How Stock Moves
Which transactions change your quantities, and when
Stock never changes by itself — a transaction moves it
Ardent Seller never edits a quantity directly. Every change to what you have on hand — buying supplies, selling a product, running a batch, counting shelves — is recorded as a transaction, and your on-hand quantity is simply the running total of all completed transactions for that item at the current location. That design gives you a full paper trail: for any number in the app, you can always answer "what made it this?"
Every transaction category and its stock effect
| Category | Stock effect | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase | Stock in | Buying materials or goods from a vendor |
| Initial | Stock in | Opening balance when an item is first set up or imported |
| Receive | Stock in | The incoming side of a transfer between your locations |
| Manufacture | Stock in | Production output — intermediates, or products made straight from raw materials |
| Assembly | Stock in | Production output — sellable products built from components |
| Sale | Stock out | Selling to a customer |
| Send | Stock out | The outgoing side of a transfer between your locations |
| Consumption | Stock out | Ingredients used up by a production run |
| Donation | Stock out | Donating goods to a charity |
| Waste | Stock out | Spoiled, broken, or discarded stock |
| Loss | Stock out | Missing or unaccounted-for stock |
| Expense | None | Non-inventory spending (rent, fees, software) |
| Income | None | Money in that is not a product sale |
| Adjustment | Either | Manual correction up or down |
| Stocktake | Either | Reconciling a physical count against the expected quantity |
Adjustments and stocktakes are the two categories that can move stock in either direction — an adjustment records the correction you enter, and a stocktake records the difference between what the app expected and what you physically counted.
Stock only moves when the status is Completed
Every transaction has a status: Initiated, In Progress, Completed, Canceled, or Returned. Only Completed transactions count toward on-hand quantity and inventory value. A purchase you saved as Initiated (say, an order you placed but haven't received) will not raise your stock until you mark it Completed — and the same is true for sales, production, and transfers.
If you ever save a transaction and the item's quantity doesn't change, check the status first — it is the most common cause. See Troubleshooting for the full checklist.
Production runs: consume ingredients, add output
When you complete a production run (Create → Production Runs), Ardent Seller records the movement as linked transactions: a consumption transaction removes each recipe ingredient from stock, and a manufacture or assembly transaction adds the finished output. The output's cost is the total of what was consumed — ingredients plus labor — so your cost-per-unit flows through automatically.
A production run has its own status, and its linked transactions follow it: nothing is consumed and nothing is added until the run itself is marked Completed.
Transfers move stock between locations
Stock is tracked per location, so moving items from your studio to a market stall is a transfer (Optimize → Transfers): a send transaction takes the quantity out of the origin location and a linked receive transaction adds it at the destination. If the item doesn't exist at the destination yet, it is set up there for you.
Because counts are per location, switching locations changes the quantities you see — read Locations & Entities for how that works.
Opening balances
When you bring existing stock into Ardent Seller — typing it in or importing a CSV with Quantity and UnitCost — the app records an initial transaction. That opening balance sets both the starting quantity and the starting unit cost your costing builds on. Neither can be negative: if an item is already oversold, enter an opening quantity of 0 and record the shortfall with an adjustment. See the import reference for how opening stock works during a migration.
The opening balance is an ordinary transaction, so you can find it later under Optimize > Adjustments, which lists opening balances alongside your manual corrections, and edit its quantity and cost if you got either wrong. Opening balances cannot be deleted or duplicated, because every quantity the item has ever had is measured from that starting point.
Setting items up before you have counted them
You do not have to be standing in the workshop with a scale to add an item. Enter the item with an Initial Quantity of 0 and everything that is not a physical count still saves: name, SKU, unit, category, description, default vendor, retail price, reorder point and reorder quantity, tags, attributes and custom fields. Add items on a laptop between meetings; count them when you are next in the shop.
Cost is the one thing that waits. An opening balance records quantity and cost together, so with nothing on hand there is nothing for a cost to attach to — Ardent Seller hides the cost field until you enter a quantity. You lose nothing by waiting: unit cost is an average built from what you actually pay, and it starts the moment stock arrives.
When you are ready to put the real numbers in, pick whichever matches what happened:
- Purchase — you have the invoice. The best option: it records quantity, cost and vendor in one place, so your cost of goods and vendor history are right from the start.
- Adjustment — stock you already owned before you started with Ardent Seller. Enter the cost per unit on the line; leaving it at 0 tells the app the stock was free and drags the item's average cost down.
- Stocktake — you counted the shelf and want the app to match it. Any surplus is valued at the item's current average cost.
- Edit the opening balance — you meant to enter the count at setup and skipped it. Open Optimize > Adjustments, open the item's Initial row, and fill in the quantity and cost.
Related articles
Locations & Entities
What entities are in Ardent Seller — the five location types and three contact types, what data is scoped to the selected location, and how the location switcher works.
How Costing Works
How Ardent Seller calculates costs — weighted-average costing from purchases through recipes and production runs to the COGS and margin on each sale.
Troubleshooting
Fix the most common Ardent Seller problems — stock that did not move, production runs that consumed nothing, inventory missing after switching locations, CSV import errors, and save failures.