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Inventory Anomalies

Purpose

This report finds stock numbers that cannot be right.

Some of your quantity can be held: reserved because it is sitting in a customer's cart but not yet bought. Normally held is less than what you have. When it is not, something has gone wrong, and the symptom a customer sees is a product that refuses to sell even though the shelf says there are plenty.

This is a diagnostic screen. You will not need it on a normal day, and it is the first place to look when a product will not add to a cart.

Accessing Inventory Anomalies

Click Modules → Reports → Inventory Anomalies

The Inventory Anomalies report with its dataset selector

The four views

Pick one from the selector at the top:

  • Items: held > qty / stale available - products claiming more reserved than they have
  • Variations: held > qty / stale available - the same, for individual sizes and colours
  • Items: stored held drifted from live cart sum - the held number does not match the carts that actually exist
  • Variations: stored held drifted from live cart sum - the same, per variation

The first two find impossible numbers. The last two compare the stored figure against a live count of what is really in customers' carts right now, which catches the case where the number is possible but simply wrong.

Reading the columns

Column What it means
Product the product, or the variation
ID its id, useful when two products share a name
Quantity what you have
Held quantity what is reserved in carts
Available what a customer can still buy
Live held (cart sum) what the carts actually add up to, counted now
Drift (live − stored) the gap between the two. Zero is healthy

The last two only appear in the drift views.

Fixing what it finds

Two actions sit on each row:

  • Edit quantity opens the product so you can correct the number
  • View product opens it in the catalogue

A common cause of drift is a customer account that was deleted while it still had a cart holding stock. The hold outlives the cart, and the quantity never comes back.