Introduction to Zapstra Inventory Management

Zapstra Inventory Management helps your team plan purchases, work with suppliers, receive deliveries and keep track of the inventory those activities create. Start here to find the right guide for your work and understand when an action changes an order, informs a supplier or changes stock.

Follow a purchase from need to receipt

A typical purchasing workflow has four stages:

1. Prepare the item and supplier. Identify the material you buy, link the supplier's product, confirm its unit and price, and choose a receiving location.
2. Plan or create the purchase. Use Order plan to collect requirements and review proposed purchases, or create a purchase order directly. Applying an Order plan creates draft purchase orders.
3. Send the order. Review the saved purchase order and submit it to the supplier. The supplier can respond through the Supplier Portal, propose changes and provide shipment information.
4. Receive the goods. When the delivery physically arrives, record the quantities you accept or reject. Completing a receipt records the inventory outcome. Check any remaining order quantity, disputes and invoice work separately.

These stages are separate records. A draft purchase order has not been sent. A shipment marked delivered is not a completed receipt. An invoice records a financial claim; it does not prove that goods arrived.

Understand the item and its stock

A material is the item Zapstra Inventory Management manages. It can be a sellable item or a component that you purchase or consume without selling separately. A Shopify variant is a store listing of an item. A supplier SKU identifies the supplier's product. A barcode is a scanning identifier. These identifiers can refer to the same physical item without being interchangeable.

For example, your Kraft mailer material might use SKU MAILER-KR6, have a Shopify variant and be linked to Northwind Packaging's supplier product. You might buy it in cases of 24 each while tracking stock in each. The quantity 3 cases therefore represents 72 each; the price must use the matching unit too.

Inventory belongs to a location or stock pool. Two stores selling the same Main Warehouse stock may share one physical pool. Their displayed quantities are not extra goods to add together. Read Locations and stock pools before connecting shared locations.

Choose a reading path

Buyer, receiving operator and administrator describe reading audiences here. Your ability to make changes depends on your actual account access, the state of the record and the workspace's operating readiness.

Know what preparation and syncing mean

Preparing Shopify data brings store information into the workspace. It does not establish that every imported quantity matches a physical count, and it does not by itself authorize every future Zapstra Inventory Management stock change to update Shopify.

Before using Zapstra Inventory Management to control inventory, verify opening quantities, choose inventory control and review the explicit syncing action. Once syncing is enabled, later changes to the pool's available stock can go to Shopify automatically. Use Choose who controls inventory for the full sequence.

Order planning uses the requirements and replenishment settings you provide. It is not a promise of sales forecasting or autonomous ordering. Cost views help you understand purchasing and inventory activity; review their scope before using them for final accounting. See Integrations and Cost layers and the ledger.

When setup is complete, use the go-live checklist to verify a real workflow before making it part of daily operations.