Locations & Entities

Where your data lives, and why switching locations changes what you see

One word, two jobs: places and people

In Ardent Seller, an entity is anything your business deals with — both the places where you keep and move stock (your studio, a storage unit, a market stall) and the contacts you transact with (vendors, customers, charities). Places are special: inventory, transactions, and recipes are tracked per location, and the app always shows you the data for the one location you currently have selected. Understanding that single idea explains most "where did my data go?" moments.

Locations and contacts: the eight entity types

Type	Kind	Typical use
Primary	Location	Your main place of business — every account has exactly one
Secondary	Location	An additional site, like a second workshop or studio
Storage	Location	A storage unit, garage, or warehouse holding stock
Production	Location	A site where you make things, like a commercial kitchen
Sales	Location	A selling site, like a market stall, booth, or retail counter
Vendor	Contact	Someone you buy from — appears on purchases
Customer	Contact	Someone you sell to — appears on sales
Charity	Contact	An organization you donate to — appears on donations

Every account has exactly one Primary location — it's created with your account and is where the app starts you. The other four location types are optional and exist so multi-site sellers can mirror how their business is physically laid out. Contacts (vendors, customers, charities) are not places: they appear on transactions as the other party, but no stock is counted "at" them.

What is scoped to a location

Three kinds of data belong to the location where they live or happened:

Inventory counts and value — on-hand quantity and valuation are computed per location. The same SKU can exist at two locations with completely independent counts and independent average costs.
Transactions — every purchase, sale, or adjustment records the location where it happened, alongside the vendor, customer, charity, or counterpart location it involved.
Recipes and production — procedures belong to the location where you run them.

Lists like reports, contacts, and settings are account-wide — only the three above change when you switch locations.

The location switcher — the #1 "my data disappeared" explanation

When your account has more than one active location, a map-pin dropdown labeled Select Location appears in the top header. It lists each location with its type and a check mark on the current one. Your choice persists across sessions — sign out on Friday with your market stall selected and you'll still be looking at the stall's inventory on Monday.

So if your items or transactions ever seem to vanish, check the map-pin first: you're almost certainly viewing a different location. Nothing was deleted — switch back and everything is exactly where you left it. See Troubleshooting for the full symptom checklist.

Moving stock between locations

Because counts are independent per location, stock moves between them through a transfer (Optimize → Transfers): a send transaction takes the quantity out of the origin and a linked receive transaction adds it at the destination. If the item doesn't exist at the destination yet, Ardent Seller sets it up there automatically. Like all stock movement, a transfer takes effect when it is Completed — the full story is in How Stock Moves.

Where to manage each entity type

Each entity type lives in the sidebar group that matches how you use it:

Vendors — Source → Vendors, next to your purchases.
Customers — Deliver → Customers, next to your sales.
Charities — Optimize → Charities, next to donations (shown when the Giving & other money module is on).
Locations — open Settings and choose the Locations card ("Manage primary, secondary, storage, production, and sales sites."), which opens the locations list.

All four lists support CSV import — see the import reference for the entity columns.

How Stock Moves

How inventory quantities change in Ardent Seller — which transaction categories add or remove stock, and why nothing moves until a transaction is Completed.

Import Reference

The complete CSV import and export reference for Ardent Seller — every import surface, the column-mapping flow, required columns, opening stock, and exact error messages.

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.