I’m a relatively new user and our foodcoop’s future foodsoft specialist.
My question is: How does a regular user buy a stock article? It seems
like there is no interface to do this. As an admin, I can change the
stock quantities, but that’s not what I mean. I’m looking for a place
that’s called something like “Buy stock articles”, and you can enter the
amount of stock articles you took, and the app will simply subtract the
appropriate amounts from your balance and from the stock quantities.
Thanks for your question. I have never really used stock articles for real, but the idea is as follows, if I’m correct.
You can keep the inventory up-to-date as a foodcoop. To fill the stock, a foodcoop can order articles from a supplier by means of a delivery.
To sell the inventory to members, one can open a stock order. Then instead of indicating articles to order from a supplier, members can choose which articles they want from stock (for as long as there is stock left).
As far as I know, this is used by foodcoops who order articles upfront, and then members buy from stock. I would be interested to know who is using this.
I do think this functionality can be improved, both for foodcoops ordering before and after gathering orders from members. Given enough interest, this could be put on a roadmap (which would be make anyway).
Thanks for the explanation, that already puts a few things straight.
To sell the inventory to members, one can open a stock order. Then
instead of indicating articles to order from a supplier, members can
choose which articles they want from stock (for as long as there is
stock left).
I see, we never opened a stock order so far, and that’s the reason we
couldn’t order anything.
I’ve created a test stock order, ordered 2 of the 3 available test
articles and closed the stock order. If I go to the page
/stock_articles, I can now see a table with my test article, but it says
that there are 3 units of my article in stock, 2 of them ordered and one
available. What I am missing now is a button saying “Yep, those two
ordered articles have now been collected.” As I understand it, it should
say afterwards that only 1 unit is in stock at all. Even after I went to
/stock_takings/new, it didn’t change.
I can see how this functionality kind of works for coops that order a
lot in advance and then distribute it to their members via this stock
functionality. Our coop orders most things on demand, plus a few
articles extra which go to stock. Members buy stock items spontaneously
when they’re there, so they don’t really need to order it in advance,
they just need to have a functionality to write down what they took. So
for us, the workflow is a bit cumbersome.