Which warehouses route automatically - and which don't.

Only two of the eight warehouses participate in automatic, order-by-order routing. The rest are manual or operational transfers by design - they should never be a source of automatic order fulfillment.