Prepare and verify opening inventory

Establish a trustworthy starting quantity for each material and physical location before relying on purchasing proposals or enabling Shopify stock updates. This guide is for the person checking initial store data and opening warehouse stock.

Opening inventory is stock you already possess when you begin using Zapstra Inventory Management. A future purchase order, shipment in transit or planned production output does not belong in that opening on-hand quantity.

1. Check workspace preparation

Open Home and review Preparing your Shopify data when it appears. Preparation covers Products, Locations, Inventory and Live Shopify changes. Inventory preparation can wait for products and locations to finish.

1. Follow View preparation details if a row needs attention or you need to inspect progress.
2. Review warnings even when other rows are ready. Ready with warnings still requires reviewing those checks.
3. If preparation offers Retry, use it for the failed work and follow its result.
4. Use Run full refresh when a fresh preparation run is needed, then follow View refresh progress. An accepted request is not the same as a finished run.

The preparation card can disappear once the workspace is prepared. Check the actual records you will use as well as the progress message. If status is Checking, progress is unavailable or a read fails, do not interpret that as an empty catalog or zero inventory.

While inventory is loading, you can work on available setup tasks such as supplier details. Avoid recording stock to compensate for a row that has simply not loaded yet. See Installation for the broader setup sequence.

2. Verify identity, unit and location

For each material you plan to operate on:

1. Open Materials and find the intended item. Check its name, material SKU and linked Shopify listings, rather than relying on a similar title.
2. Confirm the base unit and supplier conversion. For Kraft mailer, MAILER-KR6, a physical count of three cases containing 24 each is 72 each when each is the base unit.
3. Open Stock Levels and identify the correct pool, such as Main Warehouse. Check Outlet separately if it holds different physical goods.
4. Review duplicate-material or shared-location matches before consolidating them. Resolve uncertainty using material matching and location setup.

If two stores each display 72 each for the same Main Warehouse goods, the physical opening stock is still 72 each, not 144 each. Choose one verified physical baseline when consolidating their shared location. Distinct goods at Main Warehouse and Outlet must remain attributed to the appropriate physical location.

3. Compare prepared quantities with physical evidence

Compare On hand with a recent physical count or another inventory record whose scope and timing you trust. Account for activity since that count: receipts, picks, transfers and production can make an earlier count stale.

Also inspect Available and Unavailable. Available stock can be lower than on hand because of reservations, commitments, safety stock and held quantities. Do not replace on hand with Shopify's available quantity merely to make two different measures match. Stock quantities explains those measures.

If imported quantities are already correct, leave them in place. Adding the same opening quantity as another adjustment would double-count it. If an item is missing because preparation or matching is incomplete, repair that cause first. Use Data Exchange for supported imports and the migration reference for file preparation; an import is not a promise that every historical transaction has migrated.

4. Record an opening correction when needed

Before recording a change, review inventory control and syncing. A stock change can affect Shopify when syncing is already active. An initial Set to can also attempt to start syncing, and the editor tells you when that is part of the action.

1. In the material's Stock Levels, find the pool and open the edit control beside On hand. Its accessible label starts with Edit stock in.
2. Choose Set to when entering the verified total. Adjust by means a change to the existing quantity, not the resulting total.
3. Enter Quantity in the material's base unit. For an illustrative verified count of 72 each, use Set to 72. If the existing value was 48 each, the intended increase is 24 each, not an additional 72 each.
4. Choose the accurate Reason. The options identify increases and decreases, such as Write-on (+) and Write-off (−). Use Add note to explain the opening correction and the source or date of the count.
5. If reducing stock and the editor asks for Take from bin, choose the actual bin holding that material. Review the before-and-after values in the stock row.
6. Read any notice that this also starts syncing to your store. Proceed only when you are ready for future available-stock changes to update Shopify.
7. Confirm with the checkmark control named Record stock change.

Do not use an on-hand correction to represent stock merely held for inspection or damage assessment. Use the appropriate condition workflow in Stock quantities. For a structured physical count, follow Count stock with Stock Scan.

5. Verify the result before continuing

Check the material's new stock row and Activity. Confirm the pool, unit, reason and resulting on-hand quantity. If the requested total was already the current total, the editor can leave the record action disabled because there is no change to post.

Check syncing separately. Stock recorded with a syncing message means the stock change succeeded but the follow-up enablement did not finish. Resolve the stated issue and use Start syncing; do not record the opening quantity again. If the whole request timed out, inspect the original activity and quantity first before deciding whether any action is missing.

Enabling syncing itself does not immediately send a new number to Shopify. Subsequent eligible stock changes can update the store automatically. When you are ready, follow Choose who controls inventory and enable syncing, then finish the go-live checklist.