Ask a plumbing company where its inventory is and you get three answers: the warehouse, the vans, and “somewhere on a job.” The warehouse count is usually right. The van counts are usually wrong. And the job-site number is a shrug that costs real money every month.
The pattern is not carelessness. It is that most inventory systems only model one place, so everything outside the warehouse falls off the books the moment it leaves the dock.
Every van is a location
Knowledge ERP treats locations as first-class: the warehouse is one, and each van is another, with its own counts, its own bins if you want them, and its own reorder points. Loading a van stops being an untracked grab and becomes a transfer, with the stock visible in transit and landing in the van's count when it arrives.
That one change answers the question that burns the most time in a trade business: “do we have one, and where?” A three-quarter-inch pressure valve is either in the warehouse, in van two, or it is not, and the search takes five seconds instead of three phone calls.
Label it or lose it
Van stock stays accurate only if updating it is effortless. Every unit and bin in Knowledge ERP carries an auto-generated barcode with printable label sheets, so a checkout or transfer starts from the exact item instead of a guess from memory. A tech restocking from the warehouse checks out what goes on the truck; the count follows the parts.
Expensive test equipment gets a different treatment: serial numbers and asset checkout. The pipe camera is checked out to a person with a due date and a signature, so “who has the camera” is a lookup, not a group text.
Reorder before the truck runs dry
Per-location reorder points mean the system knows van two is low on fittings even when the warehouse is flush. Reorder suggestions land in a queue, and with the Purchasing module attached, they become purchase orders carrying your supplier's own part numbers. The reorder digest emails on the mornings you choose, so ordering happens over coffee instead of after a stockout.
What a real setup costs
A ten-person outfit running Inventory and Purchasing pays $268 a month: $89 plus $59 for the modules, and ten Growth seats at $12. Against one avoided emergency supply-house run per week, the math is short.
The 30-day trial is long enough to barcode one van and find out what its real count is. Most companies are surprised. Few are pleasantly surprised, which is rather the point of counting.